Early Morning on a Flower Farm

Kat is usually gone before I get up.

By the time I'm pouring my first cup of coffee, she's already on her way to work and the farm belongs to me.

Still in my pajamas, I slip on my boots, grab my coffee, and head outside.

The early mornings are a special time of day in flower farming.

By midmorning, the farm belongs to the day. To the heat building at the edges, the bees working the rows, the birds flying in the distance, the sounds of everything simply being what it is. But early in the morning, before all of that, everything's still. If I'm lucky, I make it outside in time to hear the last call of a whip-poor-will before it gives way to the songbirds. The light comes in low and sideways and catches the dew on the stems in a way that doesn't last long. Behind the field, the Black Hand sandstone cliffs are just beginning to catch the morning light, their ridges lined with oaks that have watched over this valley far longer than I have.

I walk the same path most mornings. Not because there's a task waiting at the end of it, but because the rows tell you things if you move through them slowly enough.

The peonies are finished now. The statice needs another harvest tomorrow. One section needs weeding. Another needs water. Something has been nibbling on the dahlias again, and the larkspur is unexpectedly abundant, so I'll adjust our availability list before the day is over.

I always carry my snips with me.

Sometimes I cut a few stems for the house. Sometimes I cut nothing at all.

This morning I spent more time looking at the ground than the flowers.

The little vernal pools at the edge of the woods have become nurseries for hundreds of tiny frogs and toads. Overnight they've spilled out into the grass, no bigger than my pinkie nail, and I find myself shuffling through the field so I don't accidentally step on them. They're impossibly small and somehow already perfectly themselves.

I stand at the end of a row for a while.

The light has shifted since I came out. It's warmer now, more direct, and the dew has already disappeared from the nearest stems. I can hear the bees.

Like many flower farmers, I work a full-time job in addition to running the farm. Some days I'm traveling and the flowers have to wait until evening when Kat gets home. Other mornings I only have an hour before I need to head inside, answer emails and start another kind of work.

But when I'm home, I always take this walk.

I make notes for Kat. I take pictures. I decide what's ready to harvest and what can wait another day. I remind myself that weeds don't care about calendars.

There's a particular quality to this hour that I've never been able to fully explain to anyone who hasn't stood in a flower field before sunrise. It isn't just quiet. It's something more like permission. The day hasn't asked anything of me yet and the field is still becoming what it will be by afternoon.

I'm just there, watching it all begin.

By the time I'm back at the barn, the coffee I left on the step is cold.

The light is ordinary now, which is fine. Ordinary light means it's time to go inside, change clothes, make another cup of coffee that will inevitably get cold too, and shift into harvest mode.