Welcome to our new blog, we are just wrapping up an outstanding dahlia cut flower season here at The Dahlia Barn. This summer was one of the best we’ve seen in the last few years, and all the plants were loving all the summer sun and produced with abundance this year. Business is good and we sold every flower we grew this year, as in most years. Success to us is cutting the field to nothing but buds, then cutting again a few days later to a whole new batch of fresh flowers.
Cutting Garden North Bend 2013
One thing that’s been somewhat overlooked this year is that this is our 10th year in business !!! We get so busy with farming and all that entails, we’ve brushed aside the fact that we’ve reached that milestone. The Dahlia Barn is the brain-child and the 3rd child to us, Jerry and Aimee Sherrill. It did not exist until we bought an old horse farm back in 2002. We’ve owned a landscape business for several years, and still do today. When we saw this property, we thought it would give us the space that we needed with the barn and have a little acreage as well. Soon after we settled, Jerry and I were brainstorming on how better to use the property, since we both love horticulture and both have farming backgrounds, I suggested, “We should turn it into a cutting garden, and grow dahlias.” Jerry said, “yeah, that sounds like a good idea” and I said, “what would
July 2004
we name it?” and he said, “well, The Dahlia Barn!” Perfect !! Jerry always comes up with the best names !! There are mostly U-Cut Christmas Tree Farms in North Bend along with a 40+ acre blueberry farm, but no place to get fresh cut flowers and certainly no place where you can cut your own. I started working on getting our hands on some wholesale tubers and we started to plan the garden. The gardens are laid out in the old turn out pasture for the horses, that year 2003, we laid out the gardens and just grew them to get a handle on it, started working on the website and then we opened up to the public in 2004.
The Dahlia Barn 2013
The path has not been an easy one, but has certainly been a labor of love. We LOVE it and couldn’t imaging doing anything else. It’s demanding, back breaking work at times, there are high and low times and it’s not easy. Some people see our gardens in September and say, “I could do this!” That’s fine, but what I say is that you wouldn’t want to be us in November during the dig. That seperates the farmer from the gardener, we are farmers !! No doubt about it.
The Dahlia Barn 2013