The Sweet Pea Forest

Although every year is different, this year has been extremely unique.

It seems like several of our flower crops have been much bigger and healthier than previous seasons. It's really neat to see!

One of the crops doing unusually well are the sweet peas!

We made sure to build sturdy structures so that the sweet peas had plenty to climb.

We've been doing our best to keep up with harvesting in order to encourage more blooms. We had a difficult start to the sweet pea season because of the cool temperatures we were having at night. This led to bud-drop; even though the plants had flower buds on them, they were extremely delicate and would fall off at the slightest touch.

Now that the nights have gotten warmer and the days are sunny, we are in full production! We have been selling these cute mason jars stuffed full of the sweet pea blooms. These flowers don't love the heat, so get them while you can!

We love harvesting in the evening underneath the oak tree. If the mosquitoes aren't terrible, we stay up there and arrange the masons.

Sweet peas are one of those flowers that when you smell them, you become transported to another time in your memory.

When I smell tulips, I think about when I used to cut daffodils, grape hyacinths, and tulips in the early spring in my little rain jacket.

When I smell tuberoses, I'm reminded of late Friday nights loading the market van. The flood lights illuminate all the colors of the flowers, but the scent of the tuberoses is the only flower you smell.

Lots of people have stopped by our farmers' market table just to smell our sweet peas. Lots of them say they have memories of them growing in their grandmothers' gardens when they were young.

Although I'm in my twenties now, exploring the sweet pea forest made me feel like I was little again. I was supposed to be harvesting flowers but I got distracted and instead picked up my camera to capture my mom getting engulfed by the curly-cue vines. From far away, I could only see they tops of the plants lightly shaking to mark where she was picking flowers; otherwise I could not see her at all. It's gotten to the point where we need a ladder to harvest! Of course, I haven't been using a ladder to take these pictures but instead have been standing on a bucket. Haha.