Local Flowers Provide a Sustainable Option (Podcast Transcript for Grounded by the Farm episode 204)

May 5, 2021

Grounded by the Farm episode 204 Local Flowers Provide a Sustainable Option

See the connected article, photos & access audio, etc — Who grew the flowers in that bouquet? Talking Local Flowers with England’s Ben Cross

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29:57

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

flowers, greenhouses, grow, uk, people, crop, varieties, stems, plants, big, area, bit, wonky, marissa, talk, farm, winter, ben, week, nice

SPEAKERS

Grounded by the Farm

 

Grounded by the Farm  00:03

Food is more than just what’s on our plate. It’s the places where it’s grown. It’s the people who grow it and so much more joining Janice person, your host on Grounded by the Farm every other week as we talk about the foods we love. Hello, everybody, this is Janice I’m Grounded by the Farm. And this week, I am so excited. We get to talk about flowers. And it said different things. A lot of people don’t think about flower farms per se as farms. We think of farms in our yards or maybe at the Botanical Gardens. But I’ve actually been able to see a few flower farms in Holland out in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, and some things locally. And so today though, we’re going faraway again, we’re talking to Ben Krause, and his family runs crosslands flower nursery. And as I understand that, that puts you guys right down on the southern coast with the English Channel is did I get my geography right then? Yeah.

 

01:02

Hi, listeners. Hi, guys. Yeah, we are based right on the south coast of the UK. So about an hour and a half direct south of London. And we’re between the South downs national parks are rolling hills and the channel, the beach, the ocean. So perfect climate for growing and the best light levels in the UK. So it’s Yeah, the best solar best light levels, a lovely little eco climate going on. So it’s sort of cooler here in the summer with a nice sea breeze and warmer here in the winter with the downs National Park protecting us from the southwest of these which is the prevailing sort of weather that comes into the UK so that’s where we’re based in near Brighton if anyone’s sort of knows the city of Brighton when they’re when they’re there. So look us up on Google Earth or whatever you want to do.

 

Grounded by the Farm  01:48

A girlfriend of mine and college married a guy from Brighton and I can still remember the whole family coming over for the wedding. The accents in your part of the UK absolutely amazing. I can still remember like a three or four year old boy and just thinking it was so unusual to see such a lively child throwing around that British accent. In the US. We have a thing about your accent.

 

02:14

Yeah, I think Yeah, yeah, I think I don’t know why. Because like, I love the amount. I love the American I don’t think I’ve got an accent. You know, I just talk this is like normal, you know? I mean, yeah, I like the American accent. So we kind of like each other’s. Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of

 

Grounded by the Farm  02:29

it’s a mutual love society,

 

02:30

I feel is. Yeah, so

 

Grounded by the Farm  02:33

we’re talking about flowers today. And the kinds of farms I’ve seen have really run the gamut from things like cut flowers to bulbs, so that I can plant the bulbs in my yard to people who are growing for the local farmers markets to people who are growing for major chains. So help me understand what what is it that you guys do?

 

02:53

Yes, we specialize in the British grown Austrian area also known as the Peruvian Lily, or lily of the inker. Because the seed originates from Chile and Peru sort of lives out naturally. halfway out the Andes that’s where Darwin’s cousin was choosy. Mary brought the seed back from hensel stem area Yeah, the Latin name and I’m sure you’ll keep my social handles at the end but if you don’t know what all St Mary look like, you can check me out on social media and have a look at the pretty pictures. So yeah, we started specializing in those in the in the 60s and 70s because here in the UK, they were very sustainable crop to grow. So it’s like why try and grow something and for something to grow when you’re going to spend loads of carbon footprint and energy doing it so around that sort of arrived in the 60s and 70s growing that and slowly but surely the whole flower nursery came over to growing it and that’s what we do. So we do over 70 varieties, we think we do 79 varieties, so smorgasbord of a plethora of different varieties and colors. And we have a full color range all year round. So the only colors we don’t do a blue and black but we do all the other all the other colors

 

Grounded by the Farm  04:01

you said Alstroemeria is low on water use very sustainable. I would also point out that I love Alstroemeria in my house because it typically lasts longer than some flowers, some flowers that you put in vase as a cut flower, though wilt pretty quick, you know it just depends and I think Alstroemeria has a great hardiness to it. But if you you know you can you can have them a little longer if you have cut flowers

 

04:29

yeah well the you know, each flower has a meaning whether the meaning of all stem area is long lasting friendship, no idea because it is a long lasting flowers. Yes. So you know, it’s like a lily and a rose and they all have meanings. The meaning of all stem area is long lasting friendship and then I think if you want to go really mental each petal of the flower also means something I think like romance and wealth and intelligence and all that stuff. But the general meaning of all shamira is long lasting friendship because it is a long lasting flower. I had one of my customers phoned me up the other day and she said they lasted four and a half weeks and a vase in in our home. So I mean, they’re super fresh because they’re straight out the grounds with the customer, you know? Yeah. So they’re, they’re even longer lasting when they’re locally grown. Yeah, the stem is just full of water. And like with most flowers, if people are obviously listening in to this, if you want to make your flowers last longer, you want to strip all the leaves off the stems, change the water every two or three days. When you change the water. You want to snip a bit of the end of stem off because bacteria builds up around the base of the flower in the water. So you wanna take snip that bit off, dunk it in your freshwater, don’t have the flowers in direct sunlight or on a radiator or near electronics that are going to get hot keep it somewhere nice and cool. And yeah, Australia they’ll chug on for two or three weeks. If you look after them.

 

Grounded by the Farm  05:49

I love it. He given me tips to make my flowers last lager is the kind of stuff I love. Absolutely. Are Alstroemeria are they annuals? Are they perennials? How does it work on the farming side of Alstroemeria

 

06:03

to give people sort of an image the flower beds are about a meter wide, 30 meters long. And we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of beds all around the nursery in greenhouses in big glass houses that are all biomass sustainably heated. And we do millions of stems through the whole year with spring and autumn when we’re doing 10s of 1000s of stems a week. So we’ve just literally I’ve just today, our family’s packs about 13,000 stems and that’s gone to a supermarket tonight. That’s our portion of what we’ve done this week is 13,000 to one customer and then we’ve obviously got loads of other customers. So we’re super busy now we’re in season from now until Christmas will be harvesting seven days a week. And then between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, which is our sort of quietest time, we’re still harvesting sort of three days a week, so Okay, keeps us out of trouble.

 

Grounded by the Farm  07:00

And Alstroemeria the plant is successful in a greenhouse. Oh, yeah, pretty much.

 

07:06

I mean, it’s Austin area is known as a protected ornamental. The clue is in that title protected ornamental. So if you’ve got a little greenhouse or Conservatory, you can grow them indoors as a house plan, because a lot of the dwarf varieties grow quite short. And if you don’t have that, they just love somewhere sort of protected in the garden. So against like a wall or a protected wall or something like that. Here in the UK, if you can imagine if you grew them near like an ocean breeze they’d they’d grow quite short. And then the further away from that show the sea breeze somewhere more sheltered, they were going to grow taller, more vigorously, and things like that. So yeah, they’re they’re protected ornamental. So if you can grow them, grow them indoors. Yeah, that’s amazing, or somewhat protected.

 

Grounded by the Farm  07:53

Yeah, what all goes into that growing them and greenhouses, obviously, you have to control the amount of water. What all goes into that process,

 

08:01

the two most important things that we need to look after in the greenhouse isn’t actually the plants or the flowers. Because basically the two most important things, if we look after the climate, and we look after the soil, if we look after those two things, then the rest should take care of itself. So to look after the climate, we have heating pipes, so we have a flow and return heating pipe a bit like a radiator pipe that goes around the base of all of the beds, so that he gives a nice dry atmosphere down by the root system. Then as the heat comes off that pipe, especially in the winter, it dries off the condensation that can build up on the crop. Because if you get a damp crop in the winter, soggy sort of winter, cold days, you get to try to shallow leaping, the crop doesn’t really want to grow that much. You know, basically, you’ve got to think if you’re not enjoying being in your in your garden or in your greenhouse, it’s not a good atmosphere for you as a human. What do you think your plants gonna feel? You know, so you know, you’ve got to keep a nice, dry, warm atmosphere. So we’ve got our heating pipes, so that’s stage one. Secondly, we’ve got irrigation running through the bottom of the bed just above the soil, and we’ve got irrigation where we water from above. So in the winter, when the crops really aren’t over six foot tall, but the crop of the flowers the stems gets about seven, eight foot tall. Oh, wow, monsters. You know, humungous, long stems because sustainability wise, we don’t have any artificial lighting in the greenhouses. So the good thing is that we don’t cause me like pollution. But what we do get in the winter, very tall, lush growth. So to bypass all of that foliage, we use that low level irrigation to get the nutrients and water direct to the soil. And then in the summer, when the crops a lot shorter, we use the overhead irrigation. So that’s how you you’re sort of feeding the soil and and changing the climate along with the heating as well. And obviously we’ve got ventilation so we’ve got vents in the roof of the greenhouse so we can control the temperature that way when if it gets too hot.

 

Grounded by the Farm  09:59

You have to let go. Do you have like a water cooling system? Does it get that hot? I know I’m from the southern US. And so we always have to worry about how to get those greenhouses cooler.

 

10:09

Yes, basically, obviously, we’ll get onto it later, but the UK over 90% of flowers in the UK and now imported and they come from pretty warm, hot countries. And in those countries, they basically pump cold water around the root systems to sort of trick the crop into growing and basically, you’re forcing growth. And basically, if you work a crop hard, what you’re gonna have to do, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to replace it more and, and then use peat and more chemicals and sterilization. And so we grow what we call pretty naturally here, it’s a dry crop, so we only water 20 minutes once a month in the winter, and water for 20 minutes once every 10 days in the summer. So it’s a dry crop. And in the winter, the optimum temperature sort of On a winter’s night is only 13 degrees. So it’s also known in the UK as a cool crop. So it looks cool in your arrangements and in your basis. But by a cool crop, we mean, we’re not we’re not burning a lot of energy to heat it. And when we do burn, we’re on the sustainable biomass pellets. So we don’t burn oil anymore. We’ve got a lot of woodland around us that needs to be managed. And all of that managed wood goes into little pellets. And we burn about 100 tons of those pellets a winter just to keep it to 13 degrees in the greenhouse. So yes, very sustainable. And a lot of the plants that we’ve got are over 2030 years old. We only replant less than 5% of the crop a year. So we’ve got hundreds of beds and this year we’ve only earmarked about three beds to be replaced. So all in all growing Alstroemeria here in the UK, it’s pretty dang sustainable. Yeah, it’s all good.

 

Grounded by the Farm  11:46

Yeah, that’s amazing. I was gonna ask you how often you need to replant because it seems you know, a perennial plant at some point, you know, they start having some kind of problem, right? Like, they’re just old enough that you know, something has to go wrong. You guys I know are really focused on keeping problems out of greenhouses, but occasionally you have to have some insects or something come in. How do you guys usually try and deal with those things? Yes. So

 

12:12

we don’t use any pesticides or insecticides anymore, we use what you call bio control. So we’re using biology to kill other biology. So to give you an example, to control whitefly, we using cars Yes, though in cars here look like under a microscope, they look like a big animal with fangs and they just chomp away at the white flies. So they come on little cards, you hang that card up in your greenhouse, the encarsia, the predator will walk off of the card, they’ll hunt down the white fly and chomp away at the white fly. To encourage encarsia populations. You can use banker plants, or companion planting so you can basically grow eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, calls yet sporadically in an amongst the Austrian area in the greenhouses, and they’ll act as like a venus flytrap for white flies natural. Yeah, the white flies are attracted, they’re attracted off of the Austin area on to the oberstein plants or egg plants and then the cars are just chomp away. So that’s sort of one example of how we combat a pest sort of without chemicals.

 

Grounded by the Farm  13:15

By the way, congrats for translating as you go back and forth from Albertine to eggplant and glasshouse and green. Now

 

13:22

you I know you I know, I’ve done a lot of American interviews and I know you call machines eggplant. Yeah, yeah. And I do now as well, because because I know so many Americans. Yeah, and

 

Grounded by the Farm  13:35

you also get the added benefit of having some eggplants in there. For folks who don’t know, white flies, they they create like a sticky kind of thing on the underside of leaves, like they feed on the plant, and they can really cause some big problems. So you want to keep control very early is why you’re saying you hang these cards. And you have these plants that are kind of put in there as kind of sacrificial lambs for the white flies. Yeah,

 

13:59

I mean, we still get the fruit off of all those plants. But basically, they’re they’re called companion planting or, or bancha plants. You’ve probably all heard of permaculture now where basically you’re growing things alongside other things to keep the pests down. And it’s a lot more sort of eco friendly. So there’s a big sort of wave of people trying to do all of that basically that use bio control and grow things near other things which are going to limit the pests. Yeah, yeah.

 

Grounded by the Farm  14:25

We talked really briefly about it being from a more tropical area of Southern South America. I would love to talk to you about sort of how much of an industry there is in Britain, and how you guys are, you know, doing local, like you mentioned sending to a grocery store. But what do your customers look like? They’re in the UK,

 

14:48

we supply supermarkets, right down to the general public here in the UK, over 90% of our flowers are imported. So in 2014, I started the British files rock campaign, which is all about, basically. Yeah,

 

Grounded by the Farm  15:05

he can’t see his video. I will I will get the photograph of him doing the rocking pose. Yeah.

 

15:12

So I started the British flowers rock campaign in 2014. And that’s basically doing podcasts and interviews and just making people aware that obviously, obviously in other countries as well, you’ve got American grown and you’ve got the slow flower movement there in America. So when you’re buying food, Americans with the Jamie Oliver’s of this world and other people you’re trying to buy, sort of more healthy, more seasonal, more local with the food. And you’ve got to be thinking exactly the same when it comes to flowers. Because the carbon footprint of flowers going around the world, it’s pretty much like Han Solo in javis Palace, sort of cryogenically frozen in time as they’re frozen about half a degree their storage is pumped full of chemicals, the amount of plastics and packaging used in the flower industry is probably more than the food industry. And the carbon footprint and environmental impacts of all this movement around the world is rad Oculus, so the British flowers rock thing, that’s what I’ve been doing since 2014. Just raising the awareness here in the UK, to the UK public to support local and support not just British farmers, but British growers growing flowers as well as food. So we Yeah, we still supply Morrison’s who are a big supermarket here, we will supply cafes and restaurants, because what’s the point of eating locally sustainable food in a restaurant, but the flour on your tables come from Cambodia or Peru or Colombia or Kenya or something. So we supply that and weddings now here in the UK, when people getting married, they want like an ethical wedding, they want to know their diamond hasn’t been you know, Dutch, you know, it’s really dodgy. They want to know their dresses ethically made. They want the food and their wedding to be local. And it’s the same with the flowers. So we supply direct to the public as well. So it’s picked packed, and it’s at people’s houses the next day. So we we go across the whole thing, because here in the UK, there’s not many growers left, really so we’ve had to diversify and supply people that care about the planet a bit and care about traceability and stuff like that.

 

Grounded by the Farm  17:17

Yeah, so you’ve diversified in terms of your customers, but you’re really focused on Astra mariia as a flowered site, within that breed of flowers, or what is it genus of flowers, I didn’t know what it is. But within Astro Mariya, there are all these different varieties. Oh,

 

17:33

they were 1000s and 1000s. Yeah, yeah. From from the garden varieties to the dwarf varieties, the butterfly, little types to the commercial varieties that we grow. So

 

Grounded by the Farm  17:44

yeah, where it’s like new stuff, and Alstroemeria coming from like, Is there a company that actually works on that? or university systems? Or

 

17:53

Yep, so there’s, there’s big companies, they’re the breeders. So they have laboratory where they do the DNA cell division, and they do the mutations and basically come up with new varieties. Basically, to give you some idea, if we want to replace one of our beds, that costs about 1500 pounds, I don’t know what that is in dollars, it’s probably about $2,000 or something, if, if something like that, so and then every year, every year that those plants are in the soil, we have to pay a license as well. Okay, we have to pay a license to the breeders that have bred that, that variety. So it’s very specialist very expensive, and not to be taken for granted. You know, what, what we’re doing is is expensive specialist stuff. So but yeah, they’re coming up with new varieties all the time. So they give me basically free trial varieties. So I’ve got flower beds that have got about 20 odd varieties in and then I’ll cherry pick the ones that are growing the best and, and are easy to maintain and productive and stuff like that.

 

Grounded by the Farm  18:54

And my guess is sometimes it’s around the agronomics of the variety, like you’re talking about hardiness and you know that thing, and sometimes surely they do like a new color or a new spotting pattern or something that’s brilliant. In terms of look, yeah,

 

19:09

you know, we’re always looking for the best purple, the best yellow the best read. So they’ll give us new varieties. But for example, the best read we’ve got is 2030 years old, one of the best pale yellows we got is 2030 years old. So the new stuff isn’t always the best. It may work really well in Japan or Brazil or Colombia, but in the UK, it doesn’t quite like it. So we’ve been doing it for a long time. We know what varieties cope best with the British weather. And we obviously know how to maintain the crop and look after it and get the best out of what we’ve got sort of thing. So

 

Grounded by the Farm  19:42

you’re a farmer and you’re the front man in terms of marketing, I would assume because the podcast and everything seemed to be you but you’re I see your pictures with your father. Who else in the business, his family?

 

19:55

Yes, a really brief history. We’ve been going since 1930 sick so I’m fourth generation in the 1930s. Here in the UK, we had the Great Depression. A lot of shipbuilders a lot of miners out of work. So what the government did is to set up over 20 areas around the UK, where unemployed families would go and work and farm the land. And my great grandparents were originally one of the original families to sign on the dotted line and take the government upon this initiative. They might then my granddad joined them after World War Two. He then met medanos Pompey gal from Portsmouth here in the UK. Had my dad uncles and Auntie’s.

 

Grounded by the Farm  20:35

She was a What girl? Oh, you know, have

 

20:37

you ever heard of the city? Portsmouth in?

 

Grounded by the Farm  20:40

Yes.

 

20:41

Oh, okay in the UK, so that the slang for Portsmouth is Pompey. That means Yeah, so she was from Pompey. We don’t say Portsmouth. We say Pompey. So I guess you’ve got slang for some of your cities. And obviously, the Big Apple, you know, New York, the Big Apple, you call it, you know, whatever, they’re so good. They named it twice or three times, I can’t remember that. Then my grandparents took it on. And then my parents, uncles and Auntie’s, and then I actually did marine biology from 2000 to 2011. And then I came back here in 2011. And then here I am talking to you. So yeah, it’s a bit of a whirlwind. But yeah, so fourth generation, and we’ve been going since 1936, which is very rare in farming, and even rarer, even rarer in the cut flower trade. Because as I said, there’s not many UK flower growers left. So yeah, that’s a brief sort of history. Really. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Grounded by the Farm  21:38

Well, that gets me through the questions I had. What did I miss Ben?

 

21:42

I don’t know. That we could go on and on and on.

 

Grounded by the Farm  21:46

I think between you and I, we really could go on and on forever.

 

21:50

Now. There’s slightly so much to talk about that.

 

Grounded by the Farm  21:52

What does your farm look like if somebody is able to come out? They drive out I assume, I don’t assume you’re on the train line. That happened a car and and come over? Let’s see. Big greenhouses Are they a lot of small greenhouses? How do you guys have it set up?

 

22:09

Yeah, big, big greenhouses. Again, you should be able to check out my social media. There’s a lot of videos and pictures, and I’m always updating my ID stories inside the greenhouses as well. So you can get a bit of scale, what it is, but we’ve basically got five greenhouses that cover about four acres, I think.

 

Grounded by the Farm  22:27

And then you have to have the building or something where you’re doing some of the processing where your packaging

 

22:32

package. Yeah, we’ve we’ve got the original shed from 1957 that’s still standing. So we’ve got a nice wooden, a nice big wooden shed, which that’s where the flowers get graded out into the premium grade and the Posey grade and I don’t know if you guys Jamie Oliver, and people like that did things on the wonky edge. So you’ve got at least my suspect to other farmers where you know, you get wonky parsnips, wonky carrots, and it’s called Yeah, yeah, miss it. So it’s, it’s called the war on waste. So people are now encouraged to, to buy that one key badge and use it and help the war on waste. And we also do wonky flowers. So supermarkets and wholesalers here they have specifications, we throw away 10s and 10s of 1000s of stems because they don’t come up to specifications. So if they’re under 22.1 grams each, they’re a bit gnarly, they’re a bit wonky, but the actual quality of flour is just as good and it’s going to last for two or three weeks, we do a wonky stylee Posey grade and we do a premium grade so they get graded out, then it goes on to a big machine a bit conveyor belt, it goes down to a machine where they get cut, they get automatically D leaf so the leaf, the leaf is automatically removed, and then they automatically get binded into a bunch and then they get packaged box stuck out they go. So uh, yeah, the shed still works. So yeah, we, again why, you know, as growers, we’re, we’re frugal, you know, every elastic band, every bit of solid state we are, you know, every bit of packaging we keep every pallet is, you know, sir, we’re sort of frugal people.

 

Grounded by the Farm  24:07

Yeah, find a way to use things, preferably two, three times different ways.

 

24:11

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s not a lot of money around. So you just got to use what you got. Exactly. Yeah.

 

Grounded by the Farm  24:18

All right. Well, in the show notes I’ve got I did. I watched way too many of the videos and things on your Facebook page and your Instagram, your austro Marissa, and that is not a word that’s automatically spelled in English because it’s Latin. So I’ll let you spell it.

 

24:35

Yeah. So Auster, Marissa Everyone misses out the E between the O and the M. So it’s a l s t r o e m e. r i, a Ostrom area and don’t Yes, that silent e between the O and the M. So yeah,

 

Grounded by the Farm  24:51

and you’re Alstroemeria best remember Twitter and

 

24:55

Marissa Ben on Twitter and I G and then if you’d Typing crosslands flower nursery into the search function of Facebook. We pop up there as well. So yeah, and

 

Grounded by the Farm  25:07

I would encourage people to find you on clubhouse if they’re on clubhouse. That’s how I actually came across. Yeah,

 

Grounded by the Farm  25:14

that’s the first time I’ve had somebody on the podcast from clubhouse, but there are a lot of different rooms for farmers and for people who love flowers or people who love food, or

 

25:24

I don’t know what I’m on club clubhouse. I might be under just Ben cross. Yeah, so on clubhouse I’m Ben cross and my is that a username is Auster Marissa Ben on clubhouse as well. So keep it nice and easy. So, but i think i think i think you can search Ben Krause ostra Marissa, Ben and your your your no doubt, see my ugly mark on the profile. There you go.

 

Grounded by the Farm  25:49

Well, I will make sure I include a couple of links. Otherwise, there was a magazine article you did with terawatt magazine, on sort of the business side of things. We didn’t really talk about that a lot. But you were talking about, you know, you’re a biology kind of guy, a farming kind of guy. And the business side is something that’s really exciting for your family. But it’s an area that you have to work a little bit harder on it may not be as natural to Yeah, and to many farmers. I think that’s that’s a piece that many farmers really love growing and the lifestyle and the business side is where they actually have to put real bills like work into, but that and there was also a passionate podcast I saw that I thought would be really nice to share. So I’ll share those in the notes. And we’ll encourage people to get in touch with you. And I think here in the US, I would encourage people to kind of look around and see if you might have local farms that are growing some flowers, I frequently can find them at a farmers market. It may not be all the choices and flowers that you have if you go on a global scale, but there are some really beautiful ones. There’s a lavender farm really close to St. Louis, that I really encourage people to do. sunflowers are big in various parts of the US. And there are also people growing Alstroemeria somewhere I’m sure I have some friends in the grow cut flowers. Oh, yeah. And just outside of San Francisco. So

 

27:17

I’m paying pennies to swell I think, isn’t it? I think in the US somewhere I was on a podcast and someone said pennies are quite big way you guys are as well. And these

 

Grounded by the Farm  27:26

are quite big actually the

 

27:28

running around for like four or five weeks, but they’re

 

Grounded by the Farm  27:31

there. It’s this is peony season. My mom was actually we were just taking a look at them here in Memphis to see if they were ready to start blooming and that flower is getting big and hard and circular. And you know, eventually it’s going to break through and so they

 

27:47

always remind me of like Chupa Chups Do you have those in America? The chocolate lollies? You know the sweet Yeah, the ones I mean sweets. They look like that? Don’t they all tight and sort of funky colored. And then they just unfurl and then they when they like they like a lolly on a stick? You know? funny little things when they growing?

 

Grounded by the Farm  28:08

Yeah. But I was lucky enough to see a flower farm where they were selling PNA bulbs and things. So I was there at the height of the season where they were all in bloom and they had irises and peonies was all they were doing. And I could have spent days at that farm. I think they probably would have gotten tired of me, but they were very lovely people they welcomed me in and let me look around and I put some things up on the blog about it previously. So I’ll bring some of that up as well, because I think it’d be nice for people to discover some of those people here more locally,

 

28:42

my son. Ben,

 

Grounded by the Farm  28:43

thank you so much for joining us. This is really lovely. I appreciate your comment. No

 

28:48

worries. Thanks for having me. And thanks to the listeners for for listening. So good. Thank you very much.

 

Grounded by the Farm  28:54

I’d encourage people if you really enjoyed this episode, either leave us a review or like tell your friends Hey, you got to hear this. This is cool stuff. So anyway, I’m Janice. Thank you guys for listening. We appreciate it and we will talk to you in two weeks. Check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and I’m even on clubhouse so feel free to look us up. Also on our website Grounded by the Farm calm wherever you want to get in touch we’re trying to be there. Shoot us a message about questions you have about farming and food. I hope you enjoy these episodes enough that you’ll share them with friends, whether that’s via social media or in a conversation. Love to think some of that is while you’re having dinner with friends and family. This is a production of grounded communications. Editing is by two guys talking. Thank you

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