Finally, with the late cold weather and snow, I get to sit down and write and work on our new website, which we just launched with big news for 2025.  To see all that we are up to visit us at www.littlefarm.life  In the meantime, the ranunculus and anemones are properly tucked into our hoop houses with an added layer of frost cloth.  I am determined to not lose my ranunculus this year, as the freeze of 2024 really took a toll. 

Our sweet peas, planted in December will survive or they won’t.  Between the birds hammering their little leaves and the recent fierce cold winds, who knows what will survive, but that’s okay, we have backups growing in the greenhouse. It certainly didn’t help that we made a lame attempt to cover the sweet peas with a caterpillar tent that immediately ripped apart in that intense wind.  It would have been better to just let the snow cover the starts, insulating and protecting them from icy winds. Every day, a new lesson. 

Still, there is so much happening on our Little Farm.  A giant dead fir, which has had a slow decline over the past four years, was cut down and this March it will be replaced with three cool ornamentals.  We are adding a whole line up of dwarf crabapples to our heirloom apple orchard.  The grapes have been properly pruned and we are working on the darn blister mites now wintering in their trunks.  We will fight back with predatory mites soon.   Not all is work.  We are having fun making small batch tallow-based soaps, balms and salves to offer online and in our farm stand.  You may have picked up a sample pot of our lip balm at the last Garden Club gathering to learn about insects. 

Why soaps and why tallow?  Because it’s in line with our philosophy, the flowers we grow that have skin nourishing qualities and tallow makes a great skincare product that is super good for your skin and a recent addition to our team, happens to be a natural botanical chef.  Early last fall, I met Colleen Glasser, who came to our flower farm to pick up some bouquets for an event at the hatchery.  We were super busy with visitors, and I was in a fluster running in a bunch of directions assisting U-picks and answering questions from folks visiting the farm.  I asked Colleen if she was in a hurry for those bouquets and thankfully, she wasn’t.  In fact, she was genuinely interested in flower farming and started asking questions.  I stopped everything, grabbed some buckets and snips, and started walking Colleen around the farm, chatting about the flowers we were picking and how they worked in a bouquet.  We brought several buckets of flowers up to my glass greenhouse and we spread all the flowers in one long row on a worktable to start assembling.  I showed Colleen how to put together a bouquet, the first rule being, if it pleases you, it will please others.  I quickly shared a few basic bouquet design principles such as the “3, 5, 8 rule”.   Pick three different types of anchor flowers like dahlias or roses, five stems of greenery such as nine bark or Joe Pie, and eight stems of filler such as zinnias, cosmos and status to help create structure.  She took up the charge of bouquet making and created five stunning bouquets. 

Next thing you know, Colleen had moved to Orcas Island and is now helping me flower farm.  An exceptional cook but tired of cheffing for a living, Colleen brought another unique passion to the farm, making natural soaps, salves and balms.  She had played with tallow as the base fat for soap making but mainly made soaps with plant-based fats such as coconut, shea butter, and castor oil, which is an amazing fat.  The more we researched, the more we were intrigued by the many benefits of tallow to restore lipids that tuck in moisture lost from hot showers and harsh soaps that strip our natural and protective oils from our skin. 

We are making a purely plant-based line of skincare too, but tallow is an effective moisturizer and provides many skin health benefits.  And it’s sustainable, making it an excellent choice for skincare enthusiasts looking for a more eco-conscious and skin-nourishing product.  It’s rich in vitamin E and essential fatty acids like oleic acid, which nourishes and protects the skin.  We are sourcing our animal-based fats from Lum Farm, which is a sustainable choice for consumers who want to reduce their environmental impact.  We package our products in paper tubes, glass jars and metal tins, all recyclable with no plastic involved, even our stickers are paper. 

All our soaps take six weeks to properly cure.  When our farm stand opens in March or whenever the tulips get their game on for bouquet making, we will offer these special soaps.  In the meantime, visit us online for a full line up of tallow-based salves and balms to help get your skin through a belated cold spell on our magnificent island.