Early BLOOMS regenerative flower farm tour!

Hey everyone, it's Bree here at Blossom and Branch Farm. We're going to do a quick little tour of the farm and we're going to take a look at some of the things that are blooming here early. Let's go. Thank you to this year's sponsors, Advancing Ecoagriculture, providing regenerative solutions for growers and also to Albert Lee Seeds, serving farm families for over a century. The first thing we're going to take a look at is actually my home garden and this is mostly just for me. I don't really sell stuff out of here, although sometimes I do if I have a lot of tomatoes or peppers or what have you, and mostly it's for my family just to kind of walk from the house and then I can pop over here and grab things. The greenhouse is here so it's kind of convenient. My cooler, my walking cooler, is also right here. So I try to keep all of that stuff up close to also my workshop so that as I'm working I have a nice tight little workspace here. You can see I showed last week what it looked like to plant all of our things into our cover crops. So this is what it's looking like now. We've got all of our peppers here, shishito peppers. My kids love those. We've got bell peppers. They love those too. And you can see the cover crop has died back to kind of now look like straw. So even though it looked kind of weird when we first pulled back that tarp, now it just looks like straw. I've got some pine mulch in the walkways. Here we've got the tomatoes. I'm just doing a Florida weave this year to support them. So I've got these posts and then I have my string that just goes along either side of the tomato between here and the posts and that just helps keep it up. So it's a nice simple quick way to trellis tomatoes when you don't have a big structure. I've got some kale here. Of course the sheep have been munching on that. And then over here I've got some strawberries interplanted with onions just to try to help deter pests. Of course my biggest pest in the garden recently has been my sheep and you can see they have been eating my strawberry leaves. I have covered the strawberries themselves to try to keep those protected so at least we can get some. But they do play nicely together, the onions and the strawberries. So we will be getting some nice healthy onions from here soon. Back here I've got the sweet peas going. Of course these are my favorite sweet peas. Oh they smell so good. I can smell them from the back. I mean all the way from when I walk into the garden. I grow a couple. I really like this palette together which is this one which is called Old Times and then the Spencer ice cream. I like them together because they form this kind of palette that goes really well together. I love sweet peas because you don't have to arrange them at all. I can literally just pick those right off the plant, stuff them in a jar just as they are and walk away. I wanted to show you guys. I am growing these beautiful pansies this year and I want to show you these are the Marie Antoinette. They are bred by a Japanese breeder and they are just so ruffly and stunning. So you can see them compared to a typical pansy and just how many layers of ruffles. I mean it looks like a little tutu. Oh my gosh they are so beautiful. This is the Marie Antoinette varietal. They get nice and tall as well so supposedly they will get tall enough for cutting. So we'll see how those do throughout the season. Now over here I've got the meadow and it is kind of just starting to grow in. So we've got our goldenrod, the rudbeckia, the anis hyssop for the hummingbirds and of course this whole area is here around the perimeter of the field and that's on purpose. That is so that we have lots of native beneficial insects kind of flanking our main field. So all around the while some of these plants don't really behave that nicely in an annual garden. So for example my yarrow, things that tend to spread, those are hanging out in here and they are forming that outside and protecting all of my plants that are in here. So over here we've got all of our production plants. So let's take a look at some of my favorites that are blooming right now. So if I had to show you my roses because this is always so counterintuitive and when I had my last workshop at the farm I showed people pruning some of these roses and they were so surprised at how far down I showed them to cut. And the reason that I do this, that I cut them really far down, is because that helps create these nice long stems for my garden roses so that makes them more cuttable. So I do a heavy prune in the early spring, cut them really far down, and this is one of my favorite varieties for cutting because it's relatively thornless and it has really pretty pink flowers and a nice smell. This is Queen of Sweden from David Austin. I also have another one of my favorites. So this is Moonlight in Paris. Very thorny variety though. Look at the thorns on this one. Very thorny and also prone to powdery mildew. We're going to look at this. I'm going to show you what I do with powdery mildew in another video coming this week. And then I have all these walking onions in here and these walking onions are so interesting looking to me. Now what happens is they grow out of the tops and then they get so heavy that they eventually flop over and where they flop over all these little bulbs will start new ones. So that's why they're called walking onions. They'll literally kind of walk around. I have them interplanted with my roses to try to help with pest prevention. Alliums are actually one of the few that are proven actually through research and through a little bit of scientific data to actually help reduce with pests. Marigolds as well, the French marigolds, will help with things like root knot nematode. Other than that a lot of the interplanting stuff is a little bit overblown. But let's take a look at one of my other favorites that is blooming right now that blooms at the same time as the peonies. We didn't harvest that many this year just because those plants were hit pretty hard. But they do bloom at the same time as these which are right next to them and one of my absolute favorites. This is baptisia. This is a native. Now this is actually a cultivar called pink lemonade and it's so beautiful with those pink peonies. But my favorite part of this plant, oh and down here's the straight native variety. So I always like to kind of grow both. This is the straight native variety which is more of a blue and the reason that I love these, oh there's one now, there's huge bumblebees. So the giant queen bumblebees are always all over this baptisia. Not only are they beautiful for cutting in the spring with the peonies, they're also really nice foliage. So come late summer we can use this for the foliage and then these all turn into those seed pods. So I like to make a wreath out of the seed pods in the fall. So it's really a good all-season interest plant and it's also a really nice upright plant. Now I did plant them probably a little bit too close together. I did not really realize when I first got these how big they were going to be. All right let's take a look at a few other things. I've got some feverfew getting ready to bloom. It's not quite there yet so pretty close but not quite there. And then I also have all my snaps down here. I had ordered this variety of pansies to try to get them tall enough for cutting. I ordered them from Farmer Bailey this year and they just didn't make it. I think I should really give up on growing these as cuts and I should have also planted them much closer together. But we've just had such a hot spring that everything has had trouble. All those cold loving things. It is what it is. All right over here I wanted to show you we've got our jute knitting up on our dahlias. So of course when we're growing dahlias we have to give them a little extra support and so what we started using is jute netting and I've used this in the past. We actually usually use a little bit of a thinner one but it had a little bit of trouble with breakdown and also not quite holding up the dahlias as well as it could. So we are using now this little thicker and it comes like this just pre-woven and it's really nice and sturdy and strong. Here I have a cover crop. This cover crop needs to be terminated so we're going to go ahead and smash this one down this week. The sheep keep eating it but you can see it's at flowering stage so for oats that is the stage where we're just starting to get some seed formation. So I'm going to cut that and harvest that down. Now I want to show you in comparison the dahlias that I just showed you over on this end were actually newly planted. I just divided those this spring. These are our overwintered dahlias so to compare again I'm zone 5-6 and I do overwinter my dahlias. I have videos on it I'll link below but they come up much earlier. These are going to bloom probably about three weeks sooner than those ones so it is significant when we're talking about the difference in overwintered dahlias versus the ones we plant in spring just in the difference in the timing of the blooms and also the size of the plant. Here is one of the more underappreciated plants that I grow here. I just harvested a bunch but this is a perennial foxglove. Most foxglove that I grow and I'm growing some others over there are actually biennial which means they bloom every other year. These are a perennial foxglove so these are going on year six. They have much more longevity than the biennial varieties of foxglove and they also are this really pretty buttery yellow color. Now of course be careful with foxglove make sure that people know if you're giving them in a bouquet that they're not edible but I always tell everybody anyway just don't eat the bouquets. You know I just like to give everybody that warning. Some people need to hear that but okay here's my favorite part of the field right now so I'm going to show you some of the ones. Now this is our golden current which I mentioned before we grow in the field mostly for the birds and there was just a robin in here picking away at them but they are just loaded with berries right now which is great because we want the birds in the early part of summer because they're going to help with pest reduction. So the earlier we can get the birds in here and kind of mating and hanging out the more they're going to help with the things like the grasshoppers and the caterpillars and these golden currents are edible so I always like to have something in the field you know that's for the birds but if they don't eat it all I will pop some in my mouth as well. Over here this is my perennial side of the field so mostly everything from here over is perennial a ton of natives so it's in the majority natives but also very drought tolerant so I have it all blocked off by zone so the things on this side of the field are more drought tolerant altogether because what I don't want to do is plant something that's more drought tolerant next to something that likes a lot of water but I am shifting pretty heavily toward drought tolerant things just because we are more and more prone to droughts as the years go on here in Colorado. A couple that I want to point out one is this drops of Jupiter oregano which makes a really beautiful purple bloom and it also is really nice for the foliage it holds really well and it's kind of a light limey green so it's really quite pretty with peonies. Here's our zinnias our little baby zinnias just starting to come up this one escaped a pinch so let's go ahead and give it a quick pinch to make sure we get some branching so we'll just pinch right above those sets of leaves. Also wanted to show these so this is a bush form of clematis so where most clematis that we see are climbers and at the barn that's more of a climber for comparison's sake but these ones are a bush form clematis so what they do is they actually are great for cut flowers because they don't get quite as tall now you can see I've kind of started to train this one it will climb a little bit but this is about where they top out so they're really more to me a nice ground cover it's a nice for underplanting also really really pretty with the peonies now for some reason and I didn't plan it this way but my field tends to skew a little bit purple at this time of year I have some perennial salvia they just have spread and clumped and they're so popular with the bees I just kind of leave them and this end of the field is a little bit like that I just let it be a little bit wild you also have some gorgeous rocky mountain penstemon over here and you can see it's this kind of lighter purple so this is the salvia darker purple and then the penstemon is this lighter purple and if you're in North America I really think penstemons are underappreciated anytime we are looking at native plants that's when we're going to have the absolute most amount of beneficial insects you can see in here a little ladybug bedded down for the night here's another ladybug here there's one here on the tip of this plant oh my gosh I can count literally one two three four five six seven eight there's literally a ladybug that I can see on every single one of these flowers right now so when we're talking about things that attract beneficial insects it's always better to have things like this in the garden that will naturally attract your ladybugs and your beneficial insects instead of for example in buying those ladybugs because again they're usually not the native ladybugs they've been harvested in ways that are very ecologically questionable and it's just best and it's not they're not going to hang out where you put them so it's best to just try to plant something and I love studying and observing these plants for this reason so that I can kind of have an idea of of what is blooming at what time of year and what is supporting my beneficial insects because what you want when you're talking about beneficial insects and natives is things blooming at different times of year right so penstemon that bloom really early and then followed by a yarrow that blooms a little bit later followed by a rudbeckia followed by asters these are all North American plants of course but the same thing could be talked about for any region so just making sure that you have things blooming up multiple times for multiple different life cycles multiple different insects don't forget to head over to my sub stack which we launched this week we are talking more about what we're doing on our home farm with converting to regenerative ag there so if you want to learn more in depth and you're more of a reader I'll link that sub stack link below and otherwise guys don't forget to grab the book for more information about growing natives and regenerative gardening and cover cropping and all that good stuff all right we'll see you guys around here next time at the farm