Firefly Farm & Mercantile

Today I'm talking with Andre at Firefly Farm & Mercantile. 

For a 10 percent discount off a Firefly Farm and Mercantile purchase, use code Home Grown. 

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Andre at Firefly Farm and Mercantile. How are you Andre? I'm great. How are you? I'm good. You're in Wisconsin, right? Yeah. We are located right in the Driftless, right about 25 miles east of La Crosse.

00:29
in a little town called Cashton. You live in one of the most beautiful areas I have ever visited. I have been to the Driftless area, and I can't remember the name of the town I went to, but it was gorgeous there. Yeah, we feel pretty lucky. It's, you know, we moved here, kind of sight unseen six years ago. My wife's like, you sure you wanna move here? We haven't been up to see it yet. And I said, I feel, I'm fine. I'm, you know, it's tired of Texas heat, so.

00:57
Oh, yeah. I'm sure Wisconsin is a big change for you from Texas. It is. I was in Texas for a few years, but I was happy to trade in 110 degree summers, though. Yeah. And honestly, the upper Midwest can get kind of nippy and kind of unbearably muggy, too. But as I say, living in Minnesota, spring and summer and fall are why I tolerate the winters in Minnesota.

01:26
Oh, the Four Seasons are so nice. Growing up in New England, I just loved the Four Seasons. You kind of get in those cycles of things. So as you move around the country, and I've lived in Florida and Alabama and then Illinois, I'll say the Four Seasons, I've always loved the Four Seasons. So. Me too. Where in New England did you grow up? I grew up in Connecticut. Okay, I grew up in Maine, so.

01:53
Hi there, buddy. How you doing? Okay, so tell me about yourself and what you do. Well, Firefly Farmer Mercantile, we have a garden shop and farm out here in Cashton. So my love is gardening. And I would say didn't really plan on starting a garden shop when we moved up here, but just sort of it happened.

02:19
We love just heirloom seeds. That's our specialty. And then kind of garden bulbs for all seasons, whether it's winter or summer, spring, fall, everything in between. We raise our own chickens and we raise our own lamb. So we sell those to a lot of restaurants. We do a lot with herbs. We do a lot, it's more specialty items that we grow for some of our local restaurants. Things that maybe no one else wants to grow or things that are just so small scale. They're like...

02:48
It's not really worth our time. So I'll say we're pretty lucky that a few chefs will seek us out and say, Hey, can you grow me like three pounds of this or five pounds of this? And since we have the seeds, why not? What do you mind telling me what kind of special things you grow for them? Well, I will say that I have a request for the most pungent mustard I could get my hands on. Okay. So our wasabina mustard by High Mowing Organics is perfect for that. It gives you that pungent, that heat.

03:18
We have another one, it's called Southern Curled, and that is another great little mustard too. So that's just an example. We have Red Vein Sorrel going in for a couple places. They wanted to have that for the fall, and that's a fun one. You know, and I'm surprised more people don't grow more of the perennial type greens, just because I think there's such a place and a need for them in the local food restaurants. Yeah, and

03:44
Honestly, perennial things are so much easier than annual things. You plant them, they continue to grow, you do very little, I don't know, babying them typically and you're set for years to come. With annual stuff, you have to get the seeds every year or the seedlings, you got to put them in, you got to do all the work, you got to baby them. And then at the end of the season, you're done. It's so frustrating.

04:12
I say that as not the gardener. My husband is the one who loves to garden. He's a lot like you. And I used to help. I don't help now. I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. I don't like being out there when it's hot. I get headaches from heat. So it's just, it's not fun for me. He loves it. And he's, I've said this a billion times this summer because I'm so frustrated with it. We had terrible weather here this spring and the garden is pretty much a no show. It's, we're not.

04:42
We're not getting nearly as much out of it this year as we have the last three years. And he's been so great. He's been doing what he can with what he has. And he's been terribly sad and terribly frustrated, but he's kept a really good attitude. So I'm very proud of my husband this year. Well, it was a trying year for a lot of folks in a lot of areas. June was, you know, May was warm.

05:10
And then June came along and was wet and cold. Yep. So things like you traditionally would love to put out by then tomatoes, peppers, okra seeds, squat, you name it. Um, they were just slow going and it was hard. And then in July we had hot and dry. Um, so that was, you know, that complicated things, but there's things that, you know, gardeners can do to sort of mitigate, um, some of these, and this is what some of the things that we like to.

05:38
talk about and teach down here. You know, one is we actually have a third acre or exhibition vegetable garden. It is one third of an acre and it is all compost. 100% compost underneath where we actually raised up that third acre by about six to 10 inches in places, which is pure compost. And why we did that is our top soil in our field was a lot of sand, but it's also low lying. And so when we get the rains,

06:09
It would actually just stay and get drenched and water soaked for periods at a time. And when we put the compost in, we don't have that problem. It could rain six inches and our beds are just fine to walk on. So it really does make a difference for us folks. But you know, it's one, when I get the common question about raised beds, what do I put in my raised bed? I tell folks just pure compost. Find the best compost you can source and put it in there. You don't need any topsoil to grow, believe it or not.

06:38
Yeah, we have three huge open compost bins on our property. It's three acres. We have lots of room to do that. And we've been adding compost to the garden since we moved in four years ago, but we only have so much compost to add every year and the garden is like a hundred feet by 150 feet. So we're doing, we're doing all the things to amend the soil and fix the soggy pooling problem that we have.

07:08
Mm-hmm. And we started that the spring after we moved in because we moved in in August of 2020. But we haven't been here long enough to do what you've done yet. We just haven't had enough compost to do that kind of depth on it. No, it takes time. And compost is, you know, to make good compost, it's a struggle because if you don't have it covered and you get too much rain, it slows the process down and then it drives the temperatures. You can't, you know, kill your weeds. Yep.

07:37
That's why I tell folks, I said, I know people always get sticker shocked when they go find compost and they start sourcing it. And I just tell them, I said, you know what? Good compost is worth it. You have no weeds. It's worth every penny, yes. Yes. I said, just imagining putting down, you know, I'll say that the three foot by eight foot raised bed seems to be one of the most common sizes. You know, and I tell folks, I said, really, for about 40 bucks, you can put about three of these beds together, three or four of these beds together.

08:07
and have six inches of compost in there. And guess what? You just started off a weed free environment. Yep, exactly. And weed free environment is so important. And I'm gonna say this because we've been dealing with it since we moved in. The place where our garden is was an open field of grasses and weeds and wildflowers when we moved in. And I knew it was gonna be hard.

08:30
I knew it was going to take years to mitigate the weeds. Oh yes. It is taking years to mitigate the weeds and no matter what we do, they come back to the point that we're probably going to take half of it this fall, till everything under and then use something to kill the weeds and hopefully not the bad stuff but the more natural weed killing, I don't know, products and see if that works because we're fighting a losing battle here right now.

09:00
I would caution you on the tilling, and here's why. Okay. Does not think tilling doesn't have its place. You have to till big farms. You have to till big plots of land. We have to do that to a point. No till is great when the soil structure allows it. I'm a big proponent of no till as much as possible. In the garden, so just think about that six inches of topsoil underneath your garden.

09:28
you know, that's a seed bank. And if you get deeper and you get down to seeds that haven't been disturbed in a while, you're pulling up seeds from the last few decades or last century, wherever it case may be, seeds that before you, they plowed them under. So you're bringing all that to the surface. Most seeds are causing you the problem that top one inch or two inches, really just the top inch of soil. And if you bring all those new seeds up, you've now just got to keep exasperating your problem.

09:57
So what do we do instead? Well, I would suggest a few things. One is I love old silage tarps. So I buy silage tarps from our local farm place. I like silage tarps because they're not penetrating for light and they're not penetrating for moisture. And so I can kill very large areas very quickly and smother the weeds underneath.

10:24
So when I have a large area and that may be something I just wanna say I can't kill all the weeds, but I at least wanna knock a lot of them out, I'll cover that for about 30 days if there's a lot of weeds on it. And then I will actually go ahead and just pour, put a little bit of compost on, or if I have to till, I'll call it the top dress, the bed, I may just barely, just a little bit like a half inch just to make it smooth again for planting. And then I'll go in there and...

10:54
and actually go ahead and plant just right on top of that right away. Okay. And that usually does the trick. Um, the other thing you can end up doing, if you're not sure, like, um, coming into the winter months right here, you could apply that smothering right now, and then you can get crops like buckwheat or mustard, things that even do well for the, you know, until it freezes. Um, even in Minnesota, you can put a lot of these things on right in September and October and, uh, at least get a green crop on there for you for the winter.

11:23
and then you have less seeds. And then come spring when you're ready to go, you can say, all right, I gotta go kill this thing. So you can take that same tarp and just smother it again, and then be ready to go. And what happens is as you're smothering that tarp, you're warming up the soil. So you're waking everything up, good or bad. And as you're doing that, as the mustard or the greens, you know, rot away, you actually are bringing up a lot of your organisms that will eat those weeds.

11:51
Eat that greens and then incorporate into the ground and I think that that is It's worth doing now Sometimes you might have a lot of clay and there's other things you can't tilling make sense to put you know to put compost into It I get it But if you have good soil structure already, I would probably encourage you to try that method and said Charles doubting over in England He has a lot of great YouTube videos and I always recommend folks to just check it out He's big believer into the smothering and adding the compost on top

12:20
But even if you can't quite do it large scale, maybe you find a few small beds and you start doing it with that. Like, carrots are a good example. Carrots are, it's really nice to start an area and when I do some carrots, I tend to go six to eight inches deep of compost with paper underneath. And the paper is, it rots away so fast that by the time the carrots get to be that length, it's not a problem. Okay. So.

12:46
All right, you are the most recent person to make me so thankful that I started this podcast almost a year ago, because my husband is going to be so interested in everything you just said, everything. Well, you guys are more than welcome, he's more than welcome to drive out and visit us, so. Yeah, okay, so after all that, we've been talking for almost 13 minutes, and we haven't even gotten to the things I wanted to ask you about.

13:13
And that's fine because I just learned a whole bunch of stuff I didn't know so thank you very much So you guys do you guys grow? The stuff that you sell or do you source it from outside or both? Mostly source so you can't grow that many seeds in one place Cross pollination is a big problem. So we use companies like seed savers out of the core Iowa very popular here in the Midwest

13:41
Yeah, I'm high mowing organics out of Vermont. It's a, it's a small seed label and they're pretty popular. I say across most of us, but they're just strictly all things organic. Seed savers will do organic and then conventional, but their focus is heirlooms organic and high moans about organic and things that will grow for people so they can make a living or for gardeners so they can grow crops and food.

14:07
And we have other labels too that we do Southern Exposure, New Living Sea. They're just, you know, they're mostly small farm operations for the most part. And then our bulbs are sourced from all over the world. We do grow and starting to grow our own dahlias because to try to source really great dahlias is next to impossible for the most part. And it takes when you import dahlias, you go through, it takes about a hundred dahlias to get to really like 50 or 60 good ones.

14:37
And one thing I've learned as I get older, my eyes deceive me a little bit more. And I just don't really, it's harder to focus when you're trying to go through about 4,000 dahlias at that level. We, we, so we'll start growing out things quite a bit and then we're going to bring about 40 dahlias to the market over the next, every year and just rotate things on and off. But most everything is we, our main bulb company is a small family.

15:05
I say small because it's small by some standards, but they have a 300 acre Tulip and Daffodil farm in the Netherlands, which is actually a really small farm for the Netherlands. And that's where I'd say I get quite a bit of my bulbs from. Other ones, you know, they're just sourced from the Canary Islands, from Peru. I mean, you name it, Israel, all places across the world. It's unbelievable where all these bulbs are, where they come from.

15:33
You know, for us, we just go to the store. When I was a kid, I'd go to the nurseries and the garden centers, and they were the greatest place for bulbs. That's where I got my love of putting my hands like through the daffodils or the tulips. Very sensory that way. And I still remember that experience, but as I sort of grew up into my 20s and 30s, that disappeared. You know, there was no more garden centers really stopped carrying a lot of fall bulbs, especially fall bulbs and crates.

15:59
Only because the big-box stores started getting the quick packaging, but you don't know what you're gonna get sometimes So, you know, there's just something when you come to our shop You get you know three or four hundred options and you're actually putting your hands in the bins touching the touching the bulbs that you're gonna bring Home with you. So most people just they just love that because you can't do that anywhere anymore Yeah, um, the sensory thing is interesting. My

16:30
I mean great aunt and uncle, they weren't my parents' siblings or my grandparents' siblings. And they had a chestnut tree, a horse chestnut tree. Oh yes. And it would drop those, you know, when we would be up there for Thanksgiving, there would be horse chestnuts on the ground and the pointy, spiky part would be off of the nut already. And those are really smooth. They're like glass when you touch them.

16:59
I can remember grabbing handfuls of stichmanoy in my pocket and bringing them home and using them almost like a worry stone. And I loved those. I haven't seen one in forever, but it was just one of those things where it was fun to put your hands on them. Yes. And gardening is so much more than just growing food or flowers or just making your house look pretty. You know, it's really this collection of experiences.

17:25
It's amazing where a flower or a scent or eating something can just really bring back You know something from your childhood or something about another family member. So Yeah, um, okay. So you mentioned you you import bulbs for daffodils and tulips I have a question for you. Hopefully, you know the answer we put in tulip bulbs and daffodil bulbs Two and a half three years ago And they did great

17:54
when they came up the first spring after we put them in. And now they're not coming up as much and I think it's because the critters under the ground are eating the bulbs. So is there anything that we could put in the ground around the bulbs that would allow the plant to come up through but the critters couldn't eat the bulb because this is driving me crazy? Well, a couple things. So one is your daffodils are probably coming up no problem. Not so much.

18:22
Well then I would maybe say that you might have some... do you have heavier clay soils? We do, but I don't think we do where they are, if that makes any sense. Nothing eats a daffodil. So daffodils, they don't smell good to rodents. So one of the strategies is we'll put daffodils, hyacinths, around in different places where you're trying to deter some of the critters. But you know, it doesn't always do the greatest.

18:50
I find that the Imperial Fertilary, that is really the best one and the alliums do great. Tulips, there's two things happening with your tulips most likely. One is if the tulips aren't, when the tulips don't come back, a lot of tulips, they grow these little things called bulblets. And when you pull up a tulip bulb after the, say you pull it up in August or July when they're done.

19:18
you'd see all these little tiny bulblets right here. And you know, there could be five of them, there could be 20 of them. It just depends on the variety. And hybridizers and growers, they like the bulblets because when you put a bulb in the ground and you're getting, you know, you get some more bulblets going on, it's like, all right, I can take those up and I can go ahead and, you know, grow those. I clone it. I basically grow the same thing out every year and you're kind of on the cycle. While other tulips, they only grow maybe one or two.

19:45
bigger bulblets, so they don't grow as many. And those tend to be the tulips that are more perennial in nature, I would say, where you kind of have to divide them up a lot less. Daffodils, they're not heavy feeders like a tulip. So a daffodil tends to just sort of naturalize in very long drifts, but they don't spread by seeds, so that's why we don't have daffodils popping up all over our forests and prairies everywhere. They're very much about the bulbs.

20:14
So I would say that if you remember where the daffodils were, try digging them up or maybe they got buried a little bit too much sometimes. That can happen. But the tulips, I would venture that either you have something, eat some, they are the deer love the blossoms, the squirrels love the tulip bulbs. Moles really don't eat any of the plant life. They're more interested in protein around the critters that are...

20:43
eating things and driving your lawn nuts, you get things like voles, of course, they'll go after them, but a tulip bulb is pretty deep. So you're not getting too much of those dangers other than maybe like the squirrels trying to dig them up. And you'll know them when they do. But if you try daffodils again, we always tend to mark things where maybe things might be so we can start digging them up. But if you're not getting anything back where the daffodils were, I would probably say they may have rotted.

21:13
That does happen. Yeah. Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. I don't want to spend any more money on tulip and daffodil bulbs at this point. So maybe what we'll do this fall is dig them up because I know exactly where they are and see what's going on under there. And maybe we can split some. I don't know. But the daffodils, the daffodils. So when we moved into this property, there was a lot of daffodils everywhere, but they were very...

21:42
dense and they're very, so you got a lot of green but you had no blossoms. So just me and the kids are just digging them up and spreading them out. And, you know, sometimes planting things too densely can be problematic because you have to dig them up faster too. Yeah. Yep. I just, I can't, I cannot justify spending the money on the bulbs this year. It's, it's a little bit of a tight year for us. I'm not going to lie. We're doing everything we can.

22:11
but we thought we were gonna have some supplemental income from the garden, which we don't have. Yeah, it can be challenging. Things like the tulips would be one where, they don't come back the greatest. The darwins do, but the daffodils and crocuses are probably the most reliable in the great pyocene. They're just, they're gonna go no matter what happens. Nothing really likes to bother them.

22:36
So they're always kind of a joy to have in the springtime. But it can be trying times. It's always, as I tell folks, you're just, you know, not unlimited funds when it comes to gardening. Kind of whatever your passion is, grow that and see what happens. Yeah, my passion is peonies and everyone knows it. Oh yes, yes, we love peonies. Yeah, and anytime someone's like, I'm gonna be splitting my peonies. Do you guys wanna come help and take some home? I'm like, yes, when? Yep, yep.

23:06
Because free peonies are good peonies. We have been given so many peony roots over the years and they have all done fabulously. The only problem with peonies is it takes about three years for them to really be established and give you some really beautiful blooms. So it's a waiting game. Big waiting game, because they really, even our bare roots that are harvested when they're dormant. So they go through less trauma than the splitting of

23:35
you know, during the summer, the spring, the fall. And I always tell folks when you do have, when you wanna split and thin things out, I said early spring is typically the best time. Cause then it's active to get the roots in. Fall can work very well too, but you wanna give them enough of a growing season to get some roots established. And they kind of just choose big tubers cause they gotta make it through the winter time when they're doing it. But they're really easy. But yeah, I noticed when, you know, you're doing anything in the summertime, oh.

24:04
three to five years you're gonna be waiting for that blossom to come and then all of a sudden it comes out like in a vengeance like oh where these 40 blossoms come from. And sometimes Mother Nature really surprises you. We put in two peach trees last year, saplings, and one of them has just shot up, has no fruit on it, it's beautiful. My husband's actually gonna have to prune it when it's time to do that. It's so big. The other sapling has 12 peaches on it. We just put it in last year.

24:36
that can happen. It's amazing what the fruits can do. Everything depends on your stock as well. Is it on a semi-dwarf? Is it on a standard? Over in our garden, in our orchard section, we do what's called a permaculture orchard. It goes by the acronym NAP. N stands for Nitrogen Fixing of some sort. A for apple. Then P is for pear, plum, or Asian pear.

25:04
And so we kind of just rotate things in the orchard that way where it's NAP, NAP, NAP. And you know, my wife would say, oh, we don't got enough. None of these trees over here have given us anything. I said, well, those are standards and they take, you know, five to seven years, while our semi dwarfs will take like a year or two years and you finally have fruit. So it just, it all really depends on that root stock. That makes, that does make a big, big difference.

25:27
Yeah, and I have no idea. He picked them up at some store when he was out. So not a clue where he got them or what they are. But he sent me a photo from them. They're way on the back corner of our property. So I haven't been over there yet. And he sent me a photo. I was like, are those peaches? And he texted back. Yeah. He said that one tree has peaches. I was just dumbfounded. I was like, I thought it would take three years before he had peaches.

25:56
Oh no, you know, every tree is a little bit different. There's a little, I prune my trees heavily and we're in a valley, so it is every year. Even my most dependable tree is a zest star tree for the apples, but the other items, we can't do peaches in our valley because we get the frost just at the right time when the peaches wanna start blooming. So that's always a shame, but you know, and we don't do cherries for that reason either, but.

26:24
Hey, we can do Asian pears and a few other things, but fruit should taste good. And I always recommend, they're like, oh, what should I start my garden with? I said, put in some fruit trees. We have a dozen blueberry bushes. We're getting ready to till an area to be acidified so we can get them in the ground. We love blueberries. And the one regret is we didn't do blueberries soon enough, right? Yeah. Because if I did them five years ago successfully, but we did do them, but my dogs decided to dig them up one day. Oh no.

26:52
It was not happy about that. Um, but anyhow, so we were at it again and, uh, you know, we went blueberry picking a few miles away from our house. And it was so just nice. And my wife's like, we gotta get more blueberries for, for our garden. Yeah. The, the, the battle cry or the, uh, clarion call for gardeners everywhere is we need to get more of whatever it is. Yes. You know.

27:19
Right now I am loving our thornless blackberries. So between our orchard, I put shrubs in. We got currants, erroneas, buffalo berry, and right now black thornless blackberries. I have raspberries elsewhere because I don't want them anywhere near my fruit trees to get all, you know, bit up with thorns. So we'll put them elsewhere. But the thornless blackberries are really nice because we're like I need three or four of them and you get clusters.

27:47
of giant blackberries. And it's so nice to go just walking through and you can stop at one bush and you can walk away with like, you know, a couple cups of blackberries and you still have, you know, 10 times that amount on the bush starting to ripen. So that's that's my favorite fruit right now going on in our orchard. What's a buffalo berry? Oh, a buffalo berry is a nitrogen fixing shrub.

28:14
So it actually puts nitrogen back into the ground, so to speak. And the jury's still out on how much it does, how much it doesn't, but I thought, well, I'll just try it. They're not really edible for us. The birds love them. And that's one thing in an orchard is, you know, your winged friends, you really want them around despite, you know, maybe they're going to eat some of your currants or they're going to eat some of your fruit because they take care of like all your pests. So you know, you get the kingbird.

28:43
he's my favorite bird to see in the garden and to see in the orchard because he'll eat more caterpillars and winged pests and any other bird out there than your bluebirds, of course, and your wrens. So the buffalo berry is kind of there and we just do it to feed the birds. So they're not really something for us to eat, but they're native out in the, out further west, out in the Colorado areas. And that's where I got them from a small family who has them. And...

29:13
You know, they do okay. It's not like I'm gonna get a thousand of them, but they're kind of fun. Okay. I'd never heard of Buffalo Berry, so I thought I would ask. We're almost at 30 minutes, and I don't know how much time you have. I mean, I can go for another 15 if you want, but my main question left that I have is how did you get into this? Oh, well, gardening in general? Well, yes, and the business.

29:39
Well, gardening in general, so the family, my family's were gardeners for the most part, growing up and my grand, my grandfather, some of my uncles were big time gardeners. My mom did like to garden. Um, I was really busy all the time. It was raising five boys, so we can be a handful. So it was kind of exposed to gardening. And then my brother passed away at when I was 12 and gardening was sort of a healing activity for me.

30:09
and you can get your hands dirty, you can, it really helped get me through, you know, through that, through that, his death. And so gardening kind of always stuck with me and I learned more about it going into my teenage years and it was just always a joy and I always loved gardening. And I was toying around with an organics counselor, you know, when you become a junior or senior in high school about different career options. And you know, I said, well, I think I'm just going to go.

30:36
start a garden center, maybe go to school for business or this and that, but probably just do a garden center. Yeah, I really enjoyed gardening. She's like, oh, you know, you're so good at athletics and you have a good science and math score. She goes, I really encourage you to think about engineering or just something maybe a little bit, you know, different path. And I went down different paths, of course. And then it was okay. I really enjoyed my careers. But when I left the

31:05
we sort of came up to the driftless area. I was like, gosh, I really, you know, missed the gardening side. And I said, I'm just gonna start a gardening business. We have this old 90 year old barn. It's a perfect place to start some operations. And I really wasn't planning on being open to the public. I just really wanted to have some fun selling seed and bulbs and maybe growing some things around the sale. And, you know, people would just start coming at all hours of the day. Oh, can I come see your farm? Can I come see your garden?

31:33
And we start talking, I start showing. And I told my wife, I said, we just are gonna have to open up our own farm and have a garden shop here. And it's been a joy. It really has been a blessing for us. Wow, that's a great story. You think we may have the same thing happening here next year. We put in a heated greenhouse this May. Oh, lovely. And we're going to be doing bedding plants and hanging.

32:03
hanging flower pots, you know, like you would buy it. Walmart only, ours will probably be better, maybe. And that kind of thing. And we're just gonna have people come in and pick out what they want. You know, they're gonna come into the greenhouse. So I suspect that if all goes well, keep your fingers crossed for us that all goes well next year because this year's been a bitch.

32:27
It'll be really fun to have people come see what that greenhouse has done for us over this winter and next year. Oh, yeah. And I would say that, you know, even think about things that aren't in your area. So I know the hanging baskets are fun and they're exciting. You know, there's a lot of demand, but there's a lot of supply. And I would challenge to think about what makes up your baskets to be sort of the colors people are looking for. But

32:54
to be a little bit more drought tolerant. And one thing I know from a lot of the successful growers, when I bring in hanging baskets or I have them grown for me, I get the bigger baskets. I want the 12 inch or 14 inch baskets, minimum. I do not want the 10 inch, I do not want the eight to nine inch because they dry out so fast. And I tell folks, I said, you know, a hanging basket is really just, these are all kind of temporary baskets.

33:20
for you. You really got to think about the plants that you're going to want to grow, they're going to need more food, they're going to need soil. Every basket you almost get, you almost need to put into a bigger container and you should almost have a permanent container of some sort. So 14 and so as you're going down this path of thinking, you know, some of these items that make them a little bit more low maintenance, you know, you can, you can actually command a bit of a higher price.

33:46
But if you're pointing out these things for people, that they don't have to like come late July and then their baskets are looking like, oh my gosh, there's no soil left, it's all roots. What happened here? It's very common things I hear quite a bit. Yeah, I also was thinking that it would be really fun to have some baskets and the compost or whatever we're gonna put in the bottom of them, whatever growing, there's a word, I can't think of it. Medium. We call it medium, medium. Yeah, medium.

34:15
having them come and pick out the seedlings for the flowers they want in their hanging basket and teaching them how to make one of their own. Oh, absolutely, and then you just sit there, they pack it, and then you grow it out for them in the heat. And there's a lot of fun with that. It's kind of like make your own bouquets and make your own baskets. It really becomes a big deal for them. Yeah, and I'm like the least social person on earth, and I just said that on a podcast. I don't know what I'm thinking.

34:45
No, it's fine. The podcast, I'm not required to be with actual people. I just talk to people. I don't have to be in the same room with them. And I just said that I would like to have a class on how to make a hanging flower basket. I don't know what I'm thinking, but maybe it'll work. Who knows? All right. So anyway, Andre, I don't feel like we talked.

35:08
about a whole lot of the other things that you're doing because I know you're doing other things, but this has been great. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Oh, no, thank you. We appreciate it. We're excited for this upcoming year. We have 2100 seeds that we'll be bringing in and they started arriving this past week, so it's going to be really exciting. Yeah, I love, love, love when seeds come in the mail and I can look at the packets if it's the packet and be like, oh,

35:38
we're going to be buying seeds soon and they probably won't come in a packet, they'll probably come in a bag because we're going to buy bigger amounts. If you buy bigger amounts, yeah, we sometimes will have like 10 pound bags of the wildflower seed. We'll get them in 25, 50, 100 pound sacks and it's always just like daunting to me to think how many seeds are in one of these 25 or 50 pound sacks. There's a lot of seeds in there. So many, yes. And...

36:04
In about four months, it'll be time for garden company catalogs to be coming in the mail, and that's always fun too. It is. Well, thanks for having me, Mary, and appreciate it. Absolutely. I really, really do appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.