Emily Pek is a flower farmer and the owner of Frayed Knot Farm, a small flower farm in Newbury, Ohio, where she produces beautiful, diverse cut flowers and herbs that share stories, bring joy and support equitable and regenerative farming.
In this episode, we visit Emily on her farm and discover her journey to becoming a flower farmer, the family roots and community behind her farm, the flowers behind the Saison beer at Great Lakes Brewing Company, and her grandpa's punny joke that inspired the name Frayed Knot Farm.
If Emily were a flower, she says she would be Foxglove. It's delicate but tough with "tough" being the operative word behind being a farmer. Starting with just a grass field in 2018, Emily now grows over 100 varieties of annual and perennial flowers and foliage on less than an acre using hand-scale farming practices. She demonstrates how hard work and a "why not?" attitude can turn dreams into reality. Join us on this episode to discover the heart and hard work behind Frayed Knot Farm and Emily's passion for a more sustainable and healthy environment. Her journey will inspire you to pursue your dreams, no matter how big or small.
Resources:
Frayed Knot Farm
Follow Frayed Knot Farm on Instagram
Event Florals
Flower Shares through Ohio City farm
Wholesale - The Collab
Community Partners - Rustbelt Fibershed The Flax Project
The joke - a string walks into a bar....
Follow us:
https://www.facebook.com/ecospeakscle
https://www.instagram.com/ecospeakscle
Contact us:
hello@ecospeakscle.com
Emily Pek is a flower farmer and the owner of Frayed Knot Farm, a small flower farm in Newbury, Ohio, where she produces beautiful, diverse cut flowers and herbs that share stories, bring joy and support equitable and regenerative farming.
In this episode, we visit Emily on her farm and discover her journey to becoming a flower farmer, the family roots and community behind her farm, the flowers behind the Saison beer at Great Lakes Brewing Company, and her grandpa's punny joke that inspired the name Frayed Knot Farm.
If Emily were a flower, she says she would be Foxglove. It's delicate but tough with "tough" being the operative word behind being a farmer. Starting with just a grass field in 2018, Emily now grows over 100 varieties of annual and perennial flowers and foliage on less than an acre using hand-scale farming practices. She demonstrates how hard work and a "why not?" attitude can turn dreams into reality. Join us on this episode to discover the heart and hard work behind Frayed Knot Farm and Emily's passion for a more sustainable and healthy environment. Her journey will inspire you to pursue your dreams, no matter how big or small.
Resources:
Frayed Knot Farm
Follow Frayed Knot Farm on Instagram
Event Florals
Flower Shares through Ohio City farm
Wholesale - The Collab
Community Partners - Rustbelt Fibershed The Flax Project
The joke - a string walks into a bar....
Follow us:
https://www.facebook.com/ecospeakscle
https://www.instagram.com/ecospeakscle
Contact us:
hello@ecospeakscle.com
You're listening to EcoSpeak CLE, where the EcoCurious explore the unique and thriving environmental community here in Northeast Ohio. My name is Diane Bicke and my producer is Greg Rotuno. Together, we bring you inspiring stories from local sustainability leaders and invite you to connect, learn and live with our community and planet in mind.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, thanks for listening. A brief note before we start this episode we'll be taking a break for a few weeks while we celebrate my wedding to Diane's daughter, hailey, and our next episode will air on September 19th. So I hope you enjoy this one and think of us on September 2nd while we are tying the knot.
Speaker 1:Hello friends, today Greg and I are out in Jogga County. We're visiting Emily Peck at her flower farm in Novelty, Ohio. The frayed knot farm grows over 100 varieties of annual and perennial flowers and foliage on less than an acre, using hand scale farming practices. Emily's mission is to grow beautiful, diverse cut flowers and herbs that share stories, bring joy and support equitable and regenerative farming. Thanks for joining us, Emily.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much. This is the farm, so you have an acre, an acre. It's total it's three acres including the woods, so there's about an acre that goes back into the woods. But I'm technically, if I added up all the growing space, it's only an acre that I'm actually growing on, so there's plenty of more room to expand into. And, yeah, this is kind of the main growing area up front here. I have this high tunnel here that helps extend the season.
Speaker 3:We built that in 2020 and kind of have progressively added on fields each year of growing space, so, and then the back half is kind of a meadow area that I kind of just let go do its thing as like a placeholder and kind of be a pollinator area until I need to use it for production, but in the meantime it allows me to not have to build the grass and creates like an ecosystem for things back there. So, yeah, most of these are annuals that you're seeing. And then I do have sprinkled throughout different perennials that I try to add on each year. So, like here, the Yaro is a perennial that will come back every year, and you grew flax for vegetable fiber. So we just pulled that last week actually, and I have some drying in the high tunnel and yeah, we'll dry that, store that and then, as people want to use it, they can do what they want with it.
Speaker 3:There's a whole list of processing that goes with that that I'd be happy to share more in detail. But but yeah, this is kind of the time that it gets harvested. It was over there where that Ruscolt Linnum Project sign is, so it's just a small plot. This year, the first year we did it, it was, as it was, where the high tunnel is, so it was as large as that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, big area, yeah. So there's a lot to unpack there in your mission statement. I think most cut flower farmers would be like, okay, grow flowers, cut flowers, sell flowers, and you're in this for for, on a much more meaningful level, it seems like I don't know if that's a really good idea to put it.
Speaker 3:I hope so. Yeah, I mean, I think the business part is kind of implied. So that's why it's not, for me at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not part of the mission statement. We're assuming you're growing, you're cutting and you're selling and you're making money.
Speaker 3:I do want people to know that I would like to make money, but there's there's definitely more, yeah, more to it than that. That is like part of the ethos of what I do, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I've heard about your farm and, like over a year ago I think, from Michael Robinson, congratulations on your marriage, by the way, thank you. Michael Robinson is the co-founder of Rust Belt Riders, so you guys are both in this sustainability world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, as my mom put it at our wedding a match made in soil A match made in soil. Yeah, we just, we're always, we're just on brand, we're in our personal lives and professional lives. We just can't help it so yeah, Sounds like a perfect match.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, tell us about. So I've always been curious about the name frayed knot Like it could be interpreted like I'm not going to be afraid of being a flower farmer, or I'm looking at a piece of twisted twine. So what's the? What's the origin of the name? Frayed knot farm?
Speaker 3:That. Wow, I've never had someone actually say that that's 100% correct. Which one?
Speaker 1:You know what?
Speaker 3:we actually asked a friend for somebody to bet on, I think you both situation more so the I'm not afraid to be a flower farmer. It has a little bit of an origin story. So where the farm is located was previously owned by my grandparents. They were the stewards of it before me and obviously why I was able to have access to the land. They have their house that they built next next to the farm. When I got the land it was it was not a farm yet, it was just grass that they mowed for many years.
Speaker 3:But my grandfather's family owned a grocery store for a long time in this area and he, yeah, was really active in this community and he was also a jokester and he loved telling really punny jokes.
Speaker 3:To the point where I love a grandpa can tell punny jokes. Yeah, like, just kind of like you would have to at a certain point because he had a rotation and at a certain point you would just kind of you knew the punch line, you know you can tell the joke, but you would just kind of be like, ah, good one, and even he knew that he had told it before, but it was just kind of his thing and but it brought a lot of joy to our lives and was really special and the one that he told the most was about a knot that is trying to get served at a bar and is not getting served and so has to disguise itself and and and tries to, yeah, change its look so that it can get served, and the punch line is that the string says it's not a string, it's a frayed knot, it's not even that's the that's the joke, that's a joke but why I decided to make that the name of the farm.
Speaker 3:It's not only for like that, but my grandfather passed a few years ago and actually before the farm was even a thing, so he didn't get to see it come to life, unfortunately. But I wanted to really keep his memory alive through that joke, and my mom used that joke as a metaphor at his eulogy talking about how he wasn't afraid to live his life. He was actually. He was born on this street where manja manja is now at the corner, and he lived his last days here at his house. So he never he. He lived his whole life here, but he wasn't afraid to grow his business and travel. And yeah, I just really wanted that energy when I was starting the farm of you know, having community roots but not being afraid to take risks and, yeah, just just go for it.
Speaker 1:So that that's the story I love the deep traditions and you probably played here as a kid on the farm and have a have a emotional connection to the land here for sure, yeah, definitely, yeah but what? What made you? I mean, did you wake up one day and say I want to become a flower farmer?
Speaker 3:not exactly, and when people ask me kind of the origin story, I I tend to tell very long stories so please cut me off if you need to move it along.
Speaker 3:But I I feel like, yeah, it was an evolution of a lot of things and I think, like the, when I think about what the turning point for me was was like my freshman year of high school we read fast food nation. I'm not sure I'm familiar with that book, but it just talks a lot about our food system and specifically fast food, but just the general way that animals are treated in mass production of food, and it just like completely opened up my eyes to not only the food system but other systems that I was starting to question as, like a young person and that kind of was the the starting point of like me kind of starting to think about how, um, yeah, deeper connections with where, resource things and fast forward to um, graduating high school and then going to college? I actually studied psychology in college so I went to Ohio State. A lot of people ask if I went to the ag school.
Speaker 3:No, I studied psychology as you do, to become a farmer um and.
Speaker 1:I was can analyze yourself about why exactly.
Speaker 3:It definitely comes in handy. I mean, it is not it. It was not um, yeah, it was, it was completely worth it. So, um, yeah, I was still, though throughout that whole experience of of college, really still interested in um, like food systems. I was had been vegetarian, like since I read that student nation. I, you know, tried to live it in my personal lifestyle, but then I also wanted to make it more of my career and just learn more about, um, yeah, the accessibility of food, local food, um, and then, of course, naturally, when you learn about that, you want to then grow your own um. So that led me to, um believe it or not, new York City. Um, so I moved from uh, yeah, I moved from Ohio to New York City to learn how to farm, and that's why I learned how to farm?
Speaker 3:um, wouldn't I guess that? Yeah, so, um, yeah, that, can you know? I was really entrenched in the food aspect of it and, like I worked at restaurants, at one point when I was living in New York, I was doing the full farm to table experience where I was growing food at this urban farm, um in the middle of Brooklyn, and then I was working at the restaurant that one of the restaurants that we sold food at, um as a server to to pay my rent in New York City, um, so I got to see, literally like the fruits of our labor, um, you know, get taken to this restaurant and people do enjoy it, and then they also composted, so I got to see the full um cycle of things. Um, so that's all about food, but what about flowers?
Speaker 3:I know I always had to tell that context part of it um, because that's kind of what got me into farming, but the flower aspect of it. At that farm and then at several farms that I worked at after that, we also grew flowers. So, similarly to how I kind of had an awakening moment about food, I had the same thing with flowers, because I never really thought about I wasn't, I mean, who doesn't love flowers? But I wasn't particularly passionate about them. I didn't really think about where flowers come from. I mean, you see wild flowers or maybe a landscape, but I didn't even conceptualize that you would have to farm flowers you know and that most of the flowers that we're getting either at the grocery store or a florist those are farmed, yes,
Speaker 3:exactly. And so I learned about that where most of our flowers in the United States the rough numbers 70% are imported and grown either in South America or the Netherlands. And so that blew my mind and I had no idea. And then just to learn that you could grow so many of those flowers here, either, you know, on the East Coast or in this region now, and so I just, yeah, fell in love. Similarly to my passion for food and food systems, I, you know, got really excited about flowers. So that's, I'll stop there. But that's kind of what turned me on to flowers in the first place was that farming kind of system thinking journey.
Speaker 1:Well, it's so beautiful here. Before we started to record, you walked us around. You have a high hoop tunnel. Is that what you called it? Yeah, you could call it. Sort of like a metal enclosure, kind of greenhouse type structure. So you do some indoor, not indoor, I wouldn't call that indoor.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah, undercover, yeah.
Speaker 1:Then you have perennials and annuals growing out here to the right, and hundred varieties.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the rough estimate. I think it's probably more than that. And yeah, within those varieties are a lot of different colors as well. But that's kind of my rough number, so I actually no one's gonna go out and count. Yeah, but I did. I do know that, based on my crop plan, like I can see those numbers, I seeded 30,000 flowers.
Speaker 1:Wow, you do all that work by yourself.
Speaker 3:Here I have two wonderful friends that helped me out our little team. They are here part-time to mostly manage the CSA subscription program that we have here, but they also helped do most the planting and daily tasks. So, yeah, I don't do it alone, is to say, and I also have a lot of amazing community partners that I work with that help share some of marketing and pickup and things like that.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, and you started with just a grass field. Yes, so how daunting was that to envision okay. I'm gonna turn this lawn into a flower farm. And how do you prep the soil? And how did you just do all that work to dig it up and nurture the soil so it could support the flowers? Yeah, is that where? You tilt soil.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, Is that how you?
Speaker 1:met Michael yeah pretty much.
Speaker 3:I mean yes, I mean so. I mean independent of my, of course, bias. I am so, so grateful to kind of have come up with them in my farming journey. It's really hard to find good soil and I was really lucky enough that. Yeah, naturally I gravitated towards those folks because I knew I needed a lot of work here. It's mostly kind of a clay silt so it's got poor drainage and, yeah, kind of hard to work with. So I knew that there would be have to be a lot of intervention to grow flowers here.
Speaker 3:But I think, as far as your question of was it daunting, I think I was just so crazy to like start this in the first place that nothing fazed me at the time, so I wasn't even I knew what I had learned from starting or working at other farms is it just takes a long time. I'm not a very patient person, admittedly so it's kind of weird that I'm in this profession, but you just have to be really patient in farming in so many ways, and I knew that it wasn't going to look like what it looks like right now, the first year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that was in 2017 or 18?.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I started it like the business aspect of it. So I kind of started all the back end, like getting a vendor's license and establishing the actual business, into the winter of 2017. But I couldn't actually do anything farming wise until the following excuse me spring. So technically my first like season was 2018. And kind of the thing that really was motivating me is a mutual friend of ours. It was having a wedding. My dear friend. I had been growing flowers at a couple other farms and she had seen what I was doing and I was getting really into it and had decided I was going to start, you know, this flower business. My grandmother generously offered this space to do so and, you know, lauren asked me you know, will you do the flowers for my wedding? That's great and again, I was crazy enough to say yes because I hadn't like the farm was not established yet I was just like yeah, I got this.
Speaker 3:I got this. Yeah, of course, like how can you say no, you know, I don't want anyone else to be the father of your wedding, of course. So that was really the. I wanted to do it anyway, so I don't want to put all the pressure on her, but it was. That was a good goal to have and a deadline.
Speaker 1:And a deadline.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that really put some fire under me to figure it all out. So I think it was definitely stressful but I did it and I did have to supplement some flowers, but that was kind of my first introduction to working with other flower farmers, which is something I'm really passionate about doing now. So I worked with yeah, I sourced some flowers from Sunny Meadows, which is an awesome flower farm done in Columbus, but I grew a lot of them as well here and was able to meet that goal. I've since done bouquets and other things for weddings, but yeah, you, kind of just trial by fire is kind of my MO, I think Very spunky.
Speaker 1:So you're young, You're what? 29, 28?
Speaker 3:Thank you, I'm 33.
Speaker 1:33. Well, I think I'm seeing a lot of younger farmers in this community of yours. We met several of them at the Great Lakes Brewing, ohio City Farm Brewmasters Dinner last week. Yeah, there were four farmers at our table, the one I wrote them down Kyla from AXPO Orchard, sasha from Purple Brown Farm and Annabelle and Eric from Bay Branch Farm were just sitting near us.
Speaker 1:But I was struck by not only how delicious this was at Ohio City Farm as you know, you were there and the beers were crafted and paired with the food. It was all local farm to table food and there was a big, long table right down the middle of the farm probably 100 people, and every farmer got up to tell their story, to talk about the food that was. There were six, five or six courses and the farmers would talk about the food that they were eating in their farm and then the brewmaster would talk about the beer and every farmer, I think, got up and said I'm not a public speaker, I just grow food or I just grow flowers. But they all had an amazing story to tell. Tell us about the story of how your elderberry flowers and rose petals got into the saison.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was delicious oh thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so too. I hope everyone tries it. Yeah, so I saw I was inspired by another this is a theme but I was inspired by another farmer farmer in Pittsburgh, soul Patch Garden. They did a collab with a brewery there with Tulsi basil, which is one of my favorite things to grow, super fragrant and has a really distinct flavor. So I was just really inspired by that because I just never thought oh, I love beer and flowers and so I kind of just did a call out to be like hey, who wants to do a flower beer collab in Cleveland?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're behind it.
Speaker 3:That was so best for you, yeah, so fortunately one of the folks that is here at Freidnaught, lexi, also works at Great Lakes. Oh, she's the local food person for Great Lakes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so she's the coordinator. So of course she was like, well, let's do it at Great Lakes and I will coordinate that. I was like, oh yeah, it's 100%, that makes so much sense. And, yeah, it's awesome that they've supported that position to help her get more local food into the Brew Pub and then also collab with Steve Foreman who's the Brew Pub brewmaster there to do different beer collabs. So yeah, that's kind of what started the conversation.
Speaker 3:And then we talked about earlier in the spring Luckily I had kind of seen that and early enough where we could kind of like there wasn't anything growing yet, so we still had time to harvest and plan it out for the year and we thought of like everything that we could think of that might be edible and possibly tasty for a beer. And, using Steve's knowledge, we came up with elderflower and rose. We thought that would be a nice combination and they also kind of bloom around the same time and it timed out where it would be early enough where he could brew the beer and it would be ready for this dinner and it could be a really delicious summer farmhouse style.
Speaker 3:Oh, I had no idea all that went into it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Yeah, what do you think, raikin? You're a brewer. Can we try?
Speaker 3:Oh nice.
Speaker 1:You and Tim will have to come up with some unique combinations with your next batch.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, we can't even make a drinkable beer, your first batch was pretty good.
Speaker 3:There's time, there's time.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, that's a very cool story you talk about in your mission statement. You know you want to share stories, and that's a great one about how what you're doing is kind of supporting you but also interconnecting with this larger community. Fine, regenerative farming. How do you practice that here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good question. I think for me it's definitely more of a philosophy than like a prescriptive way to farm. I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and I think the most important and kind of probably common thing is that it's based on kind of a circular system and kind of what you're taking out, you're putting back in to the soil, and not only are you doing kind of a sustainable model, but you're taking it a step above to try to regenerate some of the disrepair that has been done by farming or other industries. So a lot of people talk about carbon sequestration as a part of that. So we're not only just trying to be even, we're really trying to regenerate and improve our atmosphere by trying to sequester more carbon into the soil or doing, you know, erosion prevention or water catchment. So I think sustainability is kind of just the baseline. We need to go a step further and do some repair, and I feel that using the land in a responsible way can can do that. So love it. So how?
Speaker 1:so you mentioned water. There was that big drought we had in May, I think it was May. So when I ran into you you looked a little stressed how do you capture water on the farm? Do you have a big rain barrel here? Do you have an irrigation system? And how did that drought affect you? Because it was just at the start of your, your CSA subscription season.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that was. That was probably the worst drought I've seen here. I think it was close to a month of no rain, and especially, it's harder to do that in the spring than it is the summer, because you need rain to grow like seedlings. That's when it's needed the most and that's when it's typical. But yeah, we didn't have that. I currently do what would be considered dry farming, because I don't have my own well, so everything in the fields is watered by rain. Oh, wow, yeah scary.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. Oh yeah, hummingbird. There's also hummingbird moths here, which are very cool. Maybe you'll see one, but um so, oh no, totally fine, there's a lot. That's the point. We're creating an ecosystem here.
Speaker 1:We need to do our bird episode.
Speaker 2:That's like the fourth time I've interrupted an episode of the Colorado bird.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's pretty cool, though, to see just hummingbirds out here it's beautiful here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I everything on the fields is I do irrigate a little bit. When I first put in like I'll put, I'll carry water over, essentially with hoses, to plant the seedlings and then after that they're on their own. Wow. And the way that I get water is I do have two very large tanks at the front of the farm that capture water off of the high tunnel, so it's a really long high tunnel so it's able to capture a pretty decent amount of water when it rains. When it doesn't, I there's a local spring company, sunrise Springs. They carry water from the spring and deliver it here and fill up the tank.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of my backup If I don't get enough rain catchment. And because the tunnel is covered, you have to have rain. So I can well relatively rely on the rain out in the fields, but I can't do that in the tunnel because it's not getting it, except for the ground water, which we do have a very high water table, so it gets some water. But yeah, so it was difficult and I definitely the next big investment for the farm in order to continue is going to have to be a well, because I definitely can't. Yeah, I've gotten so lucky and kind of yeah, you can't put yourself through that again.
Speaker 1:No, it's not worth the stress.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I mean it's better for the flowers, too, to have more control over the water.
Speaker 2:that they're getting.
Speaker 3:It stresses them out, and when plants are stressed they're more likely to get pests and disease. So, yeah, it's not good for the farmer, not good for the plants. I mean I am grateful that I've had a low impact as far as using water and by the reality is that things are only going to get worse in my opinion. So it's just not worth the stress.
Speaker 1:How can our listeners support you in like giving you enough money to dig that? Well, so you have a CSA subscription, so those are sold out for the year, right?
Speaker 3:They are.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on that, Thank you. Is that your main source of income? The CSA subscription.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's about. I kind of yeah, that's definitely the main. And then the other. I have like two other kind of outlets which are wholesale. So I work with a collaborative of other growers to aggregate our product locally and we sell to florists and Fred and I is like kind of the hub for that. So that's been an amazing way for not only myself but others to have an outlet of wholesale flowers. And then I also do weddings and events, as we mentioned. So those that with the CSA subscription are kind of my three outlets and I do have a few retail partners. Some of the folks that also host the bouquet subscription also sell bouquets every week. So Shad Chagrin and our Shad Boutique in Chagrin Falls and Room Service Boutique in Shaker have bouquets every week.
Speaker 1:What is your specific day of the week that you get your fresh bouquets to the retail.
Speaker 3:Yes, so those are on the weekends at Shad, starting on Friday, through the whole weekend or until they're sold out.
Speaker 1:I will stop and get something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then Shaker Saturdays.
Speaker 1:Saturdays and Sundays there's bouquets there, so okay, yeah, and do people ever visit the farms? You have a little farm stand, I see by the road. I do have a farm stand.
Speaker 3:It's like a lemonade stand, but for flowers, yeah, so basically yeah, the farm stand was really great in 2020 when we were doing contactless pickup of everything, and that's kind of what started that. However, it is a lot of work to stock it every week with all the other things I have going on, so I've kind of focused it on doing more of an open house thing, where people can shop the farm stand and come see the farm at the beginning of the year, kind of around spring, and then around kind of fall when the season's ending. So, yeah, that's the best way for people to see the farm as well, because we are a production farm and so we're not technically open to the public during the week, but I obviously want to show it off. So and people ask, so that's a really good time to stay tuned for a fall open house.
Speaker 1:So, okay, yeah, so, moving on to some tips, how do I keep my fresh cut flowers fresh longer? Yeah, great question. Do you use that little packet that comes with, I mean, or is this a better way? Yeah, usually they don't look so good after a couple days if they're local, like wildflower bouquets that you pick up at the farmer's market.
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. My philosophy on like flower food is kind of what it's called For. Me personally, and this is no shame to anyone that uses it Plenty of farmers and customers alike do but it is synthetic chemicals.
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so no, it's usually got a mixture of like a bleach basically, which is keeping the water sanitized, and then a sugar to keep feeding the flowers. But they're both synthetic and I don't know of any that aren't, and the ones that aren't I don't think work very well. So don't bother personally. But so my philosophy on that is that I'm going to do all the work to be regenerative as much as possible, then putting the flowers that I work so hard to not use pesticides, exactly Because I don't use synthetic pesticides.
Speaker 3:I don't use synthetic fertilizers or herbicides, so just to me, it kind of just reverses the whole thing. However, I understand of course you want your flowers to last long, so I do feel like you can do comparable ways of caring for your flowers and the way that you do that is so, and instead of using bleach, you want to just make sure that you're the water that you're putting your flowers into is super, super clean and that you keep it clean. So it does require a little bit more work than maybe folks are used to, and that's something that I think is actually a benefit, because you're actually interacting with the flowers more. I feel like a lot of people will get flowers. They'll put them on their table and then set it and forget it.
Speaker 3:And they don't really engage with them. And when you have local flowers and you need to kind of change out that water, it gets you to maybe rearrange the bouquet, take out some flowers that might not be only a couple days and then enjoy the ones that are a little bit longer. So you want to keep the water clean. So whatever vase you're putting in, make sure the vase is clean, the water is cold and that I think the biggest thing is that you don't want any foliage in the water. So try to. Usually my flowers will come already pre-stripped. So okay, that's a good tip.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they have about six inches. Usually for my bouquets and most bouquets that you'll buy from the bottom there's no foliage, but if you fill the water up, make sure that, yeah, only the stems are in the water, because if the foliage is in the water it will start to rot naturally.
Speaker 3:And then that clogs up the pores of the flowers and that's what creates your flowers then to start dying prematurely. It makes the water more dirty and won't they won't last as long. So those are the tips, and I think also just keeping flowers out of direct sunlight and in a space that isn't yeah, it's more hospitable to them.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, Now, how early in the year do you start selling your CSA subscriptions? I typically Tell us about what that comes with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I typically start selling them in the winter, around end of November, early December, actually for the following year. Oh, okay, better early, because people really like to give them as gifts. So people have to be really patient and they usually are, because they'll be end up waiting around nine months for their flowers, which I really appreciate. But it feels so much even more gratifying when you get it yeah exactly.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I usually start around then and then I'll sell until I'm sold out, which usually is around May or June. So Through your website, yeah, through my website, and yeah, you can choose between. It's fraydenupfarmcom and you can choose between six or 12 weeks, which is the whole season. So yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, if you were a flower, what would you be?
Speaker 3:Oh my goodness, I always get asked what is my favorite flower. I don't know.
Speaker 1:How would I?
Speaker 3:be. I mean, I think I always revert back to one of my favorite flowers, which is Foxfove, or the botanical name is Digitalis. Okay, it is poisonous.
Speaker 2:so I don't really want to be embodying poison.
Speaker 3:However, I think that there is something nice about the contrast of it. It's like super beautiful but also don't mess with me kind of attitude. I don't know.
Speaker 1:The contrast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it has. It's really delicate and beautiful and also, yeah, it's tough too, and I think that kind of embodies me, where I think I'm a kind person and can grow beautiful flowers, but also it's really really, really hard to be a farmer, yeah, and you have to have a really kind of tough outlook on life, I think, to keep kind of punishing yourself, doing this every year. But, yeah, I think Well from our brief conversation.
Speaker 1:that sounds like a perfect description. So you are a Foxfove? Yeah, Awesome.
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