June was planting (soooo much planting) and harvesting masses of pink flowers and not nearly enough weeding. June was a frantic-paced month following on the tails of the three frantic-paced months before it. It was birthday celebrations for Mathias squeezed in between doing wedding florals, and it was up and down uncertainty as to whether all the big risks we took this year with scaling up our flower farm were going to pay off. It was saying “yes” to things that scared us (okay, that scared me, anyway) like starting to do sympathy arrangements and wedding centerpieces, and it was helping newfound friends as they cope with a difficult loss. It was simple Father’s Day celebrations and some serious celebrating as we got the first successions of everything (and final successions of others) put into the ground. It was finishing up softball for Raven (she made SO much progress this season!) and starting to pull out the family pool a lot more.
Honestly, June was a blur, and I realized…I’ve basically been saying that about every month this year, with maybe the exception of January.
When we went into this first year of flower farming as our family’s full-time job and main source of income, we knew going into it that this would definitely be a “research year.” We knew there’d be a lot of hustling and some mistakes made and a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck (and figuring out what we actually liked doing). So far, we feel extremely fortunate that we’ve actually been able to support ourselves thus far with this business we’ve built from scratch, but boy, does it sure require some insane amounts of work, stress, uncertainty, and sweat equity.
We knew it would be hard, but…it’s still been hard. Definitely worth it thus far, but still, soooo much, all the time.
So that’s why, now that the frantic pace of spring is finally behind us, we’re hoping to establish some rhythms that allow us to actually rest sometimes, ya know? Honestly, I’m not totally sure what that will even look like because after months of neglecting all but the most basic necessities around the house, it seems like EVERYTHING needs to be done, and rest seems like a far-off pipe dream. But I also know that we can’t sustain this kind of pace indefinitely, so some kind of system needs to be set up.
It’s basically gotten to the point that I can almost HEAR the weeds growing, but I’m just choosing to let myself sit down and blog anyway, or to take a 20-minute catnap in the afternoons after waking up and harvesting for 5 hours. Because if we don’t consciously just let ourselves rest, we’re discovering that we virtually will never rest.
But before we get into all that as part of July’s goals, let’s do a little recap as to what we were able to get around to in June.
Note: There may be affiliate links to books or products mentioned in this post.
June Goals
Plant all the things. For reals.- Our most important task got done, at least! The first succession of everything is in the ground, and now we only have a couple final successions of certain crops to put in before we’re 100% done with planting for the whole year.
Finish setting up all the irrigation stuff. For reals.- This was a huge relief to get this all set up finally. We still don’t have everything automated (which is the next big task that needs to happen), but it’s a huge time saver not to need to water anything by hand other than seedlings and containers.
Put up support netting on the crops that need it- We didn’t get to the snapdragons in time (they got too tall), but we did put up netting on everything else that absolutely needed it. Just in time too, since almost everything has already grown through the netting!
Start going through the rest of the Master Decluttering List again- Can I just say how AWESOME it has felt to be able to start into this again? The house had been driving me crazy for months during the spring, and being able to dive back into simplifying and decluttering has been such a stress reliever. Completely clearing off our kitchen counters of everything has been the biggest game changer that I’ve recently done, and I’ll probably try and do a post on it at some point.
- Simplify master bedroom
- Nope, still haven’t gotten around to this. At this rate, our bedroom will likely be one of the very last spaces in our home to be minimized and simplified.
- Write up next NICU post
- Nope, but I knew even writing this in that this would be more likely to happen in July when things calmed down a bit.
- Finish 3 books
- So close, you guys! I read two — The Self-Driven Child, which has officially made it onto my Top 10 Books of All Time list (yup, it was THAT life changing for me), and The Women, which was off of this year’s Summer Reading List and which I LOVED. Definitely worth all the hype, in my opinion.
Now that the craziness of spring planting and prep is done on the farm, we (in theory) should be able to fall into a bit slower of a rhythm. Instead of the 50-60+ hour work weeks for both Matt and me (plus all the childcare and housekeeping stuff on top of that), we’ll each be putting in a bit less, which is a welcome respite, especially with the weather being so hot. We still have harvesting and selling and weeding to do (always), but the hardest part of the season is largely over.
Thank goodness for that!!
I’ve been positively craving more quiet time at home together as a family (as well as more time to work on house projects), and it looks like I’ll finally have a bit of time to do just that.
Here’s what I hope to do in July:
July Goals
- Plant last successions of everything
- Phew, I can’t tell you how good this is going to feel!!!
- Get electric fence set up
- We had to set up an electric fence around the part of our farm that’s on rented land because it’s unprotected from neighboring goats and deer and other things. We have the actual electric fence in place, but we have yet to actually electrify it.
- Do a crisis weed on everything
- Weeding has been put on the back burner for far too long, and we’re starting to have lots of crops being taken down by them, particularly bindweed. Now that the planting is largely finished, we need to shift our focus to maintenance, starting with a crisis weed farm-wide.
- Totally cross one area off of Master Decluttering List
- Originally when I made up the list, I’d wanted to just do one room at a time and not move on to a new room until I’d totally finished with the last one. That’s not actually how it played out, however, so now I have pretty much almost every room in the house only half-finished. Time to start actually finishing what I started!
- Simplify master bedroom
- We’ve been making slow but steady progress on this over the past several months, so it really shouldn’t take more than about an hour to jump the rest of the way there.
- Put kitchen drawer back on
- Just a nagging task I need to put somewhere so I don’t forget.
- Write up next NICU post
- Because if I don’t do this soon, I will forget everything.
- Finish 3 books (ideally two off of Summer Reading List)
- Yup, this is for sure happening 🙂
Hope you’re all surviving the heat! What’s on your list for the month?
