Lily Festival

Lily Festival July 31st & Aug 1st 11-5
I feel like I am in one of those home reno TV shows where every thing needs to come together before a given deadline, but it seems like most of the work is done during the last few long days. Our Crew has been working hard over the past couple weeks renovating our farm store, sprucing up the u-pick fields, making tons more signs. It looks as though all will be ready for opening day July 31st.

This year the Lily festival is also going to be the grand opening of the farm. Our U-pick flower & Vegetable fields are just getting started with Thousands of Lilies. Over the next 2 weeks more vegetables & Flowers will begin to be ready for u-pick 7 days a week.

We have a few new additions to the farm this year including Red, our miniature horse and Flow, a pot bellied pig. Be sure to say hi and welcome them to the farm.

I counted today and there were over 15 different colours of lilies in bloom. I also saw the first of the zinnias, a great collection of monkshood, ladies mantel and many more flowers in the u-pick.

Although you can visit the farm throughout August, the first 2 weekends are the days we offer our U-pick vase deal. How it works is that you purchase the vase from our farm store, then pick as many flowers as you can fit in the vase.

What does a farmer do in the rain?

After last season, I had totally forgot what it was like to continually start to the sky for the slightest ray of sun. However, this year on the other hand has been completely different. Another 3 inches of rain the past couple days. So here are some pics of what we do..

I can hardly believe it, but on July 13th I had to start up my stove in the greenhouse. the temp was dropping below 10 degrees, so to avoid developing misshaped fruit we had to start a fire to keep the temp up... On July 13th...

The next job was to see the damage in the field. Nothing too terribly horrible, however; I think these peonies will have a permanent kink in their stems after been blown horizontal.


Here are some pics of beans and swiss chard, which will definitely have to be washed before eaten. I think on some of the plants there is more dirt than chard. Not to worry, a couple days of sun after all this rain will make things grow like crazy.




I know this is going to sound really weird, but I was irrigating today as well. We grow all our lilies under plastic tunnels to protect them from the hail. The one downside is that on rainy days, the lilies do not see any of the moisture. This really bothered me that I have to irrigate on one of the wettest years in recent years, on the flip side the water reservoir probably rose more from run off than I was able to pump out today.

Then their is staff to deal with. We employ 8 people on the farm, some full time, most part time, all but 1 was in for work today and I don't think I would have been the most popular person if I were to make everyone work outside for the day. Fortunately we had loads of work to do rebuilding our farm store, signs for the maze, cleaning our potato storage & packing sheds and random cleaning jobs to get done. Everyone did a fantastic job and the place is almost ready for Summer. Anyone have an idea on when Summer is going to start this year?