Planting Joy
Dear Farm Community -
We hope you’re staying warm out there! The first real cold snap of the season is upon us and fortunately we got all our ducks in a row on Friday prepping for today’s ice cold temps. Beds are hooped and frost cloths are on! We’re ready to begin the dance of covering and uncovering and covering and uncovering crops, opening tunnels and closing tunnels and opening and closing and opening and closing. A dance that lasts all winter long. It’s an exhausting tango but one that makes this coveted 4th growing season possible (even with these occasional 20-degree days). Last week we also got greenhouse plastic on our newly constructed high tunnels - we’re excited about this progress and the possibilities that this additional indoor growing space opens up!
Last week, we also wrapped up our tulip prep with a huge field planting. We’ve found over the years that to get our field tulips juuuust right, we need to hand-dig the trenches (our tractor-dug trenches just didn’t give us the right shape hole in the ground. Sometimes we just gaze at each other with a look that says, "Wow, I can't believe that my job right now is to dig a trench"). You can’t say we don't work hard for it all! And that level of dedication is why we‘re verrrrry excited about our tulip plan for 2026. Take a wild guess on how many bulbs we planted for the spring. Ponder it as you scroll through some of the gorg blooms that await us…….
Are you ready for the big reveal????
We planted 38,800 tulip bulbs! Our new approach to planting is what’s allowing us to grow SO MANY! We’ve got tulip bulbs in three areas of the farm: crates outdoors with an irrigation system we rigged up, crates in our seedhouse, and of course bulbs right in the earth of the fields. Our crate-grown tulips did awesome last year and we have high hopes for our 2026 crop.
We truly can’t wait to share our spring flowers with you. More than just blooms or another crop to tend to, they represent something bigger. To get real for a moment ~ so much in the world feels heavy, sad, and impossible these days (who can relate!!). But there was a quiet moment when we were planting these tulip bulbs that brought an overwhelming sense of gratitude and a sincere smile to my face. Planting these bulbs was a quiet act of rebellion against that heaviness. To plant anything is to choose to believe in a future, and to plant flowers is to believe that future can be beautiful.
It’s precisely that heaviness in the world that can make it feel difficult to justify spending money on something like flowers. But here’s the thing: it’s these small, vital acts of beauty that give back to you tenfold in delight, hope, and joy. Flowers invite us to pause, offering a kinder, more joyful lens through which to experience the world. They can be that small thing we see in the morning that shifts our entire mood, allowing us to go out and change the world in our small, yet incredibly meaningful ways. There’s a Buddhist proverb that says, “If we could see the miracle of a single flower, our lives would change forever.”
We invite you to give yourself the gift of noticing that miracle every week, and through that, support our farm's work.
We're currently offering discounted early pricing on both our Spring Flower Share and our Three-Season Flower Share! Signing up now is a beautiful, easy, and affordable way to invest in your own happiness for 2026 ~ a simple, prepaid investment in weekly wonder and delight that costs less than a few lattes per week. (They also make a great traditional gift for a loved one!)
Our Spring Flower Share will feature not only tulips in shapes and colors beyond your wildest dreams, but also fluffy million-layer ranunculus, vibrant showy anemones, sweet delicate poppies, showstopper delphinium, bright classic daffodils, and more.
As a CSA member, you get extra special treatment: we choose the absolute best from our fields every week, including highly sought-after flowers (peonies anyone?). Your bouquets benefit from extra-personalized attention to detail from our design superstar Farmer Bekah, and less handling between the field and your vase, ensuring your blooms are perfect every time. It's an investment in your well-being, your happiness, and a shared belief in that beautiful future.
Cheers ;)
Diamond Hill Farmers
2026 is lookin gooooooooood:
P.S. HUGE CONGRATS to Moore Flower Co for the Grand Opening of their storefront in Watkinsville on Friday! We so appreciated the farm shoutout on their sustainability table ;)
