80milesnorth

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

07/08/2026

I’ve been ignoring the signs, telling myself if I just did x, y, and z I’d get over the hump.

Turns out you can only ignore what your brain and body are telling you for so long.

I’m wiped out.

The things that usually bring me joy? I dread them right now.

On the days I don’t post, the relief is enormous. And that’s telling me something.

Honestly, how many more ways can I tell you to pinch your dahlias or get a soil test?

Here’s the thing: I’m more than a flower farmer, and I’m done wearing this straitjacket I strapped myself into.

If I want to talk about my ridiculous TBR pile, I will.

If I want to show you the two flower beds that are currently a complete disaster, I’ll do that too.

If that’s not your thing, scroll on by or unfollow. Genuinely, no hard feelings.

I’m an introvert, but I miss real connection. Over flowers, books, animals, life.

Lately I feel like a circus monkey performing for an algorithm, and that’s not connection.

I’m mulling over ways to bring more of that real connection here. I don’t know what it looks like yet, but I’d love for you to be part of figuring it out.

I’m taking a few days to just be. In the garden, in a book, with the animals. I’ll be back when it feels like showing up instead of performing.

And when I do, things might look a little different around here.

XO ~
L.

07/03/2026

Dear summer,

The truth is, you’ve changed. Every year you run hotter, and honestly? I can’t keep up.

I’m out here at 100 degrees, sweating through things I didn’t know could sweat, while you act like this is fine. It is not fine. It’s a lot.

And the mind games. Every morning I open the weather app, I see 50% chance of rain, I let myself hope and then?

Nothing.
Not a drop.

A smug little cloud with rain icon and a promise you never meant to keep. That’s not a forecast. That’s emotional manipulation.

You’re just not good to me and I deserve better. You’re definitely not good to my hair. And you’re brutal to my garden.

The zinnias love you, sure. But zinnias would bloom at your funeral.

I deserve a season that doesn’t leave me and half my beds a frizzy, overheated mess by 9 a.m.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the one part of you I’d miss is the flowers. But even that isn’t really yours. The dahlias don’t hit their stride until the nights cool and you’re long gone. That’s fall’s doing, not yours.

So this is goodbye. My hair and I are moving on to cooler, more emotionally available seasons.

Fall understands me. (Hello sweater weather!)

Winter would never do me like this.

It’s not me. It’s entirely you.

Wishing you the best (from a safe, air-conditioned distance),

Me 🍂❄️

07/01/2026

There are always a few tubers that are a bit slower to poke through the soil.

I really, and I mean really, try to resist the urge to see what’s happening underground.

It was now or never to replace any that were struggling, had rotted or somehow grew legs and walked away.

Luckily, this tuber was just fine. I I saw some sprouts, made sure the tuber was firm and not rotting, and covered it back up.

If you plan on doing this, go very slowly, you don’t want to break off sprouts!

Ended up replacing a few, so we’re good to go. Fingers crossed!

Ok, fess up- who’s done this?

06/24/2026

If I haven’t responded to your email, this may answer a few questions.

06/22/2026

Apologies, the captions are not working for me on IG today.

87% of dahlias have a virus!!!

That’s not a scare stat — it’s from the American Dahlia Society, and they tested people’s healthiest plants. Most of mine almost certainly have one too.

⚠️ But first: don’t confuse hungry with sick.
Nutrient deficiencies look almost exactly like a virus. That’s why I soil-tested instead of guessing. Turns out my beds were just a little short, an easy to fix. A virus isn’t.

So here’s the honest version nobody loves to say out loud:
🔸 There’s no cure once a plant is infected (well, almost no cure) 🔸 The most common one (Dahlia Mosaic) shows NO symptoms ~75% of the time 🔸 Testing runs ~$70+ per sample — impossible across a whole field 🔸 The ADS even paused its own clean-stock testing because the virus was everywhere

How does it spread?
🐛 Thrips  🐛 Aphids
🐛 Other sap sucking insects ✂️ Your own snips

Which is exactly why a strong IPM program matters. Keeping thrips and aphids in check is one of the few things actually in your control.

So what can you actually do?
🔹 Cull on sight. Painful if it’s a hard to get or new one, but it has to be done. 🔹 Pay to test (expensive, and thrips and aphids can re-infect anyway) 🔹 Grow them and enjoy them, virus and all
🔹 Use clean snips between each plant

One positive in all of this…
There IS one real way to get truly clean stock- meristem tissue culture. You grow new plants from a tiny piece of the growing tip, which usually outruns the virus. It’s how labs and a few farms make genuinely virus-free dahlias. Just slow and pricey, so it’s not a backyard fix.

I walk my field every day and pull what looks wrong, knowing full well I’m only catching the ones that show it.

Let’s talk about dahlia viruses: do you pull on sight? Test? Or just grow and enjoy?

Still figuring this out myself as I want to be growing the healthiest plants I can.

06/19/2026

I’m done planting dahlias!!!

This morning, the very last one went into the ground.

I have officially planted 1,044 dahlias this season. I dug every single hole myself, and it feels fitting that the final one is a dahlia I grew from seed.

In the fall of 2024, I collected a bunch of dahlia seeds. This particular seed came from Boom Boom White.

All of my seeds are open-pollinated, which means the bees do the heavy lifting and I only know the seed parent, not the pollen parent.

In the spring of 2025, I sowed the seeds in trays, potted them up into 4-inch pots, and eventually planted them directly into the ground—pot and all.

Dahlias grown from seed will produce tubers in their first year. This seedling formed a very dense clump of tubers. I won’t be planting seedlings this way again, though, as I’m trying to avoid adding more microplastics to my soil.

Growing seedlings as “pot tubers” does have some advantages. You can plant them more densely because the root systems stay contained and don’t compete with neighboring plants. And if a seedling turns out to be something you don’t want to keep, you can pull it out mid-season without disturbing the dahlias around it.

The following spring, you can take cuttings from those tubers. Instead of taking cuttings, I planted this one into a large container back in March. It’s now huge and just about ready to flower.

I can’t wait to see what this seedling does again this summer!

06/15/2026

To pinch or not to pinch? 🤏🤔

I am team pinch, and no it doesn’t mean you go around and literally pinch your plant.

I remove the central growth node of the plant.
➡️ encourages the plant to branch out
➡️ branching out = more flowers
➡️ creates a sturdier plant
➡️ creates a bushier plant

When I pinch:
➡️ when my plant is 8-12” tall
➡️ has 4-5 sets of leaves

I snap it off with my fingers, I don’t use scissors as those I have to disinfect between each plant so I don’t spread viruses.

Think of it this way…
Plants have a boss: the top growing tip. It releases a hormone that keeps the lower buds small so the plant grows up, not out.

Pinch off the top, and the “boss” is gone, so all those side buds explode into new growth. More stems = more flowers.

Some people don’t pinch seedlings as they want to see the flower quicker and decide whether it’s worth keeping around. I decided to pinch all of mine this year as my seedlings got really big and top heavy by the time they flowered.

Are you team pinch or team no pinch?

06/12/2026

Part 4 of 4: Planting a dahlia cutting 🌱

Before I get into it, let’s just get the obvious out of the way…
1️⃣ The hair- get used to it. I’ve got curly hair, I fight it, but the humidity wins. Every time.
2️⃣ Me covered in dirt- also normal for this time of year.
3️⃣ Planting tubers- yup, I’m behind but I don’t care. I spent the last few weeks creating amazing memories with my parents.

Ok, let’s get down to business. Dahlia cuttings!

I’m going to say it, I do not care for those spongy cubes (don’t want to single a company out) that a lot of growers use to start cuttings. I personally find they inhibit tuber growth and they are bad for the environment.

I personally don’t use them when I grow my own cuttings.

I do try and remove as much as I can from the cutting when I receive it, but when you get cuttings that are root bound, it’s hard to remove the growing cube without damaging the roots.

To circumvent the growing cube issue, I plant the cutting really deep. I remove a few sets of leaves. In this video, I removed 2 sets. Roots and tubers will grow from the buried nodes.

I sprinkle a tbsp of micchorhizea around the roots, place the plant in the hole and backfill. I don’t always stake them individually, but we have had some summer storms roll in so I want to make sure the stem is stable.

Last thing I do is pinch the central growth tip to encourage branching.

Fingers crossed I get some good tubers from this cutting.

Address

Millbrook, NY
12545

Website

http://www.80milesnorth.com/

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