PepperHarrow Holiday Style Guide

We love to celebrate the holiday season here on the farm with a simple, rustic flair, inspired by the gorgeous scenery and wildlife that surrounds us. From cozy, plaid blankets around the campfire, to seasonal greenery wreaths adorned with dried flowers, every detail harkens back to country holiday celebration. Holiday decorating can be simple and tasteful by using paired down decorating techniques that won’t break the bank that will make your space look warm and welcoming for the season.

Recently, we were featured in The Inspired Room on Instagram for our signature farmhouse wreaths with rustic bells. Our lush wreaths were handmade with fresh noble fir boughs, and were peppered with dried eucalyptus leftover from weddings on the farm held during the summer months. We love repurposing materials and using as much as we can forage from our own property as possible. (More on some of the things we forage on our property to come.)

After that post, we had questions from all over the country about the ribbons we used for these gorgeous wreaths. as well as the bells. As with most of our decorating, it was very simple, but elevated. Are you ready to know just how simple they were?! The ribbons were pieces of fabric torn down the bolt and tied neatly to match the neutral buffalo plaid theme on the Flower Cottage. The torn edges give more of a natural look to these gorgeous wreaths, which compliments the all around organic nature of the wreaths and the surrounding country setting. Also added to these gorgeous wreaths were the now highly sought after, antique bells, which look like something from an old-time holiday scene. The bells can still be found here. Aren’t they gorgeous?

Each early winter we spend time walking around our property, gathering materials for wreath making to add little extra, what we call ‘sparkles’ to our seasonal wreaths. What types of materials do we look for? Well, native grasses are one of the top things we look for. We’re surrounded by prairies of switch grass, Indian grass, and little blue stem to name a few. We also gather rose hips grown on invasive multi-flora roses, empty seed pods from milkweed, red dogwood branches and any other pretty natural colored branches, such as birch, because we love those gorgeous catkins so much. We’re such foragers, we even take the kids camping in the summer months and do a little pine cone collecting as a fun family activity during our time spent enjoying the outdoors.

Dried flowers are making a huge comeback this year and have been incredible popular with our customers and with our retail customers like Des Moines Mercantile. We love this trend! We use a ton of dried flowers for our wreath making workshops and for our custom made wreaths from the farm. Running a successful flower farm, there’s always extra flowers to set aside to dry and we dedicate time each week to making sure some are set aside just for this purpose. We always end up using all of them this time of year, especially for our now famous, ‘Rainbow Wreath’ that was a hit last year and continues to be a fan favorite this year.

The inspiration for the wreath came from one of our wreath making classes, where a local creative told us she was going to use ‘all the colors’ for her greenery wreath and needed yellow flowers to add to it. We ran to our drying barn immediately and pulled down some dried Lady’s Mantle and we snipped a few sprigs from our yellow arborvitae bush. The finished wreath was so pretty and inspired the final design we made ourselves, shown below.

This month, we were featured in The Cottage Journal Magazine in the Garden Pleasures section, which features some of our decorating style. Don’t miss the little details, such as the dried apples and oranges you’ll see, as well as the pretty peacock feathers we added to our wreaths to make them look extra gorgeous. Below is a little peek at the feature, but you can see photos of our design throughout the publication.

We’re honored to be featured alongside our talented fellow flower farmers, as well as our friends and upcoming book publisher, Bloom Imprint. Be sure to check out the blue barn, decorated with lush greenery and red bows to celebrate the holiday season. So inspiring and oh so stunning!

To learn more about how to dry oranges to use in holiday decorating, view our instructional here.

Creating a warm, comfortable space is what we’re all about during the holiday season. Can you tell? We love to make magical experiences that make our guests feel cozy and comfortable, like they’re at a home away from home, so we’re always are sure to setup a warm beverage bar with coffee or hot chocolate. Guests love this little addition and it’s a great way to welcome and warm themselves after coming in from the cold winter elements. Everyone loves this tradition so much and hey, who doesn’t love to add all of the special treats to their hot chocolate?

Other ways to make your space inviting to guests is to add greenery on shelves, use it to decorate a holiday table, or any space! We love making simple garlands and other little embellishments with simple greenery. To check out how to make a simple greenery garland, check out an instructional video on how to make your own here. Making a simple greenery swag to adorn your fireplace mantle, drape over your windows, doorways, or over your bed is a perfect way to add holiday shine to your space. We love taking old branches from the timberland on our property, adding string to hang it and adding greenery. It has a very rustic, organic look that we love to use to decorate in our old farmhouse.

Also, don’t forget candles. Candles create a simple magical, warm effect and take very little effort to put into decorating. They do all the work! So if you don’t like the mess greenery can sometimes make, pair your style down to just include candles to add sparkle. We love using hurricane candle tumblers in gold to add a bit of extra warmth to our space, which. We love finding new, seasonal decor at Pottery Barn, like the plates and candles shown below.

Other inspiring ideas are to add fresh florals to your fireplace mantle for a dramatic effect. This is the perfect addition, especially if you’re hosting any special parties throughout the holiday season. We were inspired to try this statement piece after seeing stunning creations by Philippa Craddock, an inspiring and talented English florist.

Our little Flower Cottage is one of the highlights on the farm. During the winter, we use the inside as an art studio, where we paint and have a space to be creative. The outside is used as a backdrop for family photos throughout the holiday season and as a lovely backdrop for group photos for our wreath workshop attendees to use for a nice holiday photo opportunity.

Each year local photographers come out the farm for the Flower Cottage to shoot family photos for the holidays, engagement sessions, and senior photos. Who wouldn’t want to use this cute space as a perfect backdrop for photos? It’s a fun space to create in and the outside is the perfect little backdrop for photos.

Are you inspired to get decorating for the holidays yet? We know we are! Bring on the all the greenery, twinkle lights, candles, and hot chocolate. We’re ready to get our holiday vibe on, starting now. We can’t wait to share our decorating style with you for this season!

XX Jenn and Adam

PepperHarrow's 10 Year Anniversary!

IT’S BEEN A WONDERFUL 10 YEARS ON THE FLOWER FARM.

We’ve had so many success and failures over the last 10 years. It’s been full of learning and growing - of our land, flowers, and most importantly, in ourselves and our relationship. At times it hasn’t been an easy endeavor, but the reward of owning our own business, creating success, and growing the most gorgeous local flowers in Central Iowa has been worth all of it 1000X over.

Cute Celebratory Boards by @CakeDSM

Celebrating 10 years of owning a small business is pretty surreal. We high-fived, and celebrated this huge milestone, but we also found ourselves completely taken aback that it had been 10 years. It’s funny how the years seem to blend together and how 10 years ago almost feels like a yesterday.

We celebrated our special night with over 125 of our most favorite customers, they are the folks that have supported us and enabled us to hit this huge milestone. It’s with their support, encouragement, and love of our small business that has helped us build our dream into a reality! Okay, totally gushing over our customers, but y’all get the point. They’re the most wonderful peeps and have treated us so well over the years. Because of this, we treated everyone who came out to complimentary food, beverages, ice cream, and of course FLOWER BOUQUETS!

Yep, that’s right! We sent them out into our flower fields to cut their own bouquets to take home as a small token of our appreciation for them. It was the absolute BEST to see everyone enjoy themselves so much and to also see the beautiful bouquets they created. It was a hit with our Friends of PepperHarrow and something we’d like to treat our best customers to every few years.

Photo Courtesy of CakeDSM

Our 10 year anniversary celebration was not only to celebrate the farm, but we also held it in support of our local Madison County Conservation, who is building a new conservation center at Pammel Park. If you missed out on the opportunity to contribute, you can do so by scanning the PayPal QR code, below to make a donation. Or, you can send payments on PayPal via email address to: naturalist@madisoncountyparks.org

All proceeds will go directly to the conservation center as well as other nature enrichment activities for an outdoor classroom space. Next time you visit Madison County, check out some our treasured parks. You can get a list of them here.

Thank you so much for helping us celebrate 10 years and here’s to another wonderful 10 years of success to come! We can’t wait to share more of our flower farming journey with all of you, as well as more exciting announcements to come.

XX Jenn and Adam

Parenting While Running a Flower Farm

Let’s face it, being a parent is the hardest job we’ll ever do in our lifetime, but add work commitments, cleaning, making meals, and maybe, just maybe, squeezing a tiny amount time out for our ourselves to preserve mental sanity, on top of simply being a mom, is even more difficult.

The whole concept work/life balance thing is not something I’ve been good at mastering, but I wanted to share some of my own stories about running a flower farm while raising three beautiful children. The stories range from the good, to the bad, to the downright ugly. Raising kids definitely isn’t an exact science. I’ll also share some small, practical tips on how to manage a full-time job, but saving plenty of time for family time.

When we first started flower farming journey in 2011, our kids were so little. Our oldest was 7, followed by our 3 year old and finally, the baby, who was a 10 month old at the time. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into with trying to manage growing flowers and raising kids. It was totally ‘insane in the membrane’ as Adam always says.

One thing about running a flower farm many don’t always know is that both Adam and I are out in the flower fields for over 14 hours most days, sunrise to sunset. When the kids were little, it would be a constant struggle having them outside with us, trying to keep them entertained while we planted, weeded, watered, and harvested all of our flowers. AND all the while we were learning how to flower farm, which is totally different process than just growing a beautiful, bountiful garden.

The Bad

There were were many times I’d lay the baby down for a nap and would head back out outside with my little hand-held baby monitor. I’d work for what felt like 10 minutes before I’d hear her awake and start playing in her crib. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’d let her play for at least another 20 minutes until she’d start calling or crying for me. Looking back, this is a total mom-guilt moment for sure.

One of the funniest/scariest moments ever, was ‘loosing’ the baby, because I’d been outside working and had our oldest child take the lead on watching her. She crawled and snuck away from him while he was watching cartoons. After frantically searching for her for at least 10 minutes and after using my shrill, frantic, terrified ‘mom’ voice to call her name, we finally found her in the kitchen behind the island, playing in cups full of flour from the baking cabinet.

The Good

Raising kids and trying to work on the flower farm isn’t full of all bad stories. There have also been some really wonderful moments for both the kids as well as my husband and I. We’ve spent countless hours together working in the gardens, teaching the kids the intrinsic gardening learnings that translate to real life skills, sharing names of flowers, showing them how to harvest, and how to care for the land.

You might think these things would be a bad memory for them, and certainly it’s probably something that they don’t yet cherish yet, but I know they’ll look back on those memories fondly, remember the time we spent together as a family, and may even end up on a farm themselves later in life, chasing the intangible joy of their childhood

My most favorite family activity with the kids is watching them make their own bouquets with the flowers we grow. It’s very interesting to see their little personalities come out in what they design. The boys have stopped making bouquets at this point, but have benefited from our flower farming endeavors, impressing their dates with bouquets of flowers occasionally and even like our ‘free’ corsages and boutonnières for homecoming and prom dances.

I shared a little bit more about myself and one of my biggest joys about being a mom and running a flower farm on Des Moines Moms’ blog. You can check it out here: https://desmoines.momcollective.com/jenn-oneal-pepperharrow-farm/.

The Most Important Message of All
Running a flower farm and raising kids isn’t a perfect scenario, but you can find some sort of balance with it. The biggest secret to all of this is you have to give yourself a little grace, and not focus on perfection.

Did everything get done that you needed to get done? Probably not, but was it done good enough? Done.

Did your kids eat dinner? Okay, maybe it was a quick sandwich, but they did eat, right? Done.

Give yourself a little grace and know that no one is perfect and certainly no garden or flower farm is ever completely perfect, tasks are never completely done, the list just keeps going…for all of us, so there’s no need to strive for perfection and wear yourselves and your kids out.

Cherish every moment spent with your kids and also cherish the wonderful learning opportunities in the garden. Get them excited to see the first blooms on flowers they helped plant and give them freedom to cut blooms to enjoy for themselves and place in their rooms. At the end of the day you want to make sure yourself and your family are happy, healthy, and loved much. This is the most simple, best thing we can do!

XX Jenn

Photo by Leah Ried

How To Make An Autumn Wreath

Check out our latest YouTube video where Jenn shows us how to make a simple and beautiful autumn wreath with dried florals from the farm.

The Great Dahlia Dig

We love our dahlias dearly here at PepperHarrow and they’re one of our featured flowers we grow.

I mean, just look at these gorgeous blooms, our last harvest of dahlias before frost. Dahlias in every shape, color, size. Just absolutely stunning!

But all good things must come to an end and that’s where we are right now. We recently spent a 10 hour day, with 3 people, out in our largest dahlia field, digging up all the dahlia tubers and getting them into our heated space before an anticipated low of 18 degrees.

It’s crazy how our Iowa weather always seems to go from just lovely fall weather, to an abysmal wintery mix overnight. That’s exactly what happened this year, just like it’s happened the last few years. We should be used to by now, right?!

Below is a great photo that shows an after look of what our field looked like after all the tubers were dug up. Not too bad!

The following day, Adam, our two sons and myself (Jenn) worked on our smaller dahlia field with our ‘special’ dahlia tuber varieties pulling them out. We spent about 6 hours in the smaller field, but were only able to get it half completed. It was a bit more difficult for various reason, but for right now, I’m blaming the pathways we added with landscaping fabric. It was a crazy, wet, cold, mess that day.

I’ll admit, I’ve been dreading the great dahlia dig. I started thinking about having to do this in early September with a sliver of dread stirring in my heart. Not gonna sugar coat this for y’all, it’s some seriously hard, dirty, body breaking work to get all of these tubers out of the field and inside.

But that’s not all! We also spend hours on our feet after that, cleaning, drying, and dividing them up for storage. There’s a lot of standing and my lower back is starting to get real angry with me. Need to work on my core next year to help with this.

The specialty dahlia field

Wish us luck as we further divide the thousands of tubers this week to get them into storage. We’ll be getting them all tucked away, then will be announcing our dahlia tuber sale online soon. We can’t wait to share all of these gorgeous varieties with you.

XX Jenn