One of the exciting changes for Butternut Gardens this year will be a weekly trip to Brooklyn, NY to deliver directly to several studio designers, who are working with locally-grown blooms. Last year, when I participated in a Business of Flowers Workshop taught by Jennie Love and Ellen Frost of Local Color Flowers (Baltimore, MD), at Jennie Love's LoveNFresh Farm in Philadelphia, I met several floral designers from Brooklyn and Manhattan. One of these designers was Rachel Gordon of Taproot Flowers in Brooklyn. Rachel has been after me ever since to see if she could somehow work with flowers from Butternut Gardens. Rachel only works with flowers sourced locally from within a 200 mile radius. While USDA actually defines "local" as being within a 400 mile radius, Rachel and Taproot Flowers stands by her 200 mile definition. Ellen Frost is Rachel's number one role model, since over a decade ago Ellen started up Local Color Flowers using only locally-sourced flowers. Both Ellen and Rachel are extremely supportive of local farmers and local farming, and Jennie Love is a Farmer Florist extraordinaire. Thank you!

Rachel, owing to an unwavering stance on sourcing local, has gathered together several Brooklyn designers and several farms, with hopes of making access to farm flowers more of the norm in Brooklyn. I am very happy to be a participating. Very exciting, also, is that Debra Prinzing, nationally-renowned proponent for Slow Flowers, i.e. locally grown flowers, recently did a podcast about the plans to bring Farm Flowers to Brooklyn. It aired on April 15th, and included a conversation between Debra and one of the Hudson Valley Farms - Tiny Hearts Farm- which will also do a Brooklyn flower run, a conversation between Debra and Rachel from Taproot Flowers, and also, quite nice of Debra, was inclusion of Butternut Gardens' planned foray into the Brooklyn market in the podcast's written notes, thus putting Connecticut flowers on the national flower map.

Please listen to the Podcast, or at least read the podcast notes, since the podcast is lengthy (but interesting). You can read the notes and access the podcast here: http://www.debraprinzing.com/2015/04/15/flowers-for-brooklyn-farmed-in-hudson-valley-with-tiny-hearts-farm-and-taproot-flowers-episode-189/

It is episode 189.