I know, I know — we’re almost at the end of the month. You guys, spring planting is no joke!!! This is our fourth season doing this, but I don’t think I’ll ever quite get used to the hectic pace that is April and May. This year is, of course, even more crazy since we’ve decided to take our flower farm full-time for both my husband and me, which has meant that we’re expanding by about 8-10X what we were planting last year.
We have three major planting out times in the year — right now, when we plant out all the hardy annuals that can handle a light frost; late May/early June, when we plant out everything after our last frost; and fall, when we plant all our spring-flowering bulbs and corms. Each of those times means planting out literally thousands of small plants (“plugs”) or bulbs, and we’ve been having to prep a lot of brand new ground this year before planting out the majority of it, so it feels like it’s been pretty slow going, even though we’re making decent progress. That’s all to say that there’s a reason I haven’t been blogging since late March and am not getting this goals post up until near the end of the month!
Now that we’re three weeks into April, I’m having a hard time even remembering what we did last month. Luckily, I still had time to blog in March, so I have all the Homestead Weekly posts and the photos to help me remember 🙂
I won’t recap too much here since it’s all in other posts, but March was all about the full shift into flower farming again, and we also celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with our leprechaun traps and Green Feast, Easter with our special Sunday dinner and egg hunts/decorating, and attended the open house for the Manti Temple. Additionally, Naomi had surgery to have ear tubes put in, and after they drained all the fluid from her ears, she was finally able to pass a hearing test fully in both ears! Major milestone!!!
Here’s how the goals shook out:
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March Goals
- Give everyone else a haircut
- Nope, but yikes — it’s bad. The boys all have massive mops of crazy hair at the moment!
Take Onyx in for vaccinations- Matt took care of this finally one morning near the end of the month.
- Finish through Module 4 in Floret course
- I did get through about half, but I’m basically going to have to put this off until the craziness of spring planting is over. This very well might get put off all the way until the off season, in November or so…we shall see.
- Finish prepping all new in-ground beds (
compost, landscape fabric)- Matt did at least make some good headway on this by removing all the sod, adding compost, and tilling it all in. Now we just have to lay fabric and irrigation.
Order irrigation, buckets, and T-posts- Spring is expensive on a farm!
Put in peony root order for the fall- It’s fun to shop for plants 🙂
Finalize farm and seed sowing plan- Finally, finally! I’ve been working on this for about six months!
Finish 3 books- You guys, this actually happened! It’s a spring miracle! I finished Tom Lake (love love love Patchett’s writing style, but I do tend to greatly dislike her endings); Lessons in Chemistry (so highly readable, but this one grated more and more as it went on, earning it a fairly low star rating from me…you can read my full review on Goodreads); and Flower Farming for Profit, which is the book I’ve been hoping someone would write for years and was totally brilliant.
Moving on to now, April and May are madness on the flower farm — it’s basically like everything converges at once (sowing! transplanting! harvesting! selling!), and it’s all we can do to keep up and keep everyone clothed and fed. We also celebrate both of our girls’ birthdays this month, which should at least make sure we do at least a couple non-farm things 🙂
I’m keeping the goals list exceedingly simple, since I know all too well how hectic the next few weeks will surely be:
April Goals
- Give everyone else a haircut
- Rollover goal.
- Size all the kids up + swap in summer clothing
- It’s rare that all of our kids need the next size up at the same time, but we seem to have hit that point in the last month or so. Not complaining, though! If I have to do it for one, it’s almost easier just to do it for all of them.
- Prep all beds (weed, compost, fabric, drip irrigation)
- We’re greatly sizing up our planting operation this year, which means we have quite a lot of new beds to prep with new compost, landscape fabric, and irrigation, not to mention the clearing out of any weeds or spent plants from last year. It’s a massive, massive job.
- Plant all hardy annuals
- Once the beds are prepped, we need to plant out all of our hardy annuals, which are currently sitting on our porch, in our living room, in our basement…thousands upon thousands of seedlings, EVERYWHERE.
- Finish 3 books
- Because surely THIS is the month that this standing goal will happen, right? 😉
Yep, and that’s it for the goals list for the month 🙂 How’s your April going?
