Highlights from the Farm
From starting thousands of seeds and DIY-building a walk-in cooler, to vaccinating goats and harvesting honey, there is never a dull moment on the farm.
makin’ the goats Work
2023: the year of working smarter, not harder 😉 — use the goats to landscape the bee yard!
We recently started turning our goats out into the bee yard to manage the overgrowth. It gives the goats a fresh new space to graze, keeps the area “mowed” with minimal disturbance to the bees, and takes something off our weekly maintenance list. A win-win…win!
Honey bees are a great, honest reflection of the energy around them. Using loud equipment around the hives to landscape (understandably) puts the bees on edge. Bees on edge —> bees more likely to sting. Bees on edge frequently —> bees that become unpredictable, aggressive and/or difficult to work with. We appreciate our calm, happy hives, so we’re pleased to see everyone content with the new rotation!
You can tell a lot about how rough a keeper is with their bees based on the baseline behavior of their hives. Happy, healthy bees (+ most animals) are not aggressive unless given ample reason to be.
Y’all know we could talk about honey bees all day, so don’t be shy! Follow us @McIntoshFieldandFlower on instagram to follow along for farm chores and flowers galore.
Clips from around the farm showing the goats, bees, and the goats eating the tall grass in the bee yard.
Notes from the Farm
The coming of winter gives us the opportunity to slow down for a few deep breaths of gratitude and enjoy the calming of nature.
November 28th, 2022
The cold weather hit us hard and early this year in Middle Tennessee. We grow all of our flowers in the field (no temperature-controlled greenhouses… yet!), so a hard frost is lethal to most of our fresh flower crop. As a flower farmer, the season’s first frost brings both grief and relief. A bit of sadness for all of the lost flower crops, but also a welcomed bit of reprieve from the hustle and bustle of the summer. The coming of winter gives us the opportunity to slow down for a few deep breaths of gratitude and enjoy the calming of nature.
Although our 2022 fresh flower season is over, the work doesn’t stop on the farm. Here are some highlights from our current to-do list to prepare the farm for winter (and next spring!)…
• Deep clean + insulate the coop — when building our flock, we were careful to chose breeds that can easily tolerate our winters here in Middle Tennessee. We still take steps to ensure our coop is a warm and dry place for our chickens, ducks, and geese to bed down in each night, including extra insulation and deep bedding.
• Livestock — give annual vaccinations, provide extra fluffy bedding in the barn, and ensure everyone’s winter coat is healthy.
• Winterize the honeybees — one last thorough check of the hives before the winter weather rolls in. Check for pests, hive health, queen, and available honey. Honeybees can starve over the winter without appropriate honey stores in the hive.
• Hardy annuals — flip the summer/fall beds and plant out of hardy annuals. We will carefully overwinter annuals like bachelor’s button, poppies, larkspur, sweet peas (+more!) to have plenty of blooms next spring.
• Plant out tulips — we treat our tulips as annuals, so we need to get thousands of bulbs in the ground as soon as possible.
• Dig + store dahlia tubers — we chose to dig the majority of our dahlia tubers this year to protect them from freezing. Now we need to divide, label, and store them for the winter! We left some in the ground (covered in mulch) because we can’t resist an experiment.