Raising Flowers and Horses
Small Problems Under a Big Sky
Sometimes I allow my small problems to feel like big problems. Lately I’ve found myself fretting over the small things. What will I do about my too wet field after all the rainy winter? Is it time for another fight with the insurance company about coverage for a minor, but expensive, medical procedure? Do I have enough help so that I can leave the farm for a couple of days? I know these are minor problems, even good problems to have. (It could be an insurance fight over a big medical procedure!) Yet, they take up too much of the space in my head, and they get stuck there.
Childhood Play
When I was a child, my sister and I would spend hours playing “Little House on the Prairie.” We would recreate scenes from the books that we loved and imagine what it was like to survive with only what we could grow or forage from the land. We imagined tending to our livestock (our dogs), and toted water from our well (our outdoor spigot) to our barn (a pile of sticks arranged in the footprint of a barn). Some of our favorite days were those rare Maryland snowstorms when we could put on our snow gear and tromp around imagining how hard we were working to save our farm animals from the extreme weather.
Thinking about summer flowers in January
January is a funny time to be writing a newsletter about a flower farm, but it is also the time of year that I think about New Year resolutions and heading into my second season of growing cut flowers, it is potentially an opportunity for many goals and resolutions. Resolutions are something I have always embraced. It is my family’s tradition to gather round on New Year’s Eve and read last year’s resolutions and make new ones for the coming year. We always self-assess which ones we feel like we’ve achieved. I’ve usually fallen far short!