(Editor’s note: The annual Rutherford and Polk counties’ farm tour is being staged on line this year. Farms can be visited weekly at facebook.com/ncfoothillsfarmtour/)
Beautiful flowers flash from Sarah Lasswell’s fingertips, turning her little farm into a painter’s palette so that she can spread their beauty around the region.
Lasswell’s 22-acre Moss & Thistle Flower Farm in Rutherford County’s Union Mills community produces nearly 30 varieties of flowers. She practices organic and sustainable farming methods, selling cut flowers, fresh herbs and herbal salves at the farmers market in Columbus, through social media and local florist Merry Beardon.
Her outlook for growing is nature and land based, and her reason for focusing on flowers is purposeful.
“Flowers are beauty—color, form, texture, scent. Looking upon something beautiful, especially natural beauty, affects people. Flowers make people smile. Flowers heal,” she said.
As you might expect, someone so focused on protecting nature and growing flowers on her one acre flower garden also keeps honeybees. And, her apiary reflects her overall agricultural outlook. She uses Warre hives rather than the conventional Langstroth hives.
Langstroth hive boxes use frames containing a man-made wax foundation where bees begin building comb that, when complete, becomes either a place for the queen to lay her eggs or where bees can deposit and seal their store of honey. Warre hives were designed to mimic the hives honeybees build in nature—in trees, hollow logs, and sometimes inside the walls of houses and barns.
“Bees draw down comb from horizontal bars, without the use of artificial foundation, resulting in more wax being made,” she explained.
She uses the wax in salves (she makes a salve designed to help skin heal after a tattoo) and candles after harvesting the honey for friends and herself.
Bees love flowers, but they aren’t considered a friend of flowers being grown for sale because the blooms can quickly deteriorate after pollination.
Proving she is a kind and gentle flower child in the sweetest way, Sarah adds, “But it’s worth it to support bee populations.”
The former CDC public health scientist can’t say what her favorite flower is because she likes too many, but she does admit being sentimentally partial to a few.
“The flowers closest to my heart are those that remind me of my grandma—dogwood, violet, iris and ranunculus,” she said.
The Link LonkAugust 21, 2020 at 10:50PM
https://www.thedigitalcourier.com/news/virtual-farm-tour-moss-and-thistle-flower-farm/article_d2f6c575-277e-5913-9c72-0c43041d2ce0.html
Virtual Farm Tour—Moss and Thistle Flower Farm | News - The Daily Courier
https://news.google.com/search?q=Flower&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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