Can you tell our flower farm season has started by the fact that I all of a sudden dropped off the face of the blogosphere? Just as is the case with every spring now, as soon as the weather starts to warm up enough in March to unfreeze the ground and allow us to work, we basically go from about 0 to 100 immediately. Even though it feels crazy to take time to blog right now with everything I have on my to-do list, I really want to make sure I at least complete these monthly goals and recap posts if nothing else, since they are a good record for me and my family to have.
So here’s everything that happened in March!
March 2025 Recap
Highlights {Personal + Family}
The best part about March was that halfway through the month, Matt stopped his winter job up north and stopped having to live away from us during the week. The situation had become so stressful for me by the end with so much on my shoulders that I actually had some anxiety to work through again once we were back to a more typical routine, almost as if my body was having a hard time letting go after having so much on my plate for four months. But it has been WONDERFUL to have Matt back again, and once I got some time and space to myself to finally rest and take a breather, I felt pumped up with excitement at the thought of a brand new farm season and getting to enjoy spring (my favorite season!).
At the beginning of March, I took the two oldest kids to see the musical Anastasia, mostly because Mathias’s teacher had one of the lead roles and he wanted to see her perform in it. While Raven had been to one other musical before, Mathias never had, and he was ENTHRALLED. The musical was a little bit intense at times for both of them, but all in all, it was a wonderful night out for the three of us, and we got to sit next to some of our friends too, who decided to join us last minute. The only downside was that Raven wasn’t feeling great that night, but I’ll detail more about that in the next section.
Matt and the three older kids got to take an overnight trip down to St. George to attend our niece’s wedding about a week after that, where Raven got to be the flower girl. This ended up being a bit of a hard thing too (see below), but the kids had a blast getting to be in a place with a little more sunshine for awhile.
Speaking of sunshine, that was probably the best part about March. We had a much warmer spring than normal (and earlier than normal), so we were all about getting out and spending a lot of time outside (and not just working, either!). We did multiple walks, bike rides, trips to the park, and just puttering around the yard. The best part about spring is that the weather is usually good enough that we can basically spend from sun-up ’til sun-down outside if we want, and we often will.
We also did our annual St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans, which involve the kids making leprechaun traps and us doing our “Green Feast” together as a family (nothing fancy — just a dinner where all the food is green). Raven helped me out this year by decorating the whole kitchen with green streamers and balloons, which was extra fun for everyone.
By the very end of the month, the kids were on their spring break, and we took the kids up to a children’s museum they’d never been to before up north. We could have easily spent 6 or 7 hours there, but as it was, we spent about 4 and called it good. It was a blast for us all, and we finished out the night by having dinner with some friends we haven’t seen in far too long.
Hard Things
We’ve had truly awful luck with March and sickness for something like the last 8 years, and the trend unfortunately continued this year. At the beginning of the month, very soon after we went and saw Anastasia, we ended up having to take Raven to the ER because she spiked a 104-degree fever in less than 60 minutes from nothing and was showing a lot of other concerning symptoms. It turned out that she had a particularly nasty strain of influenza A, but it actually ended up being fortunate that we took her in. Not only did she feel significantly better after getting fluids and medication, but we also were able to call in a preventative prescription of Tamiflu for Naomi, which I’m positive made it so that when she got the same thing a few days later, it wasn’t nearly as severe as it could have been.
However, the timing of Naomi’s flu onset collided with the same weekend as the out-of-town wedding (and I myself ended up coming down with strep), so Naomi and I had to stay home and miss the whole thing. I was sooooo bummed. I’d been looking forward to a little weekend family getaway for months (especially since I’d hardly gotten to see Matt all winter), and it was hard to have to stay home and just watch all the pictures coming in from everyone else having a great time. But, so it goes, and I’m just relieved that Naomi was able to make it through okay.
March was also a hard mental health month for me. I’ve learned some great tools over the years that mean that much of the time, my anxiety is basically nonexistent (at least compared to how it used to be), but in March, the constant stress of being on my own for much of the winter while Matt was away from us combined with all the stress of the sickness and the financial strain of the flower farm in spring (i.e., all the bills are due in the spring, but flowers aren’t on yet) collided to send me back into old anxiety spirals a bit.
Fortunately, I was able to completely pull out of it by early April, but it sure meant that March was, once again, a pretty brutal month. I think we’re about 8 for 8 on March being really hard for the last several years.
Flower Farm
Once Matt was home all the time again, it felt like we could start to really pick up momentum again with the farm. We got a lot done in March, including prepping beds, weeding, and starting compost sales in earnest. We also had strong bouquet subscription sales, which helped fuel our excitement for the season ahead.
A weird thing does happen every year to me in late February and March, however. Because our season is slightly behind most other growers’ seasons in our state, I start to worry in late February and March that I’ve somehow killed every last thing I’m growing. It’s totally irrational, but it hits me powerful hard every year in late winter, and basically it’s like I feel like I’m holding my breath every year until April comes and our first flowers arrive in earnest.
This year was no different, and I spent many hours having pointless conversations with myself about how I surely hadn’t killed everything and how we were surely going to have more wins than failures in our growing as we go into our fifth season. Thankfully, that’s proved true so far, but it’s easy for me to say now that I’m sitting at the end of April 🙂
Overall Thoughts
March was…not great. Now that I’ve worked so hard to make January (which used to be my least favorite month by far) so much better because I build in fun things for it every year, I wonder if March is now going to be the month I dread.
I mean, on the one hand, I know that every March, I will have the lengthening days and ability to work in the ground again to look forward to, which feel amazing after a long winter. On the other hand, we’ve gotten flu more years than not in March for the past however many years, and it will often hit us for weeks, dragging itself out unnecessarily.
Anyway, March wasn’t my favorite this year, but it’s over now.
Time to look at how I did on March’s goals!
March’s Big 3
Work Goal: Finish up marketing work
Kind of, but I’m counting it as done. I basically did everything I could do on my end, but I’m now waiting for further feedback from my marketing client before I go in and do the rest. This will be something that gets picked up again later in the year, but it can be taken off my plate for now.
Financial Goal: Keep grocery spending to $800 for the month
Okay, so while I *technically* spent about $825, I’m totally counting this as complete because the spending was waaaaay better than it had been the months previous to this. In an ideal world, I would do a blog post detailing receipt by receipt how the spending ended up shaking out, but I can already tell you I won’t have time.
In a perfect world, our grocery spending could probably easily be kept to this amount every month, but I’ll admit that when farming season is in its particularly busy times (like spring planting), I definitely favor convenience options and treat myself more than I usually would. Doing this as a challenge in March though was a good reminder to me that there is definitely some low hanging fruit with our grocery budget, and once we’re into June and things slow down just a bit, I’m going to re-evaluate the grocery spending issue again for sure.
Flower Farm Goal: Upload all inventory for the season to Rooted Farmer
This was a ludicrous goal, which I only fully appreciated the craziness of when I started actually entering product in. By halfway through the month, I’d modified the goal so that it became about entering the inventory through May, which was more do-able (and which I basically did, although I still sometimes have to enter in bits and pieces that I forgot about as we go along).
Rooted Farmer is the online sales platform the growers co-op that we joined this year uses to list all our product for the week. It’s had a bit of a learning curve to it, but I think I’m finally getting the hang of it now!
And now, to catch us up to April’s goals!
This year, Matt and I have one main overarching goal: to make this farming season different from last season.
We both vowed that we’d never have a year like last year again when it came to how off-kilter and out of balance our work/home life balance was, so we’ve taken some concrete steps this year to change up how we do the farm so that it’s not just work, work, work and stress, stress, stress all the time. Part of that change will come when we hire a part time employee (or two), a big part of it is how we’ve structured our weeks better now that we have more solid sales outlets, and the other part is just choosing to let certain things go (like stressing about if daily sales are on target or not, or if we’re behind on our to-do list, or chasing every little sale even if it’s small, etc.).
Here are the three more concrete goals I set for April though:
April’s Big 3
Flower Farm Goal: Plant all hardy annuals and perennials
We try to plant all our hardy annuals and perennials before May whenever possible, since it gives them time to establish in the cooler weather that they prefer. We definitely have never been able to do this before, but this year a lot of our infrastructure was already in place, so the goal seems realistic.
Marriage Goal: Take a weekly walk just the two of us
Now that Matt doesn’t have to travel away from us for work anymore, we’re trying to build in some solid date time on a regular basis again. We’ve been off and on through the years about how good we are at this, but it’s something we’re trying to be more intentional about.
Now that our oldest is 10, she’s good to keep an eye on the younger kiddos for half an hour or so while Matt and I go on a walk together.
Home Goal: Put away all kids’ clothing that’s sitting in our bedroom
I feel like this is the never-ending goal because I’ll get it done, and then we’ll get more hand-me-downs from somewhere. Not complaining (because I definitely appreciate the free clothing!), but it does mean that our room tends to be the dumping ground.
And that wraps up my super late recap and April goals post! Now I have to basically start on May’s since we’re basically there 🙂
