Magnolia Wedding & Seeds are Sprouting
Last week was our second wedding of the year. This time at The Pines Black. Man what a gorgeous venue.
The vision of this wedding was simplicity with neutrals, dried flowers and lots and lots of magnolia leaves. Luckily we were able to source magnolia leaves from Florida and California before all the beautiful soft brown texture shedded from the leaves. When magnolia is in season they are dark green on one side of the leaf and have a soft brown texture on the back side (see below). When their season is done, they shed the backing and it looks icky. I had no idea that happened and with great resources we are learning every day!
For the ceremony we designed a double layer of magnolia garland for the triangle arch.
Head table and guest tables were a combination of magnolia with seeded eucalyptus garland and bud vases provided by the couple.
One sweet touch of garland on their welcome sign in the entry way to welcome all their friends and family to celebrate their day of marriage.
Fresh flowers sourced from The Floral Reserve in Providence, Rhode Island
Dried flowers sourced from Charlies Little and Co in Eugene, Oregon
Garland sourced from The Floral Source who purchased from FernTrust and Camflor
What a fun ride to bring all these resources together to make this magical day happen with a large portion being from American flower farms!
And then for the seeds! OMG it feels good to get seeds in trays. Last year, my original plan was to build hoop houses/plastic tunnels to get a jump start and plant around April 1st meaning I started seeds in January. Well I am trial and error type of gal. The hoops didn’t go that great for us and the weather is so unpredictable that the ground was still frozen. So we decided this year going forward we are always going to plan on May 15th to start our planting.
This gives us a few month break of growing to start plans for the following year. It also means if we have 10’ of snow, like we do now on April 1st there is a lot of time to get seedlings healthy and happy when the ground is ready for them.
We are also trying no till on the gardens this year. That is a big step in trust by doing something that is totally different than we are used to but we gotta try it out. No till means exactly that, not using a garden tiller to break up the soil in the spring before planting. This year we are going to add 1-2” of compost to the beds and plant.
We heard it is better on the earth, creates better nutrients for the plants and it is a heck of a lot easier on our bodies.
Seeds we started so far:
2 types of Feverfew
6 types of Foxglove
Bells of Ireland
Chinese Forget-me-not
Columbine
2 types of Delphinium
2 types of Lace Flower
2 types of Larkspur
2 types of Rudbeckia
