HIEEEEE
I was in Fairway the other night... (and for those of you located outside NYC; Fairway is a small tri-state area franchise , and there happens to be one located not 5 blocks from me in Red Hook Brooklyn. This mirage of food - what with it's international delectables, cheap olive oil, plethora of nuts and other sundries - not to mention a cheese section worthy of my attention 5 days a week - comes with a price. That price is not being able to cross the street in my neighborhood on a sunday afternoon when I'm just trying to walk the dog and have to watch yuppie mobiles from park slope and beyond terror through our tiny hamlet on their way to enjoy the same god-given right (for now) of shopping for groceries but must they drive 50 miles an hour on Van Brunt Street and must they careen their shopping carts down the dairy asile as if no one else is browsing for keifer? Am I ranting again? Sooo SORRY!!!)...and a toddler in a shopping cart suddenly blurted out "Daddy that lady does NOT look happy." There I was, just trying to buy buckwheat. (I have crazy ideas about buckwheat, you don't even KNOW!) The girl's poor father was mortified but I was suddenly enlightened - what a better way to remember to hold steady, even in the supermarket and remember my recent mantra: After thirty - always be smiling. ALWAYS be smiling. When you're in your early 20's frowning can be cute (I would argue that's how I landed Eric) but now a days too many grumpy looks are governed by gravity. Plus, I'm a Finn - we frown professionally and sadly are not known for aging well. Except you dad!!

This was going to be a post about how you should come to our store to stock up on last minute gifts. But really what you should come out for is to witness Eric and I getting along again after a fairly epic argument that ended with Eric sleeping on the couch earlier this week. It's been a long stressful year. Being in business with your spouse is tricky. My mother got me a book years ago called "Entrepranurial Couples." It's laying around somewhere. She asks me where it is once in a while; and I remind her that the author was once in business with her partner and now they are divorced. You think they would keep that off the liner notes.

Just when my wedding season rolls to a close, his retail soap sales skyrocket. We're on different planes. The stress of the season ends up coming home with us. Resentment ensues. We do the very best we can but it's not always pretty. I'm crazy about Eric, but I'm also crazy about my work and the result of that is complicated.

Where am I going with this? My head has been in the clouds the last few days. I'm not editing. But I did just book a flight tonight. Separate vacations. Tonight we have to pull it together and go to another holiday party. Good nite.

plant bulbs in fall for spring flowers, so I've been told.

With the Indian winter we've been having (don't get me started) I've been able to extend my bulb planting into December. Which seems banana's when I write that down - DECEMBER - but it's true none the less.

Let the record show that to date, 2,450 bulbs (and 10 peony tubers) have been planted at Worlds End. A lot of those are fritillaria which are tiny bulbs and sure help boost the numbers. Crocus bulbs also cheat like that. They're so tiny; you just toss them into a prepared bed. Shoveling the dirt onto them and singing "Good Nite Little Babies! Sleep tight!"

Figuring out where to put all these little suckers was quite a challenge. There's a lot of soggy ground, and bulbs in general don't tolerate wet feet. It seems there's also a lot of VOLES and MOLES around these parts and - please do yourself a favor and do not google-image moles; especially do not google-image "star nose mole..." DO NOT...

I digress. You know the difference between a mole and a vole? I do happen to know because I live in a place where this difference comes down to the safety of 2,450 bulbs planted snuggly in beds I dug with me own hands and amended with peat and covered with mulch and edged (sometimes) with stones. Voles eat bulbs, moles do not. There it is. Voles are the real enemy here, and as it turns out, they are the cute ones. But cute or not, they've already chewed up dozens of "ruby giant" crocus planted around a mountain ash, and so those burrowing nocturnal fuzzies are going down. I'm not getting a cat yet - but I'm real fucking close.

Digging these beds went in a few stages; once we figured out where to put them we had to start digging them. Which is easier said than done. In children's books I imagine it's like: Shovel! Dig! Plant! Water! Bloom!; one step leads to the next in a sort of picture-book ease. The progression of steps I experienced this fall was a bit different, and came complete with spousal arguments (One titled "Who's fucking garden is this anyway?" shines especially bright in my memory as does "If you really loved me you'd help me dig this.")

Then there were the rocks. So many rocks around here. Which explains all the rock walls in the forest. This is what people must have done with their children instead of television; Go build a rock wall. Why? Because I said so. If we ever have children I have to make sure that all of the rock walls are disassembled, the rocks scattered so I can make them do that work again. It's good honest work. [Speaking of children, here's a great idea for your kids next birthday party; An Archeological Dig Party! Get 10 of them together in birthday hats and give them all shovels. Have them start digging for treasure in your planned tulip bed, instructing them to remove the rocks to neat piles on the side. When they complain that after hours of digging all they have is a big rock pile, explain to them that Howard Carter dug for YEARS before finding Tutankhamun's tomb, and how serious are they about archeology anyway? If anyone starts crying, quickly serve ice cream.]

Then there was the triumphant trip down to the Agway to buy mulch - in bulk - a notion which, in the spectrum of gardeners excitement, lands pretty damn close to ... ok I have to keep this clean ...
"You got a truck?" the girl says to me when I request a cubic yard. Oh yeah I got a truck...

A truck with a cap on it. And so the gentleman who was supposed to use the back hoe to dump the mulch into the truck dumped it instead in the middle of the parking lot and brought me a shovel. Do you know what a cubic yard of mulch looks like? It's more than you think, trust me.

So it went. Mulching is the most fun part, I could spread mulch all day and be happy as a clam. We'll see what happens come April.

evening post.

We worked later than usual at the studio on tomorrow's weddings and then I went to the grocery.
Came home, showered, picked up my clothes off the floor, fixed dinner. Lamb chops, potatoes, garlic aioli. I really love condiments. Fixed peanut butter sandwiches for staff tomorrow. Look at email. Open wine. I am so exhausted that when I saw the wine was a screw off top instead of a cork screw I said a silent prayer of thanks for the bit of saved effort.

I've been trying to keep up with yoga, but had to skip a class this afternoon which makes me cross. Things get hectic exercise is the first thing that gets dumped. With the farm shit and flower shit I've been trying to be diligent about the stretching and massage so to keep my body working smoothly. Can't find a good masseuse. They all play it too nice.

What I really need this week is a sanitarium that specializes in revitalization and meditation and whatever else. Throw some broiled fish and jasmin rice up in there, some freakin green tea and shit. Have a specialist come in and take all the muscles out of my back and soak them in milk for a few hours. Un-kink them all, and then arrange them back in there. When I check out of the place, the valet brings around a sweet little powder blue 1981 jaguar XJ-S convertible.
Blinded by daylight I pull out my wrap around oakley blades.
"I'm sorry, but this is not my car."
"Yes Ms. Ryhanen, it is."

And then I realize it is. It is my car. How long have I been here?
__

*PS We've posted new flower school classes over at Little Flower School, and there's a free class give away - check it out before Monday when we call the winner. Professor Nickles and I have been zeroing in on teaching ideas lately. Next to be announced is a weekend warrior weddings 101 class (a two-day extravaganza geared towards people looking to expand and hone their wedding work) and a freaking nut-zo class at Garden Valley Rose Farm in California. So stay tuned for those...Hey - I hope you have a really lovely weekend.

in which www.saipua.blogspot.com becomes a home renovation blog

At some point I had envisioned a formal portrait of us in front of our house. You know...real stoic and shit. We might get around to it one day. That fantasy was followed by pictures of me in a fields of flowers I had grown myself, snip-snipping, but pictures like that require too much effort to stage. It seems life blows by while you're desperately trying to set shit like that up. Maybe one thing I've started to understand about farming - in the microsecond we've been at it - is that time is of the essence.



But more on the gardening part another time. Tonight, we talk plaster. But Wait! Safety first! Cue the plaster-removal-hazmat-suit-striptease please!!!

So in a time before sheet rock, or even the time when a contractor was a person you could call for such matters; people used to mix gypsum dust with water and horse hair and then slather it over thin parallel strips of wood called lath to make walls. Bear with me, I'm learning.

Through a quick series of events it became clear to us that if we wanted to really "fix up" our little money pit (and this is where we shrink down to micro type - and if you're already bored with the direction of this post, as someone like myself may have been in the not too distant past, than please skip ahead. Lets play choose you're own adventure! ready?

You fall into a property with a 200 year old greek revival that has never been renovated. To be clear; Ever. A reputable contractor advises you to tear it down and put up a module. A second opinion lands you with a builder named Ivan who strikes you as so trustworthy, so right as rain, it's rather off-putting. (Read: NYC Contractors) Anyway Ivan... he throws around practically pornographic series of words like "wood cooking stove" and "staircase to the sleeping loft" like there's no tomorrow. One thing Ivan makes perfectly clear is that the house will continue to fall apart unless you get all the moisture out of it - you have to put in a new dry foundation. Ivan is smart, and he talks about the house in terms of it being a "museum piece" which sure is neat. He suggests you pull out all the plaster walls and lath to relive downward pressure on the foundation for when his crew jacks up the central beams...

Do you follow his advise and run to Ace Hardware for respirators and a crow bar...?

-or-

Do you.. --- actually there is no other path in this story, so shall we just quietly exit this little game? Those books were always mildly disappointing in the end, were they not?



So for the past few weeks I've been orbiting between plaster removal, plantings and making weddings. On plaster days we make a little coffee, fry some eggs on the grill and then suit up hazmat style. We work all day ripping off layers of wallpaper (7 layers deep in some rooms), chipping away at plaster, horse hair and lath and hauling the debris out in (what use to be flower) buckets. We spread it through the forest in a thin line, the first layer of what will become a path through the woods to the beaver pond and eventually my walled-in secret garden.



It sounds all very charming doesn't it - and there are a few small moments that it feels charmed. Not the moment when a iota of plaster lodged in my left eye for an afternoon, or when we found a rapture of century old fly carcasses between walls, each of us silently whispering to ourselves "museum piece, museum piece" as we vacuumed them up with the antique hoover left in the house from another era.

We'll see.

night at the museum

Oh ART! You're so quirky and full of contradictions!





Go figure. I used to be a part of this world in a different way - now I just make flowers for it. Which suits me better I suppose.
My father, who recently learned how to look at my blog on the internet will look at this exhibition - a retrospective of works by Maurizio Cattelan at the Guggenheim - and laugh. Without going down the rabbit hole of art critique - I will say that a kneeling statue of Hitler hung 30 feet in the air as part of a massive mobile makes for a rather challenging backdrop to shoot photos of flowers.



Anyway, we were honored to supply some greenery for the occasion of the museum's annual gala, and honored even more when Brian Eno, milling about prior to the event commented that the flowers were rather "tasteful." Deanna melted, I furiously twittered it, and we got back to work.



We even had time for a little stroll by central park; the girls appropriately suited in their upper east side attire, sipping $5 ginger sodas from Dean & Deluca. Thanks to the museum staff for being so easy to work with, accomodating and for letting us in to the after party. It was a fun day.

notes.

Currently I am sitting in the McDonalds of Cobbleskill, NY. Looking perhaps a little bit like a deer in headlights as I survey the room trying frantically to hammer out a few emails. Turns out deer are the thing that most of the people sitting here with me are after this weekend.

Said my new friend Bob; "My son got a three pointer yesterday!"

I had to look 3 pointer up on the internet. From what I can tell, it has to do with antlers.

Anyway this particular wifi hotspot is the center of the universe for me right now, broadcasting to you loud and clear this anthurium arrangement from last weekend, clicking the McDonalds Terms of Access checkbox hastily signing over my life, my liver, my ability to remember decent coffee.

Actually the coffee isn't that bad. Nor are the people in here that unsightly. There are those McDonalds you visit where everyone is sick-looking and wearing the classic sweatpant/ haltertop combo (difficult to pull off correctly). Here it looks like a bunch of fit farmers and hunters in buffalo plaid with interesting knife holsters hanging off their belts. Which makes me feel that perhaps I'm in some sort of fast food time machine, but - check again and my coffee cup is made of state of the art 2012 styrofoam.

Almost December and it's 65 degrees here today. Among other things I'm concerned about regarding the farm, dying trees is at the top of my to-research-list. Need to start putting in Palms next spring.

Been working on pulling out the plaster walls at the house. Been trying to fix my bulb beds - so many lessons I've already learned and mistakes made. It's humbling but exciting. Good for me struggle a bit and learn new things. Collecting fallen timber from the forest for a teepee for Nicolette to stay in. Nea's been doing a whole lot of nothing, and I may be starting to resent her for it.



She knows it.

{Anthurium, one of my new favorite flowers, grace this wedding arrangement of forsythia foliage, astrantia, tulips, roses, ranunculus and fushia.}

Thanksgiving.

Well, goodevening.

Happy Thanksgiving. Since that's where this rabbit hole has spit me out; we could start with that.

3:35 pm. My mother is making the necessary holiday preparations; there's a pancetta squash situation, a lot of sage being chopped. She makes it look effortless. I'm chained to my lap top; practically starving to death. Can't I have morsel to eat please? NEIN! She's german.

No she's not.

My father is in at the computer - last I checked - watching youtube videos of people crashing in planes. It's a festive day.

We break from our various projects to sample a pumpkin pie that came out of the oven first.

Now we've settled back in to work. Dad is out cutting wood stumps; props we'll use at next weekend's wedding. Eric is downstairs in the soap kitchen squirreling away bars for our Brooklyn shop. My mother; likely composing thoughtful yet firm emails to demanding wholesale clients. I bring her a cup of coffee after I finish peeling the potatoes.

Life just goes forward doesn't it? The mundane, everyday and the extraordinary - all lumped together in passing time.

Cocktail hour is not until 6:30, but here's toasting to you and yours this Thanksgiving...to peace where it may exist in patches on this earth, to my friend Josh from NASA who says he can reverse climate change, to coffee klatches, to roaming packs of dogs, to family businesses, to farming, to plaster dust and to flowers.

I've got some freaking neat shit to tell you about. In time.

Till then, you know what? You can bake the stuffing in the turkey.