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Hello
As the year finally draws to a close, it’s time to pause, reflect and to look back at 2022 - our second season as flower growers. It’s a time to cherish the highs and contemplate the challenges.
2022 was an eventful year, with all the weathers thrown at us, from extreme heatwaves to early frosts and heavy rain. We saw our flowers travel to and enjoyed in all the corners of the UK. We saw them celebrate weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, christenings and funerals. And we saw them brighten up homes and bring a small vase of joy to thousands of you.
So join us as we take a whistle-stop tour of 2022.
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2022 began with a crispy frost, a clean slate for what was about to be our 2nd season. It would bring with it new challenges and lots of new opportunities, but most of all the opportunity to perfect some of the areas we might have missed the mark in 2021. The great benefit of a cyclical season.
Top of the jobs list was clearing and amending beds. Out went the old growth and in went fresh compost. Around 4000 perennials were planted and a rows and rows of baby shrubs. Hundreds of seeds were also sown, tiny pellets of potential.
The studio kept busy, our dried flowers being the main mainstay. Cornish-grown fresh flowers also went out to subscription and deli customers. And mid feb saw out first winter wedding, pale pink hellebores being the star of the show. We also celebrated Valentines day for the first time, helped by a little mention in The Telegraph from Arthur Parkinson, thanks Arthur.
By Feb new life began to appear, the first narcissi and tunnel grown anemones bloomed. Across the field new life began. There was so much anticipation in the ground. We were just praying nothing would go wrong at this stage.
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March saw life in the flower field really wake up. Daffodils, scented narcissi, muscari then tulips all began to bloom, the latter waking up in late march and romping away through April.
Both months were unseasonably dry, with April seeing unusually high temperatures. This brought our tulips into bloom in one sudden burst which led to some frantic selling to try and get rid of them all quickly. with all the profits going to humanitarian relief charity Disaster emergency committee DEC
We also celebrated Mother's Day, (which is also our unofficial 1st birthday). It was topped off with a very special collaboration with 2 Spot Ceramics who made us some beautiful hand-thrown vases.
Despite the thrill of beds of blooming bulbs, disaster was looming in the propagation tunnel. All our seeds, which had been sown in the months before had germinated but not grown. The culprit was a batch of bad compost, despite it coming from one of the best suppliers in the UK, it was a lesson learnt the hard way. This would set us back by months and leave us with little to sell after the bulbs finished.
The coming weeks would be a race against time to re-pot what we could and re-sow the rest as summer was just around the corner.
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May felt like a changeover month. Ranunculus and Tulips still lingered, still beautiful, but they were joined by Foxgloves, Alliums, Aquilegia, Geums and the first of the herbs. Temperatures continued to be unseasonably warm, the fifth warmest May on record. We planted out annals tentatively, still wary of a late frost.
We were still making up time from our spring compost issues, the heroes of the month became biennials and autumn-sown hardy annuals and the thousands of perennials, which without we'd have had nothing.
May slipped into June. The rich colours of spring changed to delicate pastel shades, blues, lilacs and mauves. And the heavy shapes of tulips and ranunculus were swapped for wispy and dainty Ammi, Nigella, Nepeta.
We scrabbled for anything red, white and blue to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee. Then came British Flowers Week, we celebrated by opening the flower field for the weekend & took part in a local flower festival.
It was warm, we had rain, the grass was still green, and summer was here. Production was now in full flow, bouquets headed off across the country, and buckets and boxes of flowers went off to weddings and florist shops, ready to be made into something special.
Late summer seeds were sown, we were continually planting out, snipping out, it was busy, but just as we liked it.
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Summer was in full swing now, for us the highlight of July was Roses and Sweet Peas. They came in abundance, juicy and sweet smelling and just in time for wedding season.
Everything was growing full steam ahead, we had a sweet-shop of colours & scents, it was wonderful, there was so much choice.
By late July, the pastel tones of early summer gave way to the rich, hot tones of late summer. Sunflowers, Dahlias, Zinnias, Rudbeckias all joined the show, with zingy hot colours.
We also endured one of the hottest and driest periods to date. The grass went brown, many unirrigated plants gave up, and others all flowered at once. We went with the flow, watered what we needed and left the rest. We picked at dawn, planted at dusk, kept out of the sun, ate icecream (Jude’s of course).
Despite the heat, drought and hosepipe bans we survived, we enjoyed the long evenings working the land.
We loved seeing our blooms go off to weddings, parties, funerals. For us the joy is in seeing the blooms enjoyed, and bringing joy.
As August drew to a close, there was a sadness that it would soon be over for the year, how long would we have, another month or two? Little did we know that we were about to enter one of the mildest autumns on record….
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Autumn began with mixed feelings. I said goodbye to my father after a short battle with cancer. We celebrated with wild florals in the church, oak, beach, dahlias (below top right). Then an early frost wiped out our Dahlias.
Apart from that, the weather stayed warm, we had rain, everything kept growing, the dahlias even returned a bit.
It was a time for transition, for looking forward to next season. We planted out biennials and hardy annuals, allowing them to bulk up before winter. We cut thousands of stems for drying, we saved seed, we sowed flowers and cover crops.
We had a second frost in early October which took out the Dahlias and zinnias, but others kept going and the weather stayed warm. We kept cutting buckets of beautiful chrysanthemums, delphiniums, scabious, strawflowers and more.
Attention began to turn to wintery. Autumnal wreaths took over, so did dried flowers and we began to pot up Christmas potted bulbs.
The year was drawing to a close, yet the weather was unseasonably warm, it felt a little strange planning Christmas, but winter and Christmas were just weeks away.
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November began much like the rest of autumn, unseasonably warm. We continued to cut chrysanthemums by the bucketloads. Rudbeckias and others continued to bloom long into November.
By the end of the month attention turned to Christmas, we began to ship wreaths all over the country, delighted in seeing pictures of your wreath kits. We garlanded stairs and fireplaces and ran three very festive wreath workshops.
We sneaked out a new website, which included our exciting new gifts range. Our days were now spent packaging gifts and making wreaths.
So here ends year two of Stem & Green. It’s been a year of up and downs, lots of new challenges and lots of moments of joy. We are passionate about growing gorgeous flowers and doing it in a way that is kind to the planet, and we continue to find ways to do it better.
Thank you all for your support this year. We look forward to a wonderfully floral year next year.
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