Funky Little Flower Farm

Before the Storm

Clean-up is moving along! About half of our big downed trees are dealt with, and parts of our two roofs are repaired.

I’ve taken some time to write but it’s jumbled; anger, mourning, new ideas and fun stories too, but none of that is ready to share. Some of y’all have been here but some don’t know what this little place used to be like — the farm that forged my love of earth and stories.

The book Funky Little Flower Farm contains 24 stories—2 per month—one about a unique plant and one about people. Enjoy excerpts from October stories: the first about garden Mums and the second about our sweet intern Tyler.

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Garden mums got their start in the ’30s, but by the ‘50s, their floppy habit had led to modern gardeners’ disdain. Particular names got lost over the years, but gardeners who loved mums and ignored fashion trends kept them safe and passed them on to us. Today they have new names—found names like “Ryan’s Rainbow” and “Judy’s Yellow.” That huge white mum by the compost pile is now called “Senate Street” in honor of the little garden where I found it growing in Columbia, South Carolina. Mum flowers, with their October colors, bring to mind old friends and gardeners I wish I’d known. 

   As the afternoon approaches, I head into town to ship the bulbs that have been packaged and to run some other errands. In town, I see the stark difference between those country mums and their city cousins that show up in stores in October. I call these city cousins “florist mums,” and I feel sorry for them. Shorn like sheep, they sit on pallets out front of Piggly Wiggly, waiting and hoping for a home, each trying to stand out in the crowd. A football-minded florist fixed these up. I’m sure of it. Orange-flowered mums sport shiny foil wrapping around their pots, each decorated with a tiger paw print. Bright-red-flowered ones in black foil have silky bulldog-print ribbons. A "Go Cocks" sticker, anchored by a plastic stick in the dirt, poked above the garnet blossoms of another little mum. I hope they all get taken home because those left here on Monday morning will surely be tattered and pushed to the side by a pallet of pumpkins and a giant inflatable spider. 

   To my eye, these city mums just don’t fit in on the farm. But every year, dutiful son that I am, I buy a few because Momma loves them so much. She’ll bring home some from the discount rack, telling me, “They might come back next year; you never know.” She’s right. They might. So I plant the sad, crusty-flowered, cast-off plants for her and think of other random things I used to have disdain for—Jello salads, Eight is Enough, jack-o’lantern garbage bags, young Justin Bieber. I still don’t love any of those things, but I know even potted-up florist mums bring some people October joy.

   Back on the farm, a tour group takes selfies in the sea of golden garden mums s at the outhouse door. I tell them this field full of mums was bare six months ago and they can do something like this at their homes. They just need to pull little plugs from the mother mum and plant them around. It’s how a few tiny plants of mums can become an acre of flowers by fall. And with everyone’s attention focused, I can preach a little bit about organic pesticides that come from mums, how the roots till the soil for us, and how their flowers feed the bees.

    I also tell them that before dawn, a hoot owl sits in the pecan tree above the mums and outhouse. I explain that for rabbits and rodents, the thicket of stems makes a perfect home. Their families grow throughout the summer. Then, after the flowers feed the bees, and after their colors fade, the mums make a rich hunting ground for our owl. I know October is passing as that old owl hoots more often and mum flowers fade to their final color, coffee brown.

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Tyler sat at our break table for years. The break table is a euphemism for Momma’s kitchen table. Interns and farm fellows don’t so much work as get adopted here.  Sometimes, it’s my goal to broaden their food world—have them try two new things each week.  “A little kimchi with your PB&J? That’s not a question. Try it.” 

 Tyler knew what he liked. He did not need to try new kinds of cookies. He’d never even think of trying my favorite snack of cottage cheese and salsa. On the first day of work, he watched where Momma stored the Doritos, and for years after, he beelined it for that shelf.

   He was the same in work. We butted heads a lot. Conversations often went like this:

   Me: “Tyler, can you get a Facebook profile?”

   Tyler: “No.”

   Me: “But it’s so we can make a group for daily work, we share calendars, upcoming projects, notes and even what tools we need. It’ll make planning easier.”

   Tyler: “I don’t want a facebook page.”

   We never converted Tyler. He was set on Doritos and flip phones. As a career, he was set on metalwork. As far as I know, he never considered professional gardening as a life’s work any more than he considered sushi a main staple of his diet. Luckily, farm work and making gardens and growing lilies mean doing things with tractors, tools and people—bush hogging, oil changing, building sheds, teaching visitors about rural life, and chasing donkeys. Tyler loved all those things, especially working with any piece of machinery.

 One new thing that Tyler had to consider long and hard before accepting its utility was using layers of wood chips inoculated with mushrooms to build the soil. It’s something we’ve done for years. Mushrooms recycle the chipped trees, turning them back into rich dirt. With some instruction, Tyler got it. He realized that frequent tilling kills the life in the soil and that a world of critters down there needs feeding. He spread wood chips and gently layered in the cardboard and fungi spawn. Then, when he came to work, he'd jump out of his old Ford truck, slam the heavy door, and go right to the spawn to see what was happening.

We’re so proud of helping to change quiet boys into confident men. Men of independence. Men who question. Men who always say, “Yeah, we can do that.” And men who know where and how they fit in and complement a team. Tyler never wanted to garden, but he told me once, “This is what old farms need to do to survive today—figure out new crops and be places for people to visit and places for learning.” Despite everything, Tyler took pride in his role on this lily farm.

Toward the beginning of summer, Tyler was planning to graduate from high school and looking forward to a real job, welding. But what happened next—well, in my two decades of managing interns here on the farm, there has never been a bad time or rough patch to compare. 

Suddenly Tyler just wasn’t. He died in a tragic car accident.

Order this book now and we’ll send it in a funky sleeve hand-painted by our newest intern, Lily, who’s now at University of South Carolina.