Episode 565: Petals and Alpacas at Gholson Gardens in Walla Walla, Washington (Encore Edition)

Greetings, friends. Here at the Slow Flowers Society, we have experienced a whirlwind several weeks, including producing our fifth and largest Slow Flowers Summit conference ever, celebrating American Flowers Week, and publishing our debut Summer issue of our Slow Flowers Journal e-zine quarterly. Add to that 10 days of me traveling away from home and honestly, I'm just beginning to recover from all the festivities. Alpacas are the best flower crown models! So today, in what is an entirely rare occurrence, you will hear an encore installment of the Slow Flowers Podcast. Petals and Alpacas at Gholson Gardens in Walla Walla, Washington, originally aired as Episode 395 in April 2019, and it is one of my very favorite shows. Mike and Elaine Vandiver at Gholson Gardens I mean, alpacas AND flowers -- what could be a better pairing? The people behind this fiber and flowers enterprise are an equally great pair -- Slow Flowers member Elaine Vandiver and her husband Mike Vandiver. Gholson Gardens is a small, 10-acre farm located in southeastern Washington state, in the quintessential rural community of Walla Walla, in the southeast corner of the state.  Mike and Elaine are both U.S. Army veterans turned first generation farmers. As they share on their website, Mike and Elaine purchased their farm in late 2013 as a way to start anew after learning a traditional family wasn’t in the cards for them. Walla Walla flower farmer and alpaca farmer Elaine Vandiver Ten acres seemed sufficient. It had a big old red barn that reminded Elaine of the ones she saw growing up in Indiana. Plus it had a handful of outbuildings. And of course the farmhouse. A two-story folk-victorian number, with a wraparound porch. The whole place had charm, potential and good bones -- If you could look past the peeling paint & tatters of time. In other words, it was a lot like she and Mike. The seller told the couple it was “an old homestead” and that “those two llama come with the place.” As city kids, Elaine and Mike were unfamiliar with both homesteads and llamas. But they were in a place in life where they weren’t going to question things. So a homestead with llamas it was. Elaine and the Hometown Heroes program The first spring arrived, and the once sad-looking pastures sprang to life. And their two raggedy llama (LeRoi & Loretta) could not keep up with their grazing tasks. As Elaine writes on their website: "With all our resources tied into farmhouse renovations, we couldn’t exactly get a tractor. So naturally, we got the next best thing: alpaca. You know . . . the cute, smaller, softer version of llamas. They were supposed to be nothing more than cute little lawnmowers. And they were. But it sorta took a whole gaggle of them to keep up with the grass. And then they needed to be shorn. And that pile of raw fleece had to go somewhere." Ultimately, they started having it professionally spun into yarn . . . and then launched Old Homestead Alpacas, with a line of knitwear made exclusively of the alpaca fiber, manufactured entirely in the USA. Elaine and dye flowers Elaine had begun to grow dye flowers, so in the summer of 2017, she decided to start selling them as cut flowers? She began by planting 100-row-feet of zinnia, cosmos, sunflowers and celosia. I recorded this episode in March 2019 when I was in Walla Walla to speak (along with Elaine) about the Slow Flowers Movement for the Washington State Farmers Market Association. Hers is a very personal, inspiring story and I know it will inspire anyone who views growing cut flowers as a new way of life, perhaps as a catalyst for all sorts of change. To learn how this story unfolds, I'll let you hear from Elaine. Learn More; Find and follow Gholson GardensInstagramFacebookSubscribe to Gholson Gardens' newsletter For Elaine and Mike, growing flowers is the latest chapter of their agricultural lifestyle, one that began with a llama and too many adorable alpacas for...