80milesnorth, Millbrook, NY (2026)

Hudson Valley Flower Farmer
👩‍🌾Empty 🪹 turned sustainable flower farmer
🌸compost turner, soil builder, wildlife advocate
🌱obsessed with dahlias, books & nature-inspired living

05/27/2026

The Chelsea haul, as promised.

A few things I came home with:
🌿 Jane Hogben mug. Hand-thrown, hand-painted, just feels right in your hand.

🌿 Louise Condon vase. I have a weakness for vases.

🌿 Holland Cooper gilet and garden clogs. The unofficial uniform of the British countryside, and now of mine.

🌿 Burgon and Ball neon pruners. Pruners you can actually find in the garden.

🌿 Earl Grey from Fortnum and Mason. Because of course.

🌿 And the book stack: A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners by Peter Parker, The Given World by Melissa Harrison, Grow 5 by Lucy Bellamy, and How Does Your Garden Grow by Milli Proust.

Going to the Chelsea Flower Show is going to see the best of gardening, all gathered in one place. You come home tired, inspired, and quietly determined to do a little more on your own patch. I can’t wait to get my hands on the Plant of the Year- Hosta Red Ninja 🔥

05/22/2026

Next week I’m planting dahlias, and here’s exactly how I’ve prepped the beds.

My soil came back with phosphorus at 143 ppm. Dahlias need 30 to 50. So my shopping list looks nothing like the standard dahlia-planting advice.

What I’m skipping:
🚫 Bone meal
🚫 Rock phosphate
🚫 Bloom boosters
🚫 Fertilizers like 10-10-10
🚫 Manure-based compost (probably how I ended up here in the first place

Anything with a high middle number on the bag is a no for my soil this year. That middle number is phosphorus, and mine is already triple what my plants can use.

What I’m adding:
🌸 Elemental sulfur to slowly lower my pH from 7.2 which will unlock the nutrients already in my soil
🌸 Sulfate of potash: dahlias are heavy potassium feeders and mine is low
🌸 Feather meal for slow steady nitrogen (dahlias actually want less nitrogen than most people think, too much gives you leaves instead of flowers)
🌸 Kelp for trace minerals and a little boron, which my soil is light on
🌸 Mycorrhizal inoculant on the tubers at planting, fungi that partner with the roots and help plants access the phosphorus and micronutrients already locked up in my soil

That’s it.

Five amendments, every one of them tied to a number on my soil test. No guessing.

Remember, your soil is the only expert on your soil.

05/20/2026

It’s dahlia planting season, which means the Facebook groups and Instagram comments are full of one question: “What should I add when I plant my tubers?”

The answer that gets handed out like candy is bone meal in the hole. Toss a scoop in, plant the tuber, done. 😤😤😤

The advice is well-meaning. It’s just not the right advice for every soil. For mine, it would be the worst thing I could do.

Here’s why:
🌸 My phosphorus is at 143 ppm. Dahlias need 30 to 50.
🌸 Phosphorus behaves nothing like nitrogen. Nitrogen washes through your soil with every rain. Phosphorus binds to soil particles and stays put. Researchers actually call it “legacy phosphorus” because soils can hold high levels for a decade or more after you stop adding any.
🌸 Too much phosphorus blocks iron and zinc, which shows up as yellow leaves, weak stems, and smaller blooms.
🌸 So people add more fertilizer to “fix” it, and the cycle gets worse.

And before anyone thinks I’m pointing fingers, I’m the one who got my own bed into high-phosphorus territory. 😩

More on that in Pt. 3.

Your soil is the only expert on your soil. Test it before you add something it may or may not need because you can’t un-add phosphorus.

Next Tuesday’s Greenhouse Newsletter goes deeper on phosphorus if that’s your thing. Link in bio to subscribe.

Pt. 3 is coming with what I’m using instead, and how I think I ended up with high phosphorus levels in the first place.

05/18/2026

Let’s be honest, “what’s in your soil” might be the least sexy sentence on the internet. Stay with me though. 🥱

I almost scrolled past this topic myself. For years I was literally just throwing things on my soil because I saw someone online do it. Sound familiar?🙋‍♀️

Then I took two soil science classes at (the New York Botanical Garden), and it was genuinely eye-opening.

Turns out “that person on the internet,” me included, often has no idea what they’re actually doing to their soil. So, please don’t do what I did.

Here’s what made it click: I plant about 800 tubers a year. Conservatively, those run $10 to $15 each. I’m putting somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000 into the ground every single season.

If a financial advisor told you to drop even a few hundred dollars into something, you’d ask what’s in the portfolio? What are the risks, the returns, what could go wrong?

But here’s the thing. Whether you’re planting 20 tubers or 500, you’re putting real money into the ground. At $10 to $15 each, even a modest 20 to 50 dahlias is $200 to $750 invested, and most of us plant it into soil we’ve never actually questioned. 🧐

So I finally got a basic soil test. The results?

My phosphorus is THREE TIMES what dahlias actually need (that’s the P in NPK). I was low on both nitrogen (N) and potassium(K). My pH came back at 7.2, when dahlias want closer to 6.5 to 7.0.

That last number might look minor, but it’s not. Soil pH is basically the gatekeeper for everything else. When pH drifts too high, it can lock plants out of the micronutrients already sitting in the soil, like iron, manganese, zinc, and others.

The nutrient is right there in the soil, the plant just can’t access it. So you can have “enough” on paper and still have a hungry plant.

Here’s the lesson: feeding your soil means nothing if your plants can’t get to the food. And adding things blindly, just because you saw it online or a friend told you to, isn’t feeding your soil. It’s gambling with it.

Stay tuned for part 2 where I tackle the piece of gardening advice that is straight up nails on a chalkboard for me: “just throw so

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