Well, here we are in August already — my oldest starts first grade in two weeks (seriously?!), everyone’s trying to cram all the last-minute summer parties and fun in, and we are positively swimming in flowers from our cut flower farm here at the house. As I type this, market bouquets are all over our kitchen counters, some already sold and waiting for pickup, others waiting on their ultimate fate. Even though it was sometimes hard to keep my hopes up through the long June stretch of hardly any flowers that lasted uncomfortably far into July too, I am now experiencing the abundance I hoped for way back in March, when I started not just my seedlings but also my dream about having a cut flower farm in general.
It’s exhausting work — yesterday I woke up at 6 in the morning and harvested for nearly 3 hours straight and then spent the next 8 or so prepping, arranging, photographing, and then delivering the first of the arrangements — but it’s a satisfying kind of exhausting.
I have a feeling that each August and September from now on (or for however long I decide to flower farm) will be filled to the brim with blooms and bouquets, deliveries and marketing, early morning harvests and late night musings on different color and flower combinations for future arrangements. I already know that I’m being overambitious with my list of goals for August (just because I can already tell how crazy busy I’m going to be with the farm), but if I don’t at least try to focus some of my energies on other things, I’ll never get around to them.
Here’s how last month shook out first, though:
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July Goals
Finish potty training Mathias- I was really nervous about doing this, especially because I felt like we’d missed the “ideal” window when he was acting super excited and ready for it back in March, but the whole process actually ended up going MUCH smoother than I thought it would. Honestly, I’m so relieved at how quickly he’s caught on and that this is officially completed, and he’s also night trained now too, so we officially only have one kid in diapers! Woo hoo!
Look into swim lessons for the kids- I called the local pool about this, but it turns out they’re not offering swim lessons this summer at all. I’ll plan on looking into this in the winter to see if anything has changed; otherwise, we’ll just plan on next summer for sure.
Take a family day trip to the zoo- Mathias’s special treat for being potty trained was a trip to the zoo (a 2-hour drive away), so we had Matt take the day off of work and also took my mom with us (as we’d given her a trip to the zoo for her birthday ages ago before Covid that we hadn’t been able to redeem), and we had a lovely day adventure all together. The kids really enjoyed themselves, and so did we!
Take our 10-year anniversary trip- My mom is awesome and agreed to stay overnight here at our house so that Matt and I could have a little weekend getaway at the very end of the month (to celebrate our 10-year anniversary all the way back in May). It’s been so long since we’ve done anything like this (the last couples trip we took was before we had our second kid, and now we have 3), so it was a bit overdue! We ended up going to Capitol Reef National Park, which neither of us could remember ever going to before. So insanely beautiful, and not nearly as crowded as some of the more popular national parks here in Utah.
- Set up and fill sandbox for the kids
- Sigh…nope. Too many other projects taking up our weekends. Rollover goal for August.
Resume work on kitchen floor- As we’ve lived in our new place for the past 8 months without having kitchen floors, I was getting desperate to finally have a hope of seeing something other than subfloor in there (and of finally getting our fridge out of our front entryway), so I cleared our calendar one Saturday, took the kids to the closest McDonald’s for a looooong 3-hour lunch-and-playplace date, and Matt got going. And he’s now almost done! Our kitchen table and laundry area actually have flooring underneath them! It seriously makes a huge difference in how our place looks, and I can’t wait to see the whole thing finished. It’s definitely reinvigorated me for house projects again 🙂
Fix mailbox- Our mailbox — which was damaged as the last family was moving out — has always been hanging by a thread, but in June it finally just flat-out fell over and couldn’t be revived. The post office refused to deliver our mail until we fixed it, so Matt made this priority #1 and got it done near the beginning of the month. And honestly? I’m glad the mailbox fell over because now it looks about 1000% better being on a brand-new post!
- Finish clearing off the porch
- Uh, no…you guys, I’m so bad at procrastinating stupid things. This would literally take me like, 10 minutes to complete, but I just really don’t want to, so I don’t, lol. However, I have a CSA member event coming up next month (see the list item right after this), so this one WILL get done in August.
- Host a u-pick event for CSA members
- I didn’t have quite the abundance I was wanting to host an event like this by late July, but now that we’re into August, the farm is much more productive. I’ve already set this event for the middle of the month, and now I’m just hoping it goes okay!
Put down landscape fabric to expand front garden bed- We didn’t do this until the very end of the month, but nevertheless, it did get done! The silage tarp I ordered wasn’t quite big enough to do the whole area in front that I was wanting, so we’re going to have to do it in stages.
Start all seedlings that need to be overwintered- One thing I’ve learned this year that has blown my mind is that I was treating hardy annuals (a specific class of plants) completely wrong—I was trying to plant them around the last frost and then not having any success with them, but after reading the book Cool Flowers, I realized that I should have been overwintering most of them (aka, planting them out as seedlings 6-8 weeks before my first fall frost and then letting them bunker down over the winter). This year I’m going to try overwintering snapdragons (literally hundreds of them), yarrow, rudbeckia, and dianthus, which are all down in our grow room right now.
- Clear out the rest of the boxes from our master bedroom
- I did clear out some more of them, but we’re still not all the way there. Rollover goal.
Make a trip to the donation center- We made a huge trip to our closest donation center, which effectively completed my 101 in 1001 goal of decluttering 1,001 things from our home (which I posted about HERE).
- Read two books off of my Summer Reading List
- I only finished one — People We Meet on Vacation — and have started A Place to Hang the Moon. Honestly, I probably would have finished that one but then I got sidetracked by two titles that I got for a steal as Daily Kindle Deals (The Flatshare and The Lazy Genius Way).
- List Buick
- *coughs and looks the other way*
Like I said, August will be largely overrun by harvesting and selling our flowers, but there are still a lot of other things we want to cram into the last of the high summer days (not to mention things we need to get done around here before much more time passes!). Here’s August’s list:
August Goals
- Take family photos
- There’s a beautiful farm north of us with a huge sunflower field that I would love to get some family pictures taken at. I’ll probably just invite some friends who live nearby to take them for us (I’ll do the settings on the camera and pose our family, and then they’ll just keep snapping away), and then I’ll take some pictures for them. I do want to have some professional pictures taken of us (aka, by a professional other than myself), but for now, this will work to go towards completing my 101 in 1001 goal of getting our family pics taken 3 different times.
- Have the first meeting of our new book club
- Upon moving here, I discovered an existing book club that I was planning on joining, but then I discovered that they literally only ever meet in the middle of the day, which just does not work for me right now with small children at home. So I decided to kind of start my own (with some nudgings from fellow neighbors who had been wanting to do the same), and our first meeting is this month.
- Invite friends over for potluck
- Now that we’ve been vaccinated for awhile and things are starting to normalize a bit, I’ve wanted to get back into the habit of actually spending time with friends (and trying to make new ones, as we’ve been here over 8 months now and still hardly know anybody). I kept putting this off because we were so busy with flower farming stuff and our house was under construction, but now that the kitchen floor is much closer to being done, I feel comfortable putting this on the list.
- Set up and fill sandbox for the kids
- Rollover goal.
- Make 72-hour kits for each member of the family
- Ever since our fire alarm scare last month, I’m keenly aware that we don’t have 72-hour kits for each of us and that the only kit we DO have is seriously outdated. Time to start prioritizing this!
- Clear out the rest of the boxes from master bedroom
- Rollover goal.
- Finish putting down kitchen floor
- Eek, I just can’t wait for this to be done!!!
- Do caulking in kitchen
- Once the floor is in, we just have a couple smaller projects to complete so that everything is basically “finished.” One of those is to put caulking between the cabinets and ceiling and the moldings and the ceiling/walls because when we painted all the cabinets white, the gaps suddenly became VERY apparent.
- Put laundry doors back on
- The laundry is located in the eat-in area just off of the kitchen, so we’ve basically had a washer and dryer right next to our kitchen table this whole time. Now that the floor underneath those is complete and they’ve both been moved into their rightful places, we just need to put the doors back on so that they can be out of sight for the first time since we’ve moved in!
- Move fridge back into kitchen
- Because having a huge fridge be the first thing you see when you walk into our house is just not the way I want to make a first impression on newcomers.
- Host a u-pick event for CSA members
- CSA members are those people who paid us a chunk of money at the beginning of our growing season for a certain number of bouquets to be delivered to them from May – September. As a thank you for them taking a chance on us (as this has been our first year), I wanted to do a thank-you event where they all can come for a bouquet-making demonstration, refreshments (obviously), and also a little mason-jar arranging. I’m hoping it turns out okay!
- Put down silage tarp to expand back bed
- Once the tarp has been on the front bed long enough to kill all the grass, we’ll move it to the back to do the same to a large area back there.
- Plant cover crop on extended front bed
- If we don’t plant SOMETHING in the area now covered by the silage tarp, we’ll just have grass growing right back, so my plan is to plant a quick cover crop mix (probably red clover and white buckwheat) until we’re ready to plant it in the fall with bulbs.
- Order load of compost for new beds
- Although the soil underneath grass is often pretty decent, we want to make sure we have the best possible start for those new beds next year, so we’re ordering (another) huge load of compost.
- Get necessary work done on the Mazda
- The Mazda (the car Matt drives) needs all new tires and an oil change. Dolla dolla bills…
- Read two books off of my Summer Reading List
- Third month’s the charm? (Seriously, I haven’t done this bad at my summer reading list since I started doing them years ago…)
- Find Buick’s title or send in for new one
- Clearly “List Buick” is far too complicated of a goal for me right now, so let’s break it down into smaller chunks and have me actually find the title first (or at least send away for a new one).
Happy August to you! What plans and goals do you have for the end of summer?
