Excuse the ridiculous grin, but there’s honestly no point in even *trying* to play it cool, we are ELATED to be harvesting tulips here of the farm for Mother’s Day! 😄🙌🏻 It seems like such a basic thing, right? We’re a flower farm. OF COURSE we’ll be harvesting tulips at Mother’s Day…..right? Here’s the thing we haven’t talked much about: It’s been one of the toughest springs for outdoor growing that we’ve experienced in 11 years of farming. First, the winter was extremely cold. And hey, a cold Canadian winter is a good thing. We haven’t had one in a while, and that sense of normalcy felt good. But—as the calendar flipped over to spring, the weather didn’t seem to get the memo. It STAYED cold. The days were cold, the snow kept coming, and the nights continued to freeze. And then there was the rain. Countless grey and rainy days followed that cold weather, and, well, the flowers simply didn’t have any sunshine and warmth to work with, two things that they need to bloom. Before we knew it, we were 10 days behind where we typically are in the season. Scrolling through photos of past years, anxiety quickly started to settle in. In past years, we were already harvesting thousands of stems of tulips every day, and given that Mother’s Day is the Super Bowl of flower holidays, we NEED to be doing that. This spring, we were staring at green tulips beds, with tens of thousands of dollars of bulbs sitting in the ground, and no promise of a Mother’s Day payoff, for a crop that we’ve already put 6 months of time into. Farming simply isn’t for the fair of heart. It’s a gamble, and no year, or season, is ever a guarantee. Cue the IMMENSE relief we’re feeling to be harvesting tulips today! 😅😅😅 Our first two beds are in bloom now. 🙌🏻 Sure, the rest of the field is still 7-10 days behind, and Mother’s Day is in 6 days, and sure, there are 3 solid days of rain in the forecast (my god, what we wouldn’t give for some SUN!), but these first few tulips feel like a real victory this year, and we’re glad to have them. If you haven’t placed a Mother’s Day preorder yet, you’ll want to ASAP! We *will* have flowers for you, but this spring has been a nail biter!