We’ve known for some time now that the Texas Hill Country has been attracting movie stars. Kevin Costner has moved in and so has Tommy Lee Jones. John Travolta was stopped for speeding here in Blanco, but the police let him go after they asked for his autograph. (The asked for Frank’s autograph once, but it was on the actual ticket.) But now we have a real celebrity that has moved in a couple of miles down the road. His first movie was a smash hit – big enough to just barely lose the Oscar for best picture to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. That’s right. Babe is our neighbor. You know – Babe the pig. As it turned out, Babe didn’t age as well as other hollywood stars, and by the time his second picture rolled around he had lost his appeal and had to be replaced with a stand-in. So now he lives down the road at a friend’s house, baggy eyes and a belly that almost touches the ground (his perky little voice gone gravelly from all the cigarettes). He lives as a recluse, spending his days in retirement in the Texas Hill Country. Who’d of guessed.

Babe hasn’t been a very good farmstand customer this spring, but the rest of our neighbors sure have been. Every Saturday our farm has been wall-to-wall customers. On top of that we have expanded to take on another big store in Houston, so we are working about 24/7 right now. We are putting together over 1,700 bouquets a week, and almost as much in straight bunches. Frank is driving equipment back and forth between two farms, we are picking flowers five days a week, and trying to keep eight employees happy and going in the right direction is akin to keeping frogs in a wheelbarrow! It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!

Thank heavens we bought a cooler this year. Up to now we haven’t needed one, but this year we are packing it regularly. We bought a used cooler from a fellow that buys and installs used panels from grocery stores that are remodeling. As it turns out, grocery chains can be an excellent source of used material – you just have to know who to tap into. Most stores save all the old equipment and building supplies that the stores tear out in remodeling. They collect it at a central point where it is then sold to contractors. In the case of the chain we sell to, store employees can also buy material. One can find anything from old cooler panels, to metal shelving to upright freezer cases or floral display coolers. Sometimes they are almost new. By doing a little detective work (start by calling the store headquarters directly or talking to the store manager where you shop) you might be able to find a way to buy some of this used equipment for your farm. It is a good place to try.

Our new cooler is 12 by 12 feet. With used panels and coils and a new compressor, it cost us 3,500 bucks, including installation. We got a real deal. It saved our life with a huge lily crop this year. We planted thousands of bulbs, and even though we tried to stagger the plantings, they all seemed to bloom at the same time! It was a nightmare, and if we hadn’t had the cooler we would have lost the majority of them. The lilies practically paid for the cooler right from the beginning.

Speaking of lilies, aside from the big Hoffrica varieties we grow, we grew some bouquet-sized stems from smaller, less expensive bulbs. Asiatic lily bulbs are pretty inexpensive to begin with, but we called up Ron Beck at Gloeckner ( 503-655-0908) and asked him to recommend something that we could experiment with. We wanted a lily that would have a good bud count with a smaller bulb, be tall enough to grow outdoors, and be around 20 cents a bulb. He sent us a list of varieties in the 10/12 cm size. We choose one called Elite. This variety was perfect for bouquets. It has intensely bright, clear orange flowers. The buds are small and rounded, and the small, cup-shaped flowers fit just right into a bouquet without overwhelming it. The flowers were compact and very resistant to damage, so they were a lot easier to work with in a bouquet if the buds had already opened. We plan to grow a lot more of this variety next year.

Pollyanna is another variety that grew well as a bouquet lily. We grow this one as one of our standard tall lilies, but when we planted it with the Elites, it bloomed right along with them. This variety has beautiful yellow flowers with a gold band in the center of the petals. The flowers are very fragile compared with Elite, so we had to pick and use this one while still in bud. They open up beautifully in the bouquet. The main advantage of Pollyanna is its high bud count. Our 12/14 cm bulbs have up to nine buds per stem! They all will open in the vase. Next year we will try some smaller bulbs.
We planted our bouquet lilies around March first – late when compared to our other crops. The crop bloomed around May 20th, so it was a pretty fast crop! They were shorter that our earlier crops, but still plenty tall for bouquets. In the future we will stagger the plantings and hope that will spread out the crop just a little, even though that didn’t help much this year!

Another new success for us this season is the Chinese forget-me-not, or Cynoglossum. This relative of borage has been cranking out intensely blue flowers on 2 1/2 foot stems for most of the month of May. We only grew one 80 foot long bed of it, but it is on its way to becoming a top money maker. This little bed has been producing four full buckets of stems twice a week. Each picking brings in about 200 dollars, so this little gem has certainly paid for itself.

Cynoglossum is a tough little plant. We set the plants out last winter from seeds we started in the late fall. The seed is easy to handle, and germinates with no special care. The plants grew slowly at first, but once we set them out in the field they grew into large rosettes. We set them out at a 1 foot spacing, 4 rows in a 4-foot bed. The plants send up a central spike and the send up side shoots from the base that are often taller than the first. Many of the stems were over 1/2 inch thick. The buds come out in a cluster, but will soon unfurl into a large spray of thin stems at the top. We cut our stems when they were showing good color, but before the stems at top became wiry.

The flowers are a bit delicate to handle and may need a specialty market. We got a vase life of at least a week from our stems and the buds all opened nicely, but the older flowers tend to shatter. The flowers stay beautiful when they fall, like pretty blue snowflakes. Some people like the look of fallen flowers and others don’t. Martha Stewart does. God Bless Martha!

You have to carefully handle cynoglossum when you pick it – it wants to wilt right away. We cut ours into Chrysal OVB hydrator and removed each bucket from the sun as soon as it was full. The stems need to be conditioned overnight before you take them to market or they will wilt permanently. We put our buckets in our new cooler overnight (Frank loves our new cooler), but you can also put them in a shady, breeze-free spot in the packing shed if the weather is mild. As you pick, strip all the leaves that will be in the water. Otherwise they will turn brown from oxidation and be a real mess when you try to process them.

We have had a spectacular growing season so far for cool-season crops like cynoglossum. As of late May, we still haven’t hit anything above 90 degrees. This is nothing short of miraculous here in Texas. Add to that the fact that the drought has broken and we are getting timely rains and this year will go down in the memory of farmers as the kind of year that we dream we are going to have when it is really a drought or a hailstorm or a flood or…you know. It is nice to have at least one year like this every decade or so!

Thanks to the cool weather we have grown a great crop of late-season sweet williams. We planted a new variety called Provencal. It is a variety that does not require any vernalization, or chilling period. We bought the seed from Gloeckner (800-345-3787).

We started the seed in late November, set the plants out as 200 cell plugs in late January, and in late May we were picking 24 inch stems! It is probably the most productive sweet william we have ever grown. Every plant set a big crop of stems. It only comes in mixed colors, and the flower color and quality is less than that of the variety Electron, but the production is spectacular. The seed is a bit pricey, but not as bad as some of those low-chill varieties such as Hollandia.

We have become victims of our own success this year. As farmers, we are indefatigable optimists, and we plant each season like it is going to be our best. This year we got what we wanted, and the sheer volume of flowers is overwhelming. For the week of Mother’s Day we picked over $12,000 worth of flowers, wholesale, just off our original 8 acres (the other 7 acres weren’t blooming yet!) That almost killed us. Things happen so fast in the field and packing shed, and so much Spanish is being spoken that we have practically forgotten the English words for a lot of things. Powdered Chrysal preservative is just “polvo” (powder in Spanish). Tenax netting is “tela”, T-tape is “mangera”, Ammi majus is “bela de novia” and forget-me-nots are “no-me-olvides”. We never use the English words for these anymore, even between ourselves. Frank flat out forgot the English word for polvo the other day when talking to a tour at the farm!

This has been a spring for some serious soul searching. If we can keep up this pace and don’t weaken we stand a good chance of paying off the farm this year, or at least a big chunk of it. But after that, what? In spite of our book title, we really don’t want to be rich. We want to have a high quality of life, just like all the readers of GFM. All of us market growers knew from the get-go that we were choosing a way of life as well as a career. So here in the thick of the best season we’ve ever had we dream of fishing trips at the coast, only 3 hours away but an impossible distance. We have bigger dreams of taking July and August off completely and hiding out in the mountains of New Mexico–or even of moving there part of the year and growing something. Something has got to give before our success is also our demise. We don’t want to end up like Babe – burned out before our prime and put out to pasture! Look for some changes here in the future!