I’m thrilled to share that the latest episode of The Floret Farm Journal is now available to watch!
This month on the farm is always a scramble—the final surge to collect every ripe seedpod, capture as much beauty and information as we can possibly manage, and scrape together the very last bits of magic before frost arrives.
October does not linger, and yet it holds the most unknowns. With one cold night, the growing season will be over. But as we race to bring in the harvest, I am reminded that the end of one season is always the beginning of another.
With each passing storm, the flowers become more bruised and battered, but just as the garden is fading, hundreds of crabapple trees are coming into their prime all over the farm. While these magical trees are beautiful in every season, October is their high point. Their ripe fruit hangs on every branch, like ornaments in all the fall colors. I am obsessed with these trees, and in this episode I finally get to share why.
EPISODE RESOURCES
Cover Crop
Not everything we grow on the farm is meant to be harvested. Cover crops are grown to help improve the health of our soil and to keep the ground covered during the winter months. They retain nutrients in the soil, prevent erosion, and decrease weed pressure, and when they flower in the late spring and early summer, they provide habitat for beneficial insects. Here on the farm, we grow a mix of triticale, field peas, oats, vetch, annual ryegrass, and crimson clover.
My Creative Practice
Each week of the growing season, I try to make an arrangement using only ingredients gathered from the gardens and hedges here on the farm. This weekly ritual has been incredibly grounding over the years and has changed my life in the most unexpected ways. You can watch a short film about it here.
FEATURED PLANTS & VARIETIES
Favorite Crabapples Video & Blog Post
No other trees offer so much beauty throughout the year as crabapples—they really are a tree for all seasons. For a list of my favorite sources for bare-root trees, a printable list of the more than 120 crabapple cultivars that we’re growing (including sources), and a short video tour of some of my favorite varieties, visit Crabapples: A Tree for All Seasons.
Albert Etter
More than a century ago, Albert Etter was a prolific and skilled breeder of apples and strawberries in California, but his varieties nearly vanished forever following his death in 1950, when his enormous experimental apple orchard fell into decay. In the mid-1970s, Ram and Marissa Fishman, the owners of Greenmantle Nursery, began a mission to save the trees and decades’ worth of breeding work, and they offered Etter’s treasured trees, both his named and his trial varieties, in their catalog for many years. Sadly, Ram passed away in 2022 and the trees were nearly lost again. Thankfully, Trees of Antiquity took up the torch and added them to their offerings, ensuring that they will survive for generations to come. You can search “Etter” on their site to find all of his special varieties.
Greenmantle Nursery’s website includes some wonderful posts about Albert Etter that would make for interesting winter reading. If you read about Albert and his trees, you won’t be able to resist adding one (or many) of his varieties to your garden!
After you watch the episode, I’d love to hear what resonated the most. Are there any heirloom, rare, or obscure groups of plants that you’re particularly drawn to? Have you planted things in your garden with future generations in mind? Please share in the comments section below.
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