Season of Brides

We were pretty much ready to hang the “Summer That Never Was” tag on this one and be done with it. Chill gray mornings, faded sunlight when Old Sol has shown his face, rain on Labor Day–rain on Labor Day! We’ve gone swimming on Labor Day in other years. This year, fugeddaboutit.

That said, this weather has at least one upside–our flower gardens are blooming like gangbusters. The dahlias (those not poisoned with herbicide-tainted compost–see our Aug. 6, Clopyralid Redux post,) zinnias, marigolds and sunflowers, all are exploding in these cool, wet days.

And a good thing too, because we’ve got another crop flourishing around here now–brides. Every week seems to bring another wave of excited young women, (some with  confused-looking grooms-to-be in tow,) intent on planning every last detail of their weddings down to the last delphinium. 

It should be noted here for those readers not from this part of the country that June–the traditional wedding month elsewhere–is at best a crapshoot if you are planning an outdoor wedding around here. July is a better bet, especially the second half of the month, but if you really want to stack the weather odds in your favor the experts say stick with August and September.

Not this year, of course. This summer has been so weird that Rebecca tells brides to check in with her 24 hours before the ceremony so they can decide whether she should be making indoor or outdoor flower arrangements.

Still, the parade of brides trooping through the farm’s gardens to see their wedding flowers in the making is at full march these days.

A couple of plugs here. Our brides are often referred to us by our friends Hollis and Anne, who run The Farm Kitchen, one of the nicest and most interesting wedding venues in the area. We’ve also done quite a bit of work lately with the wedding people at Port Gamble, another beautiful spot to tie the knot.

Among her many talents, Rebecca is a floral designer and she spends a lot of time helping brides prep for what she inevitably refers to as “your special day.” During the garden tours, everyone usually ooohs and aaahs at the showy beds of dahlias and China Asters that seem to be putting on their own late summer fireworks display for the crowd.

It’s a nice break from the late-summer vegetable harvest, which can devolve into a bit of a treadmill six months into the season. The brides and their families go home happy and we generally feel pretty good ourselves. Now and then, a rogue bride will insist she must have lilacs or Lilies of the Valley or some other out-of-season flower that only blooms in Chile at this time of year, but most seem to crave the elegant simplicity of the bouquets we grow in our own gardens.

The bride’s bouquet is Rebecca’s piece de resistance and she usually takes hours getting it just right. “Only the most perfect flowers are suitable for the bridal bouquet,” she says. Bridal bouquets, in other words, are the all-star team of the flower garden.

Here’s a sample of Rebecca’s latest work done for a wedding over Labor Day weekend.

The bride was Jeannie Duncan and her wedding took place at St. Paul’s Church in the historic New England-style community of Port Gamble.

We bring all this up because one of the things that makes a microfarm like ours work is diversity. It is no secret that most big monocrop farms struggle to make money–a lot of wheat, corn and soybean operations would be in the red most years without government subsidies.

We don’t do subsidies–diversity is our profit-making secret and brides are critical piece of that mix. When the economy cuts into restaurant sales, our CSA takes up the slack. In the slow season before the CSA kicks in, the farmers market often comes through. And brides, well, nothing really seems to slow down the wedding business at this time of year.

We’re dating ourselves, but we always liked that old song that goes: “Another bride/ Another groom/ Another sunny honeymoon/ Another season, another reason/ for makin’ whoopee.”

It’s apt. We might wish  for a bit more sunshine in this Summer That Never Was, but bride season is our reason too for makin’ whoopee.

Persephone