Canyon Blooms E-News…
The ice is melting and soon we will be able to take a peek in our twelve fifty foot caterpillar tunnels and see if anything made it through the intense cold snaps we had in December. (I’m afraid to look and am putting it off a bit longer.) We had two really significant donations to our program this winter. Pacific Power and Wright Tree Service donated their time and equipment to take down and chip the eighty foot Cottonwood that was centered in our annual field. It was a very hard decision, as she was a gorgeous old tree, but without the goats in the pasture to keep her pruned she was sending up suckers everywhere and creating real havoc in our beds. It was an enormous job and we are grateful they were able to do it with minimal impact to our field. The stump will be excavated out as soon as weather allows.
A second donation came from Chief Hops in the form of an old abandoned hoop house. It was in pieces but we were able to salvage enough to construct a forty foot tunnel that now sits parallel to our first. We may not be able to get many years out of it but we are grateful to have it for the lisianthus, campanula, ranunculus and anemone going in next month. Thank you Chief Hops for helping make it possible for us to get more donation vases out earlier in the season!
It is grand to have use of our germination room again. All of our 500 or so pots of sweetpeas are seeded and already starting to sprout. This is our first year of using largely our own seed and I’m anxious to see what kind of germination we get.
Most of our team will be coming back in February and I’m excited to see what we can accomplish. Our goal is to increase the number of organizations we provide vase donations to this year beyond the 8 trial programs we had last year. Everyone of the 8 hopes to continue and we’ve received requests from several others. If you have ideas of where flowers might be of the highest use please contact us at canyonblooms@outlook.com.
We depend on volunteers to pull this venture off so please let us know if there are ways you would like to participate or contribute. It is a remarkable group of people, growing remarkably beautiful flowers, and we’d love to share the journey with you.