Parenting While Running a Flower Farm

Let’s face it, being a parent is the hardest job we’ll ever do in our lifetime, but add work commitments, cleaning, making meals, and maybe, just maybe, squeezing a tiny amount time out for our ourselves to preserve mental sanity, on top of simply being a mom, is even more difficult.

The whole concept work/life balance thing is not something I’ve been good at mastering, but I wanted to share some of my own stories about running a flower farm while raising three beautiful children. The stories range from the good, to the bad, to the downright ugly. Raising kids definitely isn’t an exact science. I’ll also share some small, practical tips on how to manage a full-time job, but saving plenty of time for family time.

When we first started flower farming journey in 2011, our kids were so little. Our oldest was 7, followed by our 3 year old and finally, the baby, who was a 10 month old at the time. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into with trying to manage growing flowers and raising kids. It was totally ‘insane in the membrane’ as Adam always says.

One thing about running a flower farm many don’t always know is that both Adam and I are out in the flower fields for over 14 hours most days, sunrise to sunset. When the kids were little, it would be a constant struggle having them outside with us, trying to keep them entertained while we planted, weeded, watered, and harvested all of our flowers. AND all the while we were learning how to flower farm, which is totally different process than just growing a beautiful, bountiful garden.

The Bad

There were were many times I’d lay the baby down for a nap and would head back out outside with my little hand-held baby monitor. I’d work for what felt like 10 minutes before I’d hear her awake and start playing in her crib. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’d let her play for at least another 20 minutes until she’d start calling or crying for me. Looking back, this is a total mom-guilt moment for sure.

One of the funniest/scariest moments ever, was ‘loosing’ the baby, because I’d been outside working and had our oldest child take the lead on watching her. She crawled and snuck away from him while he was watching cartoons. After frantically searching for her for at least 10 minutes and after using my shrill, frantic, terrified ‘mom’ voice to call her name, we finally found her in the kitchen behind the island, playing in cups full of flour from the baking cabinet.

The Good

Raising kids and trying to work on the flower farm isn’t full of all bad stories. There have also been some really wonderful moments for both the kids as well as my husband and I. We’ve spent countless hours together working in the gardens, teaching the kids the intrinsic gardening learnings that translate to real life skills, sharing names of flowers, showing them how to harvest, and how to care for the land.

You might think these things would be a bad memory for them, and certainly it’s probably something that they don’t yet cherish yet, but I know they’ll look back on those memories fondly, remember the time we spent together as a family, and may even end up on a farm themselves later in life, chasing the intangible joy of their childhood

My most favorite family activity with the kids is watching them make their own bouquets with the flowers we grow. It’s very interesting to see their little personalities come out in what they design. The boys have stopped making bouquets at this point, but have benefited from our flower farming endeavors, impressing their dates with bouquets of flowers occasionally and even like our ‘free’ corsages and boutonnières for homecoming and prom dances.

I shared a little bit more about myself and one of my biggest joys about being a mom and running a flower farm on Des Moines Moms’ blog. You can check it out here: https://desmoines.momcollective.com/jenn-oneal-pepperharrow-farm/.

The Most Important Message of All
Running a flower farm and raising kids isn’t a perfect scenario, but you can find some sort of balance with it. The biggest secret to all of this is you have to give yourself a little grace, and not focus on perfection.

Did everything get done that you needed to get done? Probably not, but was it done good enough? Done.

Did your kids eat dinner? Okay, maybe it was a quick sandwich, but they did eat, right? Done.

Give yourself a little grace and know that no one is perfect and certainly no garden or flower farm is ever completely perfect, tasks are never completely done, the list just keeps going…for all of us, so there’s no need to strive for perfection and wear yourselves and your kids out.

Cherish every moment spent with your kids and also cherish the wonderful learning opportunities in the garden. Get them excited to see the first blooms on flowers they helped plant and give them freedom to cut blooms to enjoy for themselves and place in their rooms. At the end of the day you want to make sure yourself and your family are happy, healthy, and loved much. This is the most simple, best thing we can do!

XX Jenn

Photo by Leah Ried

How To Make An Autumn Wreath

Check out our latest YouTube video where Jenn shows us how to make a simple and beautiful autumn wreath with dried florals from the farm.

The Great Dahlia Dig

We love our dahlias dearly here at PepperHarrow and they’re one of our featured flowers we grow.

I mean, just look at these gorgeous blooms, our last harvest of dahlias before frost. Dahlias in every shape, color, size. Just absolutely stunning!

But all good things must come to an end and that’s where we are right now. We recently spent a 10 hour day, with 3 people, out in our largest dahlia field, digging up all the dahlia tubers and getting them into our heated space before an anticipated low of 18 degrees.

It’s crazy how our Iowa weather always seems to go from just lovely fall weather, to an abysmal wintery mix overnight. That’s exactly what happened this year, just like it’s happened the last few years. We should be used to by now, right?!

Below is a great photo that shows an after look of what our field looked like after all the tubers were dug up. Not too bad!

The following day, Adam, our two sons and myself (Jenn) worked on our smaller dahlia field with our ‘special’ dahlia tuber varieties pulling them out. We spent about 6 hours in the smaller field, but were only able to get it half completed. It was a bit more difficult for various reason, but for right now, I’m blaming the pathways we added with landscaping fabric. It was a crazy, wet, cold, mess that day.

I’ll admit, I’ve been dreading the great dahlia dig. I started thinking about having to do this in early September with a sliver of dread stirring in my heart. Not gonna sugar coat this for y’all, it’s some seriously hard, dirty, body breaking work to get all of these tubers out of the field and inside.

But that’s not all! We also spend hours on our feet after that, cleaning, drying, and dividing them up for storage. There’s a lot of standing and my lower back is starting to get real angry with me. Need to work on my core next year to help with this.

The specialty dahlia field

Wish us luck as we further divide the thousands of tubers this week to get them into storage. We’ll be getting them all tucked away, then will be announcing our dahlia tuber sale online soon. We can’t wait to share all of these gorgeous varieties with you.

XX Jenn

Growing Lavender in the Midwest

Growing Lavender in the Midwest and Loving it!

If you had told me we would have 1/2 an acre of lavender blooming at any point 3 years ago, I would have thought it was an amazing idea, but it would have sounded completely far-fetched annnnd completely dreamy.

I’d spent 4 solid years testing out planting methods, testing my own theories about how to grow successfully, and making some accidental discoveries about growing lavender in the harsh growing conditions here in Zone 5b, Central Iowa. It was mostly observation and those ‘happy accidents’ that propelled us so far forward with enabling success. Crazy, right!?

Lavender prefers a more mild climate, with poor soil, neither of these Iowa has for the most part. Our winters are tough, getting incredible cold and conversely, our summers are crazy hot with extremely high humidity, which lavender plants dislike immensely.

But here we are, into our second growing season with lavender, reaping a bounty of blooms! Also, as we head into Fall, we’re even getting a small out of a second bloom on our plants, which has been nice for wedding work and to use for a few additional products.

Our fields yielded so many blooms, we spent nearly a solid month and a half cutting all the blooms, almost daily, into our workshop for small batch hand crafted distillation and bud drying (for dried bunches and sachets).

We enjoyed every moment of it an also enjoyed sharing it with photographers who brought out so many of their clients. We were booked solid each evening for a month and a half with newly engaged couples, families, and senior photo session.

Just incredible to get to share the lavender field with folks and to get to see the amazing photos. Check out this amazing blog post with some additional photos by Stephanie Daggett, here. It makes my heart happy to see such beauty, captured and shared with others to enjoy. So beautiful!

Adam even had fun with taking photos, breaking out his electronic ‘toy’, his new drone, to take a few photos of us in the lavender. Gotta say, that drone really takes some amazing photos!

We added so many classes, classes, classes! Everything from mocktail making with lavender simple syrup with Jeff Naples, the Beard Behind the Bar, to lavender distillation. You name it, we tried it this year with great success. Look for a whole line-up of farm experiences based around lavender next year.

We so enjoyed having so many out to the farm to share our knowledge. We love getting to meet new people who share our excitement and love of plants.

Not only did we hold on-farm classes, but we also launched our first ever online course on growing lavender. We weren’t sure online learning was going to be something people were interested in, but we were oh so wrong. It’s been super popular!

The final offering we’ve centered around lavender is our lavender products, which I kind of talked briefly about in the beginning.

We spent so long, lovingly making each of these products on a small scale, by hand. It’s truly been a labor of love brining these lavender products to market and was a huge undertaking. I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we decided to expand out our lavender product offering beyond essential oil and hydrosol. Whooowee!

This year, we expanded our lavender products to include: lavender sugar, salve, bath salts, wreaths, and sachets. They’ve been really popular so far and I’m excited to be adding even more new items next year. I’m especially excited about our lavender candles! They’re absolutely incredible! They burn clean, have an amazing fragrance and burn for a really long time.

We’re thankful for the help of our amazing friend Keelia from K Henri Design for creating our packaging and also to Dani at Sugar Hill Photography for the wonderful product images. We couldn't have done any of these without these terrific gals.

Picture by Sugar Hill Photography

So, are you ready to try to grow some lavender or sample some of our amazing products? We’ll have all of our amazing products online and available to the general public on 9/25/20. We can’t wait to share them with you, and for you all to share them with your loved ones.

XX Jenn

Adventure at the Wedding Show

An Adventure at the Des Moines Wedding Show

Our setup at the Des Moines Wedding Show at the Scottish Rite Consistory

I spent the week preparing for the Des Moines Wedding Show that was held last Sunday. This was my first wedding show since C19, but I’ve decided that we have to learn to still carry on with our daily lives, but take precautions to protect ourselves and others. It was a great success and I met with tons of wonderful prospective brides.

The amount of time researching trends, coming up with idea for setup, number of flowers , props, vases, etc, is just staggering. Prep for the wedding show actually started two weeks ago, by pulling together a portfolio of my work, as well as a portfolio

Gina, one of the team members who coordinate the Des Moines Wedding Show, reached out to me a few days before the show and asked me if I’d do an exhibition table, telling me that the table should lean towards mauve tones. How could I say ‘no’?

I broke out allll the cut glass I could muster, as well as silver for place settings from my personal stash of fancy things. I made a last minute dash to Home Goods to grab some napkins, and plates, as well as Hobby Lobby for candles. I’m pretty excited about how everything turned out! The flowers are stunning and I love the way the candles look with the ribbons tied around the napkins. The pops of blue were everything!

Table Setting at the Des Moines Wedding Show