Visits to my mom’s family farm always entails my first task- discover the flowers; browse the hydrangea bushes. My flower farming journey wouldn’t have happened without my years helping my brothers with the haymaking operation and the large garden, but most importantly it wouldn’t have started without the flowers around the Bloom farm.
It has to be in the family name, Bloom that it develops women of all generations to love, well, blooms. Starting in the spring, daffodils flood the edges of the ol’ cow pasture and parts of the farm fields. Don’t ask, I don’t know how that daffodils still bloom after plowing and planting over the years.
Apple trees, lilac bushes, rhododendrons, and more woody spring perennials erupt into blossoms. June brings the first of the hay making, but with it comes peonies, Sweet William, and hydrangea.
Farmhouse Hydrangea
By the original family farmhouse, it is surrounded with lilacs, iris, sweet William, raspberry bushes, and my favorite every year- a large white hydrangea bush on the northern side of the house.
I love the pinks, blues, and purples of colorful hydrangeas, but the pure white is stunning. It takes all the colors of the room, makes them at peace with it pure white petals.
These hydrangeas are not as ginormous as Proven Winner’s Invincible, but the structure is similar with the soft heads and the pure hue. It is easy to harvest a multitude of stems to create a bouquet.
Flowers and Tractors
A few staple pieces of a farm are the fields of waving crops, red German-American barns with their barn banks, hay wagons full of dried, fresh hay, and my favorite to pair with flowers, tractors.
Pairing beauty of work with that of feminine beauty is a bit my style. I mean, I wear John Deere hats with floral dresses . . . The same goes when I pair floral bouquets with tractors. I’ve been doing this since I began cutting peonies. Taking pictures of peony bouquets with tractors began my mindset of flower farming. Taking the farm life that I grew up with from my grandpa’s Charlei herd and the years of haymaking on the farm, and transferring that love to my feminine farm life with flowers.
So, yea, flowers and tractors just complement each other in my mind. And yes, I can drive a tractor. Well, on some of them if my husband or brother reviews how to run it and what is the brake. Ha!
Drying Hydrangea
Drying hydrangea is not hard. I know of three ways to dry it successfully. Firstly, leave it on the bush until late fall and early winter comes. One sunny, warm day for those cold months, the flowers should be completely dried. They should not be dried with a little moisture from dew or rainfall.
The other two methods give you dried hydrangea sooner. The method I tend to use is starting them in a vase of water, but once they drink all the water, let them go. They should dry standing up in the vase. This is nice because it will leave the same form as when you harvested the flowers and plopped them into a vase.
The last strategy for dried hydrangea is to hang them upside down in an airy, dark location, such as a garage, pole barn, or shed. The air needs to be flowing around the hydrangea, in the same manner that clothes out to dry of the fresh air to help dry them. Flowers, though, need a dark location in order to keep their colors. For other flowers, this is essential for them to dry. For white hydrangea, it doesn’t keep the white color, but turns a light brown.
Dried hydrangea last. I have a vase filled of a hydrangea harvest from two years ago still going on nicely. I keep on top of my bookshelf for aesthetic décor, but also to keep it away from a hydrangea destroyer.
My Fluff-ball and Hydrangeas
My cats love flowers, but one specifically enjoys the jungles of hydrangeas. For my wedding, the one floral project I did was spraying dried hydrangeas white, then arranging them in a white wooden basket. As I had these as décor for my dining room table, I hear rustling the one evening. I walk over and see what’s going on. My kitten is zooming her way through. When caught, she jumps into the middle of the hydrangea arrangement, acting as though she’s not there and still attacking her way through the hydrangea jungle.
She was small then, not even half grown. But ever since, I require myself to keep any dried hydrangeas where she cannot bushwhack through them. That’s why my dried hydrangea bouquet is at the top of a shelf she doesn’t have access to thanks to a floor lamp.
To Sell or Not to Sell
I love all white hydrangea arrangements fresh and dried. I had one for sale one time. It wasn’t expensive either for the true cost of each hydrangea stem. Market goers loved the all-white arrangement, yet it didn’t sell. Harvesting your own hydrangeas is easy. Those folks had their own hydrangeas at home they thought about pick. I find that this is an easy cut flower to grow oneself for their home and for gifts.
Farmhouse Hydrangea
After years of an annual small bouquet harvest from this bush, I dug up a root and transplanted it into my own garden space. My hope is built on continuing these blooms that I’ve grown to enjoy throughout my youth, connecting me to my family farm and the flowers there.
Sometimes a flower farm cannot be built on flowers alone. Flowers are beautiful, but they get us through their meanings. Not even if they mean love or happiness, but rather how they connect us to people in our lives. Hydrangeas connect me back to living at the farm during the summer months. They connect me to weekend visits to the farm. The white dainty petals grouped together take me back to the first bouquets I added to from my boyfriend now-husband. This flower just reminds me that what I was doing 5 years ago at 22 was building me up for flower farming today.
