At the beginning of 2022 I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to have all the flowers that I wanted. A dear friend of mine Andreea, invited me over to start seedlings in the beginning of February in 2022.
A full year prior I bought enough flower seeds to cover several acres, echinacea, sunflowers, rudbeckia and so much more. Most of the seeds I never even got to plant, I didn’t have land for it so I never planted them Aside from sneaking some seeds into my sister’s yard with my niece and nephews or giving them to my Aunt Bonnie or my Grandparents.
Andreea has a beautiful garden by the beach in New Jersey where my family is from. She is the mastermind behind little bites of joy and my partner in taking this flower farming to the next level. She suggested we plant seeds and we began soil blocking.
I thought OK I’ll figure out where they go… she was right because once I had the need for land and all of these living things dependent on it, I found exactly what we needed. I was looking for places to live and then I saw a newly posted listing for an apartment with a garden on 7 acres.
I thought to myself, this has my name written all over it, a place where I could plant all the native plants I want, paint sunflowers in my garden and nobody would question it! I could be myself in Woodstock, with nature, art and culture; in the mountains with the stars.
I’ve come a long way to cramming in every plant I could on a fire escape in Brooklyn. Its like this has been waiting for over a decade for me to finally have a little piece of earth to plant in.
So it looks like everything is coming together, I’ve got my plants growing and the snow is starting to fade finally. I didn’t realize the difference in the seasons would be so drastic! Once I moved north to the mountains, I lost about two months of the growing season.
It’s very different from what I’m used to working with. It’s really wet here, I feel like I almost don’t need to water… at least not until the hot summer heat sets in and my dahlias start pushing through the soil.
The rows are 4’ wide with 3’ rows between them… as suggested with creating air flow within dahlias. This allows for (4) plants every(12”) or 3 every (18) inches throughout the row.