Memory Lane Farm

Despite the troubles we are having with the Dahlias, thankfully all of the other flowers in our field are blooming beautifully! This keeps our spirits up!
Just to see the flowers and our customers reactions to our bouquets keeps the joy of flower farming alive! 🥰

Beware of Killer Manure!!!
We will never ever get mushroom manure, straw, or soil that has cow or horse manure in it, brought onto our flower farm. It may be contaminated with a long lasting herbicide like Grazon.

So much time and effort went into picking all 300 varieties of Dahlias this year. Some varieties had more than one and we ended up with over 400 carefully curated varieties that would be great in our MemoryLane bouquets from July until our Canadian Thanksgiving.
When we noticed our Dahlias starting to harden and deform for a second year in a row I almost started to cry!!
Last year we did our upmost to save the Dahlias but most were too poisoned and didn’t make it.

This year I had started all of our Dahlias in pots because we were still putting in drainage in the Dahlias area.
All of the Dahlias were beautiful bushy, no gall or viruses. (One we previously threw out as it had looked suspect. Perhaps a virus).
We planted these healthy Dahlias in the field and waited for flowers that never came.

Again beware of killer manure!!! Please google it before you buy manure.

It does not take much herbicide in the soil to negatively impact Dahlias and many other flowers.
We have once again transplanted all of our Dahlias in the middle of July to new, manure free rows. They had only been in the poisoned ground a few weeks and were not showing as much damage as last year’s. We are very hopeful that our plan will work! 😊

If you are wondering why we didn’t plant directly into our soil, it is because we have mostly very hard clay and that mixed with our abundant autumn rain would lead to rotted Dahlias tubers.

One week later from transplanting and we have got our first Dahlia!!! A small and struggling Wine Eyed Jill but what a trooper!! ❤️
It is gorgeous and so precious to me. I felt quite emotional in the last clip.

Now we baby them along, pray and wait for more blooms!! 🥰

This is the lazy gardeners way of planting Zinnias!

The zinnia seeds were all gathered without a lot of effort last year but because they were not culled to get the best viable seeds the germination rate wasn’t great. (I tried one seed tray in the spring)

But clearly by adding a huge quantity of the seeds, I managed to get a huge amount of Zinnias!

I need to quickly thin the zinnia patch and then eagerly await for the blooms. I will definitely keep you updated so you can see what type of Zinnias appear. 😊

If you have a pot, you can grow these cut flowers!!

Zinnias come in a huge range of colours, they’re super hearty, & have beautiful blooms 🌸 It’s so satisfying to grow them because they produce so many flowers with such minimal effort!

We absolutely love them & they’re a necessary component for our bouquets✨ Plus they have a great vase life!

Just keep picking them & they will keep blooming right into the fall 💕

I just ate my first apple of the season and it was delicious!! 🍎 We never get them this early!!

This variety is called Gravenstein. It is crisp and sweet with a little tang. Just perfect ❤️

Windfall apples are just the apples that have fallen to the ground. If we collect them quick enough they won’t get nibbled on by critters. There are so many apples that we can choose the freshly fallen, non bruised, ripe apples.
Last year we gave away so many apples and it looks like it will be the same this year. We eat them fresh, make pies and crumbles, and make juice for apple jelly!

To have them in July when we are still getting plums off of the plum tree is such a treat!! 🥰

No doubt about it, there is something special about locally grown, no spray, fresh flowers.
They are uniquely beautiful as well as being a haven for pollinators and kind to the environment.

On our second year flower farm we do not use harmful sprays or chemicals to deal with pests or weeds. Every single flower is grown by us from seed, corm, tuber or bulb.

We get so much joy in growing these beautiful flowers and we hope you get as much joy giving them to others or enjoying them at home 🥰

Join me for an early morning mid July flower harvest!
We are second year flower farmers in southwestern British Columbia, Canada and as you can see the field is bursting with colour! So many flowers in July. 🥰

We will condition the flowers for a couple of hours, prep the stems, make sure no bugs decided to come for the ride and then arrange some incredibly gorgeous bouquets to put out in the flower stand for the day’s sales. 💐

And then we will do it all again the next day. 😅 This really is the fun part of flower farming. This and meeting our customers. 💕

Just a little peak into what goes on at Memory Lane Farm.

😊

Almost 3 days outside out of water!! 🤯

They looked very wilty but they bounced back with a snip and cool water😊

We have discovered that certain varieties of Marigolds are awesome cut flowers! If the smell of them bothers you make sure to trim off the foliage.

Has anyone else tried Marigolds in a bouquet? 🥰

When it is a cut and come again flower, the key is to keep cutting!

We can’t imagine a time when there wouldn’t be Strawflowers growing on Memory Lane Farm! They are gorgeous, long lasting flowers that keep producing beautiful blooms right until last frost. And so many colours!!🥰

These are also queens of the dried flower world and their crinkly sound is fabulous!

We save our strawflower seeds but they will also reseed quite freely!

Cut deep and often and they will keep blooming for you. 🌸💕🌸