The netted rows, looking west.
The heat wave that closed out June finally broke with a full day of rain, and the whole farm exhaled. For a stretch there the heat index was climbing toward triple digits, and everything (the plants, the soil, and us) was just trying to hang on. When the rain came, you could almost hear the beds drink it in.
These two weeks came down to two things: giving the flowers something to lean on, and learning a lesson we'd much rather share than hide. One of those is a satisfying success story. The other still stings. We're going to tell you both, because that's the deal we made with these notes.
Stringing up the netting
The big job was installing Hortonova netting over the beds that hold our ammi, cosmos, and sunflowers.
If you haven't grown tall cut flowers before, here's the short version of why this matters so much. As these plants shoot up and load themselves with bloom, they get top-heavy and top-heavy plants are fragile. One good summer thunderstorm, the kind that rolls over the hills here without much warning, can lay an entire row flat overnight. And here's the cruel part: once a stem kinks at the base, it never fully straightens. A bent stem is a hard sell in a bouquet, no matter how perfect the flower on top of it is. A whole afternoon's harvest can be compromised by a single storm.
How horizontal trellis netting works
The solution is elegant and low-tech. Instead of tying up each plant individually (which would take forever across a whole field), you stretch a grid of netting horizontally, flat over the top of the bed, held up on posts at the corners and edges. The plants then grow up through the squares of the grid.
Here's the clever part: as each stem rises through a square, the netting supports it on all four sides at once. The plant essentially braces itself against the grid as it grows, so it comes out of the season straight and market-ready instead of leaning and kinked. As the plants climb, we raise the netting with them, so the support stays right up near the growing tips where the plants are most vulnerable.
The sunflowers in particular are loving it, growing fast and arrow-straight through the grid, exactly the way you want them. It's one of those cheap, simple tricks that pays for itself the very first time a storm blows through and your rows are still standing tall the next morning while your neighbor's are flat. After the brutal heat, that day of rain was the reward, and the netted beds took it beautifully.
The part that didn't work
Now the honest part.
Alongside the flowers, we started a big flat of vegetables in plug trays. If you're new to seed-starting, plug trays are those cellular trays divided into dozens of small individual cells. They're wonderful for getting a lot of starts going in a small footprint, but each cell holds only a thimble of soil. And a thimble of soil in a heat wave dries out in hours, not days.
Between the relentless heat and a few too-busy days when the farm pulled us in ten directions at once, we simply couldn't keep up with the watering. Here's the hard biology of it: when tender seedlings dry out and cook in that kind of heat, their roots are so small and shallow that there's no reserve to fall back on. They don't wilt and recover the way an established plant might; they're just gone. By the time we caught up, we'd lost roughly half the flat.
It stings. There's no way around that. But a loss you learn from isn't wasted, so here's what we're carrying forward:
Start fewer than you think you need. It's so easy to over-sow in the optimism of spring. Fewer, better-tended plugs will always beat a big ambitious flat you can't realistically keep watered. Match your sowing to the time you actually have, not the time you wish you had.
Give trays afternoon shade during a heat spike. Even a few hours out of the worst of the afternoon sun buys those small roots a real fighting chance. A simple length of shade cloth would have saved a lot of what we lost.
Bottom-water. Instead of splashing water over the top from a hose, set the trays in a shallow reservoir of water and let them wick moisture up from below. It keeps the root zone cooler and far more evenly moist, and it doesn't blast tiny seedlings around the way a hose does.
We'd rather tell you the parts that didn't work than only show you the pretty rows. That's the entire reason we write these notes as we go, in real time, instead of polishing everything into a highlight reel after the fact. And if you've got a hot-weather seedling trick that's saved your starts, we genuinely want to hear it. Reply to the newsletter and teach us something; we're all ears.
A zinnia coming up through the grid.
In the cart this week
Here's what's coming out of the field right now:
Cosmos, still going strong and being cut by the armful
Ammi (false Queen Anne's lace), now blooming and ready to harvest, all that airy white lace
Calendula, opening up in the meadow
From the upper field, wild black-eyed Susans and coneflowers, cut fresh
You can always see what's in the ground this season on our live planting list.
Bespoke bouquets
We're not on a market schedule yet; that comes later this season. But bespoke bouquets are available now. If you'd like flowers for a table, a gift, or an occasion, just reach out by email and we'll put something together from whatever is at its absolute peak that week. Because everything is cut fresh and hydrated immediately, a Hardy Hill bouquet holds up in the vase far longer than anything that's traveled to get to you.
Follow along
That's our second letter from the hill: one win, one loss, and a field full of cosmos. If you're enjoying these notes, the kindest thing you can do for a brand-new farm is forward this to one person who'd like it too.
See you in two weeks.
Warmly, the Hardy Hill Farms family
Hardy Hill Farms · 100 Hardy Hill Rd, Roxbury, NH 03455 · hardyhillfarms.com