I don’t know where the compulsion to make my daughter a bouquet came from (maybe because I’m a flower farmer and have tens of thousands of flowers available at my fingertips), but I started cutting without much thought.

What would make a child’s bouquet different from one for an adult? Textures - loads of them. Apples for Peru for rattle, papery limonium. Then I wandered to smells. Phlox, mint and flowering tobacco. Then size. Can’t go around shoving dinner plate dahlias in. I even added some edible bits.

Of course my 9mo old daughter didn’t care much for the bouquet beyond its structural abilities to withstand being ripped to shreds.

I guess it was more of a gift for me than her.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

I’m not a big fan of British supermarkets, but I must say that whoever stocks our local big Sainsbury’s is pretty good at their job. I like their style.

I found these bad boys in the bread aisle yesterday. A delicious taste of IKEA shopping with my mom as a 12yr old in Germany. This was the treat at the end, along with a hot dog.

Weirdly, they’ve also started stocking Kirin Ichiban. I love that beer and I rather they didn’t. Something about seeing it in a big Sainsbury’s in southwest England took the shine off.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

I woke up groggy today. Don’t know why, maybe because the full moon was beaming in my face.

After a late breakfast, while Kate was tending to some flowers, Paloma and I were playing in her room. I was laying on the floor while she was crawling all over me and felt myself doze off. The rain was hitting the window and Paloma was babbling something quietly. I wasn’t really asleep, but I wasn’t fully awake either. It was like I was noticing how I was actively resting.

Kate said she doesn’t want to go to bed too late today, which by our standards is 9pm. I think I’ll jump on that idea. It’s cloudy today, so I don’t think the moon will disturb me much.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

We also happen to live together and she also happens to be my wife. Coincidentally, she’s also the mother of my daughter.

I’ve heard the phrase ‘don’t work with your partner’ a lot of times in a lot of variations. It’s probably said by people who don’t like their partners very much.

Kate had chicken waffles which were very good, but I never understood the sweet & salty obsession. I had a banana milkshake, which I probably hadn’t had since middle school. We didn’t talk shop because that’s not what business lunches are for - everybody knows that.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

I’m not sure where I read that, but it makes sense. It’s more probable that there are diamond deposits on Mars than temperate rainforests.

There’s a guy I know that works as a tree surgeon. He frequently brings over wood chips to the farm and this time round he mentioned that he had a good piece of timber for me. A branch of a 200yr old oak. When I asked how big it was, he just made an ‘O’ over his head with his arms. My excitement on the scoville scale was in the millions.

Only for him to call an hour later and say that the landowner changed their mind and wanted to keep the branch for themselves.

Rare material indeed.

Oh well, storm season is upon us and there’s plenty of ash.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

I’ll give you an obvious example: we built a chicken coop and a goat pen to house our lovely farm animals. The thing needs to be cleaned at least monthly, which is around a couple hours of my time. On top of the clean, the animals need to be fed and watered daily, eggs need to be collected, hooves (and occasionally feathers) need to be trimmed. That’s just the ‘planned’ work as tech people would say. Then there’s the ‘unplanned’ work like taking your chicken to the vet when a goat decided to roundhouse kick it in the gullet; or chasing a goat around the field when it managed to escape and finds the all-you-can-eat-buffet of dahlias. In terms of time, building the coop was just the tip of the iceberg.

Some of it is less obvious.

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I don’t own an egg basket and maybe that’s the reason I keep breaking eggs. This must be the fifth this month. I stuff them in my pockets since my hands are always full walking back from the coop. Paloma in one hand, feed in the other, gate latch in the other, pears in the other. Doesn’t take much for my thigh to be pre-marinated like a schnitzel ready for fry-up.

What I know now is that you can’t just throw your jeans in the wash. That’s the surest way to end up with omelette in your pockets. Whatever. They were dirty anyway.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

I was pouring my coffee this morning when my wife screamed behind me. It was Fernando (that’s what I called the grasshopper that has been living in our kitchen since Friday). He launched himself at her while she was washing the dishes.

Fernando is only one of several unintended residents in our house. During the last heatwave I kept waking up to a pentagram of mouse poop in the same place in the corridor. Our resident bat invited himself through the open windows and was napping on the carbon monoxide detector. Then there was the spawning of ladybugs in every window, a swallow nest over the front door, the neighbour’s cat, countless moths and spiders.

How could I forget the time a crow fell through the chimney at 5am and we thought we were being burgled?

The nights are getting colder, but I keep the windows open.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

My evening farm chores include bringing the goats in from pasture, collecting eggs, watering the seedlings and turning off the irrigation. I also replenish everyone’s water and hay when necessary. Recently, I started to do all of this with one hand because the other is holding my eight-month old daughter.

The raspberry bush is a new addition on the route as that’s where the pre-dinner snack is. So are glee-filled shrieks in my ear when we approach the goats. Let me tell you - I don’t ever want to do it with two hands again.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

The whole entrance to the house has it now, hanging about at head height, and I still couldn’t tell you what it’s like. Oily, faintly sweet, something almost edible about it that isn’t quite food. Nothing else I know smells like it.

Anyone coming in would think we’re burning incense. It’s just me running in to scrub my hands every time I want some coffee.

Glazed four panes so far and broke one. We move.

See yall tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

For the next three weeks or so, I'll be eating pears as manically as the tree produces them. Then I won't touch a single one for an entire year until the tree is ready again.

There's a one-week window at the beginning of September when the nuts of the walnut directly next to it are ready at the same time. That's when my wife makes pear and walnut cake. I wonder if it’s my favourite cake because I only eat it once a year. I’m not intending to find out.

That reminds me - I need to buy a new nutcracker.

See y’all tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

Years of breakfasts and dinners and Settlers of Catan pressed in permanently. Like the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There’s a big ol’ scratch from the time I was moving around a big vase of flowers to its ‘perfect spot’.

It’s a six-seater and for most of its life there were only two of us. So the damage is mostly on one end. Now we’re three and we managed to claim a bit more of the table. I can’t wait until there’ll be enough of us to claim it all.   

See yall tomorrow boys and girls,

Patrick

Most of our windows have rot, which then means replacing parts of wood and joinery. Then the glass panes go back in, re-puttied and re-painted. It should be noted that putty needs to dry for about three weeks before it can be painted. The painting itself is also a very time-consuming part as all edges and corners need to be done without painting over the glass. Multiple layers too. Naturally, replacing one window takes a looooong time.

Today was also the first time that Paloma dropped to two naps during the day. She’s been sleeping poorly at night for the past couple of weeks and we think it’s because she’s been napping too much throughout the day. She’s just dozed off for her night shift, so I’ll report back tomorrow how it went.

But all of this to say that I manage to fit in as much window work with a newborn as I did before. The amount of available time has decreased, but the window output has remained the same. You may be asking ‘Patrick, that sounds too good to be true, surely something had to be sacrificed with a crawling 8-month old?!’ And you’d be partially right. Mostly the things that you want to do take a back seat.

Nevertheless, my daughter definitely has helped me realise how much time there is in a day and how much of it I was wasting before. I used to give myself a month to finish a window. Now I give myself a week and I still manage. The morale of the story is that a task takes as much time as you dedicate to it.

See yall tomorrow bois and gurls,

Patrick

After growing flowers, killing flowers is the second-best thing I’m good at. The farm is riddled with dead flowers. Some seeds never sprouted, some seedlings never made it out into beds and some young flowers were either scorched by the sun, flooded by the rain or eaten by slugs, birds, bunnies or deer.

It used to really upset me that so many of our plants died. It still does to an extent. But I’ve since learned one thing: as long as we grow more than we kill, we’re net positive on the karma scales with the universe. Actually, I don’t even think the universe cares that much.

Sometimes you gotta break a couple eggs to make an omelette.

See yall tomorrow bois and girls,

Patrick

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You are a conscious soul that the universe  attached to a speck of atoms through literal magic. You can smell plants that started from a miniscule seed and grew taller than most buildings only thanks to a fire ball in the sky and some condensation. You can listen to fucking air particles vibrate at frequencies that make your body want to move. You can s…

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The difference is not that subtle. One bouquet sucks and the other one is beautiful. Just like a meal is more than just a collection of ingredients, a bouquet is more than just a collection of flowers. The whole should ideally be greater than the sum of its parts.

I think I’m decently qualified in all of this as I grow flowers and make bouquets for a living. So if you’re making a bouquet for yourself or as a gift for someone, here’s how to assemble one that’s jaw-droppingly good in a couple of simple rules.

1. A good bouquet starts with good flowers.

Going back to the meal analogy - quality ingredients are half the work of a tasty dish. It’s going to be much easier to create a nice-looking bouquet with seasonal (ideally locally grown) flowers than with imported, hydroponically-grown substitutes. You have to really try to make something ugly from a selection of good flowers. Local and seasonal flowers are usually more fresh, scented and delicate. There are also more unique and interesting varieties that big exporters don’t bother with due to low demand. For example here’s what a fresh ranunculus looks like vs. an imported plastic-looking roses harvested in December.

How do you distinguish the good flowers from the not-so-good ones?

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