The year is coming to a close and I can barely believe it. A lot has changed on the flower farm this year and as cliché as it may sound, I always like to take the time before the New Year to reflect on everything that has be checked off, remains on, and has completely been erased from the to-do list.
I started my reflection with drum roll… the flowers! This year was our official “experimental year”. We grew loads of varieties with one simple goal in mind. Figure out what is going to thrive at Growing Memories Flower Farm. To my utter delight, even though we aren’t even living on the farm full-time, most of the varieties that we tried did amazing. Did we have to get creative with automatic watering timers? Oh, hell yes, we did. Did you know there is a such thing as WIFI water valves? Well, there is, and let me tell you, they are worth it.
We were able to grow enough flowers to produce some beautiful bouquets, and I mean REALLY beautiful bouquets. I don’t usually like to toot my own horn, but for most of my life I had been so accustomed to grocery store bouquets that when I started creating field-to-vase, truly farm fresh floral arrangements, I actually impressed myself. There is nothing, and I repeat nothing, more stunning than locally grown flowers. Even if you don’t get your flowers from us, I am begging you to take the time to seek out a flower farm nearby, you will not regret it.
Looking back on the year behind us, growing flowers has taught me something I wish I would have figured out years ago. The ability to let go of the things that didn’t go the way you thought they would. I can’t begin to tell you how many plants I have killed this year. Some of them died because of me, and others met their demise due to circumstances out of my control. I am a textbook perfectionist aka I am hard on myself. I expect success in all aspects of my life and the failures, even small ones, tend to hit me like a Mack truck. Growing flowers has opened my eyes to the beauty of failure and the lessons you might have missed out on had everything gone completely as planned.
Experimental growing year: mark that off the list with a CHECK.
On to what remains. This list only ever seems to get longer, but if I’m being honest, I prefer it that way. A growing to-do list tells me that I haven’t stopped dreaming. There are SO MANY projects that we couldn’t get to this year. Firstly, we are limited financially. We are bootstrappers by nature so we complete projects if and only if we can pay for it out of pocket. But beyond the obvious financial obstacles, is time, oh that doggone time has always been our biggest opponent. It moves fast, and even faster when the to-do list gets longer. I swear sometimes a week feels like a day, a month like a week, and so on. And I don’t mean any of that in a bad way, I’m not saying that time is slipping away or that I don’t stop to enjoy the little things in life, I just mean that sometimes I look up and think to myself “damn, this is all so f***ing cool, if only we had more time, we could accomplish even more!”
Here are a FEW things that we didn’t get to this year and that will remain on the list going into 2025.
- Digging our ponds- we have had a lot of rain this year and we were hoping to be able to dig multiple ponds on the farm for some extra water storage so that we could supplement our city water usage with harvested rainfall for watering the flowers.
- A walk-in flower cooler- a flower cooler is an absolute must during the hot Texas summers. I was hoping to have a cooler completed before the end of the year so we were ready to go for spring flowers…who knows maybe we will still make it on time before the tulips bloom.
- Have a new section of the farm cleared for beds- we have a TON of pine trees on the farm. I love the trees, and I hate to see them go, but the flowers need their sunshine. Don’t worry though, we aren’t just bulldozing down all the trees to make room for flower beds. We plan to keep as many as possible and to integrate our flowers into our forest, that way we get the best of both worlds. Fun fact about me (Mollee) I grew up in a tiny town called Strawberry in Arizona. It’s surrounded by ponderosa pines, and I think that was one of the reasons I was drawn to our farm the first time we ever went to go see it. Strawberry was a little-known place when I was a kid, today I hear it’s become somewhat of a tourist hub. Can’t say I’m not surprised, it’s beautiful there.
ANYway….back to reflecting.
Our to-do list usually goes a little like this, complete 1 task and then proceed to add 2-3 more. Never actually shrinking, always growing, but so exciting.
And finally, let’s talk about what was erased-ish from the list. And I say ish because yes, we did decide to remove (sorta) something from the to-do list this year, but it’s not a permanent removal. It’s just been moved so far down the list that we won’t really be looking at it for some time. And that is our rental cabin. We had originally planned to build our rental cabin first, even before our own house. I was so excited to be able to offer farm stays on a working flower farm. I wanted nothing more than to share all the beauty of the farm with as many people as possible. I couldn’t think of a better getaway than a weekend to a flower filled farm. I know, very Hallmark of me. But what can I say, I’m a sucker for those picturesque type places (again from my previous statement above I understand why Strawberry, AZ has become a hot spot).
I don’t know why we had it in our heads that this was the correct course of action, but eventually we came to our senses when we realized uhm, WE need a place to live so we can actually RUN this magical Hallmark farm that I have in my head. So, we scratched the rental and dove into building our personal home instead.
But don’t worry y’all, one day the rental cabin will be right back at the top of our list, and we’ll be open for east Texas flower farm stays.
Well, there we have it, a very condensed, but truthful look from 2024. Now we will take a few days to celebrate our checkmarks and plan our remaining to-dos. Watch out 2025 because we’re coming for ya!
A toast for the new year:
Here’s to it, and from it, and to it again. And if we don’t do it when we get to it, we may never get to it to do it again.
Cheers!
