What's Blooming in July: Drip Tape, Dahlias, and a Milkweed Rescue

We'll be honest with you right out of the gate. We're a little late, and we're still cutting our teeth on all of this. This is the very first season for Hardy Hill Farms, and it's also our very first newsletter. Thank you for being here at the start. There's something both terrifying and wonderful about writing the opening page of a story you don't yet know the ending to.

Here's the plan for these notes. Every other Thursday we'll send a short letter from the field: what's growing, what we're learning, and a few things worth knowing whether you grow your own flowers or simply love having them on the table. We'll show you the pretty rows, but we'll also tell you what's giving us trouble. That second part is the whole point.

For most of the last month we've been farming in a drought. If you've never watched a field go dry, it does something to your stomach. You plant in spring optimism, the beds come up green and hopeful, and then the sky just stops. So when the rain finally arrived this week, it genuinely felt like a gift. You could almost feel the whole place exhale.

And the flowers responded. Right now:

It's not a wall of color yet. But it's a start, and after a dry June, a start feels like plenty.

The big project these two weeks was defense against the drought. When you can't count on rain, you have to make every drop count, and that came down to two jobs.

We ran drip tape down every row. Drip tape is a thin, flat irrigation line laid right along the base of the plants, with tiny emitters spaced along its length that release water slowly and directly onto the soil. Compared to spraying water over the top of a bed, drip has two big advantages: almost nothing is lost to evaporation, and the water goes straight to the roots instead of sitting on the leaves. That matters more than it sounds, because wet foliage in warm weather is an open invitation to fungal disease. Keeping the leaves dry while the roots drink is a quiet win for plant health, not just water savings.

Over the beds we rolled out black landscape mulch fabric. It does double duty. It smothers weeds before they can compete with the flowers, and (crucially in a drought) it holds moisture in the soil by cutting down on evaporation from the surface. It was a long, hot afternoon of unrolling and pinning fabric, the kind of work that leaves your back reminding you about it the next morning. But the beds were visibly happier by evening, and we'll be glad of it every day the sky stays empty.

Not every job on a farm is a chore. This week we carefully dug up some wild milkweed that had volunteered in the driveway, where it was doomed to get run over, and transplanted it into a garden bed. Milkweed is the one plant monarch butterflies must have to lay their eggs and feed their caterpillars, and it's a magnet for all kinds of pollinators. Giving it a safe home is a small thing, but a flower farm lives and dies by its pollinators, so we take the long view. If we look after them, they look after us.

Now the honest part, because we promised.

Our dahlia tubers are finally waking up and sending out their first tender shoots, and something is eating the new leaves. Dahlias are one of the crown jewels of a cut-flower field, and watching those first fragile leaves get chewed is a special kind of frustrating. We haven't pinned down the culprit for certain. The usual suspects in Zone 5b are slugs, snails, and earwigs, all of which love a soft young dahlia shoot.

So here's our first real ask of you: if you garden in Zone 5b and have a trick for protecting tender dahlia shoots, we'd genuinely love to hear it. Just hit reply. We'd rather tell you what we're stuck on than only show you the highlight reel, and honestly, some of the best farming knowledge we've found so far has come from other growers, not books.

People often ask what they actually need to get started. The truth is you need far less than the catalogs suggest. Here are the three tools that do the most work on our farm this month.

A clean, sharp pair of floral snips is our single most-used tool in July. It's not about looking the part; it's plant biology. Dull blades crush the stem as they cut, mashing the very channels the flower uses to drink, which shortens vase life. A clean, sharp cut leaves those channels open so the stem can take up water immediately. We also dip our snips in a sanitizing solution between plants, because a blade is a perfect way to carry disease from one plant down an entire row. Sharp and clean: those two habits do more for bouquet longevity than almost anything else.

Cut flowers go straight from the plant into clean water, never a dry basket. We carry light buckets with a few inches of cool water right into the rows, so every stem is drinking within seconds of being cut. This is the single biggest reason a local bouquet can outlast a shipped one by a week: a flower cut at its peak and hydrated instantly simply has more life left in it than one that spent days dry in a box and a truck.

In July, the weeds grow faster than the flowers. Our secret weapon is a sharp stirrup hoe (also called a hula or scuffle hoe), run shallow along the soil surface once a week. The trick is timing. You hoe while the weeds are still tiny threads, slicing them off just below the surface before they ever get established. Slice, don't dig. Ten minutes of this a week saves hours of miserable hand-pulling later, and it keeps you from disturbing the soil and the flower roots you actually want.

Here's what's coming out of the field right now, or nearly so:

You can always see what's in the ground this season on our live planting list.

That's our first letter from the hill. If you know someone who'd enjoy watching a brand-new flower farm figure it out in real time (the wins, the losses, the milkweed rescues), forwarding this along is genuinely the kindest thing you can do for us at this stage.

See you in two weeks.

Warmly,
the Hardy Hill family