2025 Recap
This past year was the biggest one yet for our business! We were presented with some incredible opportunities to scale up and expand our operation. The days were long, the weeks flew by, and somehow we are already at the beginning of a new year. If I had to sum up the year, it would be with these two phrases: more connection and increased production. More connection - because we really felt the love from our local community members as we opened our public-facing farm. Increased production - because basically every enterprise of ours was scaled up! At the beginning of the year we knew we were taking a big bite and the season was a marathon to keep chewing. We tried a lot of new things to see if we'd like doing them and if you'd like them, too. As Jeremy likes to say, "we have a lot more information now." Now during the winter months we take time to digest, reflect, and make a plan for the year ahead.
Here is a recap of our very full past year and I hope you'll enjoy reading it. So many things happened - blessings and challenges - and there are too many to name them all, but here are a few of our biggest highlights in 2025:
In early 2025, we expanded to a second farm location just south of Mount Vernon. Formerly Morning Glory Farm, this 3-acre property was already set up with high tunnels, a greenhouse, a commercial kitchen, and a charming barn that we transformed into our Farm Store. We jumped right into production!
We grew so many nice flowers! By mid-March the high tunnels were fully planted with flowers - ranunculus, snapdragons, lisianthus, poppies, Bells of Ireland. Growing in high tunnels has been a game-changer this year, especially for our cut flowers. In previous years we typically have flowers for sale by the second week of June and are done harvesting by the middle of October. This year, we had an abundance of bouquets in early May and kept harvesting all the way through November. Growing in tunnels has extended our fresh flower season by 10 weeks! The season extension isn't the only benefit we saw. The flowers that we grew in the tunnel were typically much taller, sturdier, and overall of a higher quality than the same varieties grown in the field. It is so great to have these structures to grow in so we can offer flowers to our community for more weeks of the year.
We sold more flowers than ever before! We expanded our Flower CSA to 16 weeks and had 50 dedicated customers that received a weekly bouquet. The Flower CSA is the backbone of our floral program - thank you CSA members! We also handed over a lot of bouquets at the Iowa City Farmer's Market, our Farm Store, and the Cedar Rapids Downtown Market. This past year we began supplying New Pioneer Co-op in Cedar Rapids with ready-made retail bouquets and they often sold out in a day or two! I am blown away by the enthusiasm for our flowers and I am so glad that they bring you comfort and joy. You can bet we're growing even more for you next year =).
In April, Jeremy and I did a tractor dance and prepared the soil for our field grown crops. We created 36 4' x 90' beds, plus a triangular plot for our perennials. In the photo above you can see Jeremy using the chisel plow to address compacted soil and I'm running a disc. We then spread composted manure (thank you, sheep!) on the beds and tilled it in to incorporate. We started planting outside in mid-April and within a few weeks it was a very colorful site to see. I hope it brought joy to folks driving on Highway 1 to see all those flowers blooming!
The Farm Store opened the first weekend of May and stayed open until the Winter Solstice! We were open on Saturday mornings and Thursday afternoons. The shelves and tables were full of our own flower bouquets, fresh produce from neighboring farms, pasture-based and organic meats, our full herbal apothecary product line, and grocery/pantry items from regional farms and food businesses. We had an amazing community of regular customers that showed up most weekends to get their weekly groceries, as well as a steady stream of folks traveling in from other cities and places to check it out. We had guest vendors most Saturday mornings offering coffee, baked goods, produce, bread, pottery, soaps, and more.
Our Spring Plant Sale was our biggest to date! It was an amazing way to kick off our market season. We offered over 150 different varieties of garden starts including vegetables, herbs, native plants, and flowers as well as our own dahlia tubers. We sold somewhere in the realm of 8,000 starts. We really maxed out our two greenhouses and in May we were holding plants in the high tunnels, on trailers, on carts.. everywhere we could. Hah! I love greenhouse work and growing plant starts so I go a bit overboard. It is heartening to see so much enthusiasm in our local community for growing your own garden and landscaping with native plants. Our 2026 Plant Sale will be even bigger (even though our greenhouses aren't getting any bigger.. I'll work something out!) and we will open the Farm Store again in mid April.
On the other end of the season, we hosted a pre-Thanksgiving Harvest Market at the Farm Store. We had incredible turnout from customers and sent so much local food home that weekend! The Farm Store was well stocked with good food, storage vegetables, holiday gifts, and most exciting (to me): fresh flower bouquets! We had some beautiful winter-hardy bouquets of flowering kale, eucalyptus, sunflowers, and heirloom chrysanthemums - and they sold out in 2 hours! Outside we had other local vendors brave the chilly day to sell their fares: Buffalo Ridge Orchard, Abbe Hills Farm, Little Scratch Coffee, Local Crumb Bread, White Tree Bakery, Over the Moon Meats, and Andrea Williams with fresh evergreen wreaths. It was a perfect day to gather together and stock up on local food before the holidays.
In 2025 our herb fields became Certified Organic! We have always grown organically since beginning our farm in 2022. Organic standards requires a 36-month transition before fields that were farmed conventionally can be considered for organic certification, and this year we were able to submit all our documents and become certified. Growing organically is so important to us and we'll never grow any other way. Farming organically keeps harmful chemicals off our land, out of the waterways, and out of our bodies. It creates a healthier ecosystem for us all. We are proud to be an organic farm in Iowa. It is an extra expense and a lot of extra paperwork, but having a third party verify that we grow how we say we grow is priceless and it builds trust between us as the farmer and you as the consumer. We hope this is something you value, too.
We put up two new high tunnels at the home farm in the spring. This year we grew ginger and turmeric for the first time and these crops really benefited from the extra heat and bit of shade that a tunnel provides. The fresh ginger is really special and we are going to grow a lot more of it next year! The skins aren't cured which means they are tender and edible, and the whole root is still packed with spicy juicy ginger flavor.
Having two properties with equal amounts of horticultural growing space meant that we were able to separate out our production by location. The Mt Vernon farm is now the "flower farm" and our "home farm" (7 miles north of Mt Vernon) is where we raise our sheep and grow our medicinal and culinary herbs. We primarily grow herbs for our value-added herbal apothecary line of herbal tea blends, healing topical salves, culinary salt blends, and cocktail bitters. Now that our harvests are Certified Organic, the next step is to get our products certified as well. That's one big thing we are working on in 2026!
We were full season vendors at the Iowa City Farmer's Market again this year. This was our fourth year vending at the IC market and it was by far our best market season ever. Every Saturday we showed up with a van full of flower bouquets and almost every time we came home with empty buckets! To our Iowa City customers - thank you so much for your consistent support. While flower bouquets steal the show at our market stall, we brought a lot of other items as well. Each week we brought our herbal teas, cocktail bitters, and herbal salves. We also began selling retail cuts of our pastured lamb. We're planning on doing this again next year! Big thanks to Kim and Jeremy for being the lovely faces and hard workers that run our IC market stall!
Back at the home farm we had a busy year with our flock of sheep. If you didn't already know, Lamb's Quarter Livestock is our pastured lamb side of the business. Throughout the month of May over 200 lambs were born on pasture! Jeremy is the primary shepherd and handles the daily management of the sheep and our livestock guardian dogs, Willie and Oko.
In September we hosted a farm-to-table dinner with the chefs of Cobble Hill. The day started with a tour of the home farm and our pasture-based livestock operation. It was a warm day but we stayed hydrated with iced herbal tea and hung out with the rams in the shade. In the evening, guests gathered at the flower farm for cocktails and drinks. The chefs prepared two whole lambs: boned-out, sous-vide, and grilled over an open fire. The other plates featured local produce and were garnished with our edible flowers. It was all so delicious. Dinner was served family-style which is a perfect format for beautiful presentation of the food as well as getting to know your table-mates! It was an amazing evening and we hope to put on more of these farm-to-table dinners in 2026.
If you've read this far, then you know we took on quite a bit this year with expanding and scaling up all of our enterprises. None of it would be possible without our stellar team of employees - the Rhu Crew! Huge thank you to our 2025 field crew: Kim, Ashley, Addy, and Bryant, our market manager Laura, and a special shoutout to Anne, Sam, and Abby for stepping in regularly to help on the farm. I am so grateful for all of you!
We have a lot of exciting things planned for 2026! The best way to stay in touch with all we have to offer is to sign up for our weekly email newsletter. It contains information about what fresh produce is available in the Farm Store each week, what flowers are in season, upcoming events, and more. It's fun and packed with information!
I want to say a heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who has been a part of our journey. Whether you frequented the Farm Store or the Farmer's Market, purchased our products online, or cheered us on from afar - your support has kept us going. Stay tuned for an update on what's happening this year, coming in another blog post soon!
With gratitude,
Emma