Note from the Author

I’ve had this newsletter/blog for almost 3 years and it's always been off and on. I started it because “that's what flower farms do”. We have newsletters that are a curated collection of updates and beautiful flower photos an extension of our curated social media personas. Marketing to you a little slice of our “heaven” in the form of bouquet flowers. I’ve felt the pressure of this since basically day one. Trying to produce this newsletter/blog regularly and consistently in order to sell you flowers. Instead I want to reframe this- I want to share things here that are real when I feel moved to do so. Use this format to try and capture and document some of these moments in my life. Creating some I can look back on and truly reflect and cherish. So I will no longer be focusing on trying to produce this on some forced time frame but instead sharing when I feel moved to do so. This is all with the intention of giving myself more grace and finding more efficiency in 2026.

How breastfeeding changed me and my farm

As my daughter rounds the corner on turning one I’ve been reflecting on what it’s been like being a mama, farmer and full time food source. It’s been surprising, empowering, exhausting but I wouldn’t change it for anything. It's truly taught me to follow my intuition and give myself grace.

Before I was even pregnant I knew I’d breastfeed. I come from generations of women who breastfed their babies. I grew up as one of the oldest in the pack of children and was surrounded by moms who choose to breastfeed. There was almost always a mom around nursing a little one. Your body was designed to make the perfect food for your baby. It always felt like the natural logical choice. But I don’t think I was prepared for how much breastfeeding would teach me about myself.

Even though I was surrounded by people who breastfed I encountered so many things that surprised me in the early days. For example how exhausting it was. I remember at my 6 week postpartum checkup saying to my midwife “I can't believe how tired it makes me. Like I never knew sitting on the couch could be so exhausting. I’m just sitting there doing nothing and I want to take a nap afterwards.” She smiled at me and said “You're not doing nothing, your body is making milk!”

*Asleep on the job in the interns arms while he waters*

It also took me by surprise how time consuming it is. Especially when they are little. They come out of the cozy free food hot tub as my mom (who is also a midwife) likes to call it. They have to learn how to do about a billion things-including how to nurse effectively. This was definitely a bit humbling and frustrating at times. I like the physical labor of farming. I like to work with my body and be outside. I like to start a project and push myself to complete it. I've always prided myself on my work ethic and find great satisfaction in completing a project. I’ll go in for a break when everything’s done or I absolutely need to pee and drink water has always been my mentality. That’s just who I am. But nursing truly forced me to slow down this past season. At times it could feel like I was getting nothing done. I’d set out to start a project, get myself organized and set up to only need to stop and nurse. It was frustrating leaving a project midway through and feeling like things that should take me a couple hours now took all day. I had to teach my brain that despite not doing what I wanted per se I was doing a job that truly no one else could do. Not just feeding my baby but connecting with her, making her feel safe, helping regulate her emotions.

This forced slow pace made me think about how I spend my time farming. What are the things I want to do less of? What are the things I want to do more of? How can I effectively do this while also being as present and available to this tiny human. When it comes down to it I started my flower farm to have the ability to choose how I spend my energy. After years working in commercial Agriculture I wanted the freedom to cultivate plants in a way that felt low impact to our planet. I wanted the freedom that when I had kids that I could be as fully present with them as possible especially when they were young. So much of kids' moral compass, their sense of right and wrong and interpretation of the world is formed before the age of 7 and I wanted to be the adult who teaches them those things. So I made the decision to focus my farm on wholesale sales, growing more perennial plants, buying seedlings instead of starting them and growing as much as I can in bio-mulch. This way I can spend more energy growing, harvesting and teaching my little lady. Less time stressing about weeding, keeping thousands of seedlings alive and being frustrated by the forced breaks that I know motherhood is going to bring.

Breastfeeding has been empowering. Empowering in building my confidence to follow my intuition. In the first few weeks I had a pediatrician tell me to stop breastfeeding. She did not like how “slowly” my baby was gaining weight. She wasn’t losing weight, she was colicky or showing any signs that she was unhealthy but my baby wasn't matching what the growth chart said she should be doing and to this doctor that was an issue. I tried to reason with her that there was family history of other babies not really gaining significant weight until they were around 3-4 months old. But she brushed me off, making me feel like I was doing something wrong, that I was just a young new mom who needed to listen to her. I left that appointment in absolute tears. I felt deeply conflicted- on one hand I had a medical professional telling me there was something wrong with my baby, on the other hand my intuition was telling me I was doing everything right and that she was happy and healthy. I decided to listen to my gut and found a lactation consultant and new doctor who assured us our baby was healthy and stopped looking at her as a number and instead looked at her as a whole little human growing and developing.

That experience really made me think about a story my great grandmother told me. When I was 20 I got the chance to go to Australia and meet her. She was well into her 90s though physically frail, her mind was sharp and she told me many stories about her life. One of these stories was about how she was convinced to formula feed her first born and how she was convinced that formula feeding is what lead to major infection that would lead to his death as an infant. After that she breastfed all four of her other biological children. As a 20 year old this story mostly felt like a tragic tail of most likely unhygienic conditions due to World War II. Now as a mom I think the point she was trying to make was to listen to your intuition, listen to your gut.

Giving myself more grace was probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned this past year. The grace to leave projects for the next day. Grace for not accomplishing the entire to-do list that day. Grace with myself for not following my plans but pivoting to something accomplishable. Grace with myself on the days when there’s work to be done but also a teething baby who just needs to be nursed and cuddled. Having a baby changes you physically, mentally and emotionally, rewiring your brain to be a mother. It took some time to get to know the new me and find the person who I used to be. Settling into the person who was at those intersections.

How breastfeeding changed me and my farm

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Flax Hollow Farm