Backlot Buds

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Backlot Buds

Small-scale urban flower farm
Bouquet CSA & custom designs

06/05/2024

Get your poppy fix this week!

Sweet lil’ mixed bunches for $10. There today (6/5) ☀️

05/30/2024

In this noisy digital age, thanks for inviting me to be a little human presence on your screens. More than just pretty pictures, I hope you can find an invitation to delight in the small, wonderful miracle of flowers within my posts.

☀️ Summer and fall CSA shares sold out—thank you so much for powering the backlot!

——————

Pictured is this year’s Mother’s Day collaboration with at Sarah’s beautiful studio, .by.dayton. We hope you loved your DYT grown + DYT thrown gifts ✨

05/24/2024

Mid-spring stars

Digitalis Pink Gin
Delphinium Cliveden Beauty
Digitalis Camelot Cream
Martagon Lily
Iris Absolute Crush
Ranunculus Elegance series

05/10/2024

DYT grown 💐

Find bouquets (and lots of neat gifts!) this weekend .

Sarah’s and my DYT grown + thrown collaboration sold out again this year. Thanks for your support, Gem City!! These sweet-smelling vessels will be heading to .by.dayton tomorrow (5/11) for pickup.

05/02/2024

Done is better than perfect.

Words I’m living by in the backlot.

04/30/2024

DYT Grown + DYT Thrown

Mother’s Day Florals in Handmade Ceramic Vessel

Celebrate mamas & special women in your life with Dayton-grown specialty blooms arranged in a keepsake vase.

Two floral color palettes feature Dayton-grown ranunculus, French tulips, and poppies. Earthy contemporary vessel designed and handmade by Sarah Richard.

Limited stock. Pre-order for pickup at at .by.dayton on 5/11 from 10am - 4pm.

04/28/2024

Spring Hand-Tied Bouquet Workshop—May 18

Make a sweet spring bouquet in this relaxed 1-hour workshop using poppies, ranunculus, and French tulips grown on the backlot. Early peonies may make an appearance, too!

During the workshop, I’ll talk about the flowers we’re using and how you might showcase them in your bouquet. I’ll demonstrate how to hold your stems and gather all your ingredients into a delicious (and photogenic) bunch. Don’t worry—we won’t be using any tricky spiral or other technical methods to build our bouquets. If you can sip from both coffee mugs and glass stemware, then you’ve got the dexterity to do this! When you’re pleased with your bouquet, we’ll tie it off with chiffon ribbon.

Expect to leave this workshop with—

• your hand-tied bouquet
• a basic technique for holding and placing flowers in hand-tieds
• knowledge about specialty spring blooms

Where & when:
Saturday, May 18, from 3:30 - 4:30pm
Dayton Metro Library—Main Branch (215 E 3rd St, Dayton)
Conference Room 3A (third floor overlooking the city!)

Register at the link in bio 🌷

04/19/2024

Earth Day Lineup

If you scoop imported ranunculus and tulips at your grocer this weekend, please don’t tell me. That’s between you and your maker 👀

Now is PRIME time for local spring flowers! In addition to juicy $10 bunches of tulips, ranunculus, and anemones, I’ll offer Italian violas and perennial poppies packs for sale at this Saturday (4/20) from 12 til sell-out.

Italian-bred violas come in near-black and a mix of antique, paint-brushed hues. $2.50 per pot.

Perennial (Oriental) poppy 6-packs are available in white or a fruit-punch mix of coral, peach, and red. Since these were started by seed late winter, they won’t flower until next spring. Plants are young, so their taproots won’t be too disturbed during transplant. $12 per pack.

🌱 Sustainability note: all bouquet sleeves and wraps are made of water-resistant mineral paper that’s recyclable & made in the U.S. Plus, they don’t get that icky damp paper feel.

04/17/2024

Inspired by the Dutch masters.

1960s Chinoiserie, a Vietnam war souvenir gifted to my late grandmother by my grandfather.

04/13/2024

Taylor & Seth

Late March boasts exquisite flowers, so when Taylor approached me about flowering her wedding I had no doubt her vision could come alive.

Lush and impressionistic, Taylor's bouquet featured some of her favorite blooms: Iceland poppies and black-white anemones. Guided by her color palette, I chose bicolor ranunculus and checkered fritillaries to bridge white and deep plum. Star-shaped hellebores infused a vibrant green, a nod to the trailing velvet ribbon.

Taylor said floral artistry was particularly important to her--something I did not take lightly. Seeing these springtime treasures come together in an art museum was something of a dream. One that I'd love to have again.

Photography- The Brauns
Venue- The Dayton Art Institute
Floral product sourced from the Backlot, Sunny Meadows Flower Farm & Mayesh Wholesale Florist

04/10/2024

If you don’t have E 5th Street on your list of places to hit April 20, you should!

On Earth Day our business corridor will be bustling. Check out the complete vendor list at or pages.

I’ll be at Pink Moon slinging perennial poppy plants, Italian violas, and some decadent cut flowers—like these double tulips.

04/04/2024

Isn’t life full of surprises? Love when they’re good ones, too, like butterfly ranunculus blooming early April—earlier than expected!

Hopefully my pleasant surprise can be yours, too. Bunches of these specialty ranunculus and anemones will be at this weekend, 4/5 - 4/6.

Pricing on these sweeties is comparable to wholesale, for those who don’t know. So I do mean share—not scalp. Flower biz is full of reselling old or lesser-quality stems, which is what you’re getting at Trader…well, you know.

My flowers are harvested in the backlot less than a week in advance of sale and are handled and stored to ensure maximum vase life.

Ranuncs-$15
Anemones-$10

04/03/2024

Give your future self a gift. Invest in bulbs this fall!

Although double tulips don’t return reliably as perennials, daffodils, fritillaries, and muscari do. Brent and Becky‘s Bulbs is a great source for these harder-to-find perennials. I’ll also offer some of my tulip bulbs in October.

Pictured:
Tulip Palmyra
Fritillaria meleagris
Tulip Queensland
Narcissus British Gamble
Tulip Drumline
Muscari Baby’s Breath
Tulip Orca

03/29/2024

Centerpieces for your Easter table or spring soirée. 100% Dayton grown!

A delicious medley of the season’s first blooms: double tulips, anemones, specialty narcissus, hellebores, and muscari.

Straight bunches of tulips and anemones are also ready to grace your space.

Available at 3/29 thru 3/30.

03/25/2024

Tulip Magnolia

It’s been two years since our neighbor’s stately magnolia flowered. Last spring, an untimely frost killed the buds. Not so this year!

Permission was granted before we hauled the little giant down the sidewalk to reach these precious blooms 😁 Thanks, James!!

02/29/2024

For they (art and music) are not the thing themselves;

they are only the scent of a flower we have not found,

the echo of a tune we have not heard,

news from a country we have never yet visited.

C.S. Lewis

Sympathy flowers from last October, in memory of baby Dexter

01/29/2024

Celebrations

Flowers have long been used to commemorate important human events. Floral motifs exist in most ancient cultures on record.

In our modern world, flowers may not hold the same spiritual significance as in ancient times, but we nonetheless continue to incorporate them in our celebrations.

With most everything I do (perhaps to a fault), I want to know why and to what end. Participating in the cultivation and design of live flowers for other’s celebrations is not the least of these. Something inside comes alive as I gather and arrange fragile, exquisite botanical life for someone.

To what end? To do something uniquely human—to gladly cooperate with others in offering what beauty I find to enhance and adorn their significant life occasion.

If you want to incorporate the ephemeral beauty of live flowers in your celebration, you’re participating in a longstanding human tradition. And you’re underscoring the importance of your event by including these perishable natural works of art.

Reach out if you’d like to explore the possibility of working together to bring your floral vision to life.

01/21/2024

Full-force winter this week

Snow and frigid temps made me thankful for a warm home. I doubt my overwintered crops share that sentiment. Frankly, I’m a tad nervous to uncover them when the cold spell breaks.

Farmers aren’t doing much outdoors in this weather (although indoor seed starting is in full swing). Bitter cold kills.

All this time inside led me to an interview I’d been meaning to read of Ernest Becker, the psychologist who wrote ‘The Denial of Death’ and himself succumbed to colon cancer at 49. This interview was his last.

Becker realized ‘character armor’ kills our ability to really live. Cancer ended his life, but Becker believed cold, invulnerable character armor could have the same deadening effect on the living.

It’s no mystery why spring is for planting and winter is for resting. Our experience and empirical study of the natural world tells us cold kills and warmth enlivens.

So why is it difficult to see that character invulnerability kills human capacity for true living while vulnerability leads to life?

Maybe because paradoxes are hard to accept. It seems contradictory that becoming vulnerable can lead to better living.

In warm, damp, bright conditions, seeds surrender their coatings and release embryos into the soil. The seed coating is consumed, and the seedling emerges.

Along with my seeds, I hope to continue learning to shed my protective shell and become vulnerable, aware, receptive to the world. More alive.

01/15/2024

Seasonal bouquet CSA shares are live!

Seasonal. Unique. Dayton-grown and harvested 24 hours before you touch them.

Enjoy *truly* fresh flowers this year. Each share runs 3-4 consecutive weeks and includes a seasonal, wrapped mixed bouquet for pickup.

Support local small biz by picking up at either or

01/10/2024

Beneficial limitations

Limitations drive creativity.

Artists self-impose limitations on color, medium, form, to expand the realm of what’s possible. Inventors develop new tech by embracing constraints of budget, timeline, materials.

I started considering the benefits that accompany constraints in my own context. Designing with what’s available in the backlot challenges me to find beauty in what isn’t necessarily beautiful. Mottled foliage. Flower buds. Long, crooked branches.

The limits of my physical and mental abilities also confront me regularly in this little farming venture. They remind me I’m human: compared to a tractor, weak; compared to a shovel, frail; compared to nature, vulnerable.

But of all real and self-imposed [beneficial] limitations, death is chief. Flowers die. We die.

Or do we?

I recently heard about Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur turned human longevity research subject, and listened to an interview out of curiosity. He believes human death will soon be forestalled indefinitely by AI technologies.

Johnson is in an old business. New tech, ancient endeavor. But what surprised (and scared) me was the way he suggested humanity will arrive at this semblance of immortality.

“My mind is my worst enemy.” Johnson begrudges his mind for telling him chocolate and pizza taste good and for urging him to indulge. He followed this with something to the effect of, if we let an algorithm determine what’s best for our bodies and carefully follow its edicts for our diet, exercise, sleep, etc., our bodies will “age in reverse.” He also wrote a book titled “Don’t Die.”

I think Johnson would disagree with the extension of the logic that limitations are useful for humanity itself—not just its inventions. Particularly, that of mortality.

What do you think? Are our minds just out-of-date software that need to integrate with the mega power and speed of computing technology? Do our mental and physical constraints serve us, or do they hurt us and deserve elimination?

Are our minds and bodies, with all their limitations, our friends?

01/04/2024

Oh, poppies!

I’ve had to double check my spelling of that word. ‘Poopies’ is used much more frequently our house with two toddlers who currently find potty talk hilarious.

I can’t get enough of the former (but had more than enough of the latter). The number of these plants in the backlot is triple that of last year.

Since several folks asked for help getting poppies to take in their gardens, here’s a seed-starting tip I’ve picked up growing them in Dayton:

🌱 I’ve never had luck with them germinating after direct seeding in winter/early spring. Despite seed packets recommending this method, it has never worked for me.

🌱 What has worked is starting them indoors in late winter/early spring under grow lights in soil-less medium (ProMix). I don’t cover the seeds with vermiculite or press them into the dirt, but I do use a humidity dome. They usually germinate within a week with lights on for at least 14 hours per day. After at least 8 weeks in the tray (they’re slooow growers), I plant them out.

There are many varieties of poppies, so consider their traits (and your tolerance for fuss) when choosing which to plant!

▫️ The pretty yellow, orange, white, and red Iceland poppy mix (‘Champagne Bubbles’) is not perennial here, despite what seed packets say. They should be treated as annuals as they will not reliably reseed in our zone. I’m offering Iceland poppy seedlings in April if you want a better shot of enjoying them in your garden!

▫️ Oriental poppies can be grown from seeds or roots and are perennials here. They regrow dependably from roots, not by reseeding, so you don’t have to worry about them popping up all over your garden. I’ll also offer Oriental poppy seedlings in white/black and a mix of pink/purple/coral.

▫️ Perennial reseeding poppies in our zone include most other varieties: Shirley/corn, breadseed/opium, peony-flowered. If you let them flower, die, and set seed you’ll have them again next year. They reseed vigorously, so if you don’t want them popping up everywhere, collect their seed heads before the vents open up and drop the sand-like seeds. They won’t reseed vigorously if they’re planted in mulch, grass, or other competing plants.

01/03/2024

Wasteful or worthwhile?

“All [the world’s] beauty I can wink into blackness, and all its mirth I can think into sadness. I can drown all its pleasures in a few penitent tears, and the wind of a sigh will scatter them away.”
Richard Baxter, 1650

This reflection on beauty made me pause. Is it really that fleeting?

Yes. Sleep, mundane as it is, can erase the experience of beautiful music, art, and the natural world. Real suffering can overshadow real beauty.

I wondered why the pursuit of beauty might still be worthwhile in a world where sleep, sighing, and sadness routinely rob us of the ability to enjoy it.

We know flower arrangements aren’t necessary for survival. They’re a luxury. In fact, there’s an argument cut flowers are more than a justifiable luxury—they’re superfluous and wasteful. Pollinators need them more than humans.

If a few nights’ sleep can wipe the delight of a fresh bouquet from our minds, why bother with cut flowers? Especially if we’re depleting natural resources in the process and supporting an industry with a waste problem.

Many people have answered this question over the centuries. There seems to be a consensus humans are hardwired to perceive and enjoy beauty. It’s transcendent, and so are we.

I suppose we can’t help ourselves.

12/31/2023

Value in finitude.

I’ve been thinking about why live flowers are more desirable and valuable, generally, than artificial ones, and it seems the answer has to do with death.

Live flowers have defined limits. Each is unique and irreproducible in time and space. Naturally-occurring works of art that profit the ecosystem in every stage of life and death.

Consider artificial flowers. Copies of nature. Identically manufactured, mass-produced, and unchanging (except for the amount of dust they collect year to year).

Flowers follow a biological pattern of coming into existence and ceasing to be. Their beauty is mutable and finite.

Artificials, by contrast, are pieced together suddenly and have no expiration. Their beauty is static and seemingly infinite.

If their eventual death is part of why live flowers are more valuable, captivating than artificial ones, then maybe the transience of life are part of what makes it valuable, beautiful.

12/27/2023

The who, where, why & what

▪️ I'm Brittany, and my husband and I are Dayton transplants who fell in love with this city
▪️ Our backlot, acquired through the city's former Lot Links program, is nestled in Historic Inner East Dayton behind our home.
▪️ Cultivating cut flowers became a hobby in 2020 after losing our daughter Abigail and then quickly captivated me.

Our flowers are a mix of specialty annuals, biennials, and cutting perennials worked into the landscape. The season runs April through Sep/Oct.

📣 In store for 2024:

▫️ Spring, summer, and fall bouquet CSA shares, just like last year! These CSA shares feature a mixed bouquet for several consecutive weeks for local pick-up.

▫️ A hand-tied bouquet workshop and a compote design workshop

▫️ Stem bars at local retailers

11/20/2023

Peonies

Spring's queen. A low-maintenance perennial with hard-to-beat beauty.

This fall I've planted a few dozen roots of Itoh (intersectional) varieties and this new herbaceous hybrid, King's Day (pictured), also known as Coral Beach. Buying wholesale stock sometimes means I get more than I need, and that's the case with this salmon-pastel stunner.

For the next two weeks I'll be selling excess King's Day peony roots for pickup at Pink Moon Goods. I selected this variety for its muted coloring (as compared to the popular Coral Charm / Coral Sunset varieties) and semi-double form which exposes its dramatic golden stamens.

Photo credits: Golden Valley Plants; Groot & Groot

11/13/2023

Seedlings.

Will to live, failure to thrive.

I didn’t have loads of white lacy orlaya this spring, but not for lack of seeds. Poor germination discouraged me from caring for the few plants that emerged like I should have. They didn’t even make it to the backlot—I left the spotty tray of a dozen that sprouted on my porch all winter untended (yes, lazy). Eventually squirrels knocked it off the porch, and it lay face-down on concrete, forgotten until spring.

When warm weather enticed me to tidy up outside, I picked up the tray to find one plant alive—weak, spindly growth that had crept along the underside of the tray to find daylight and sparse tendrils of roots were caked atop concrete in a thin layer of growing medium. It was in bad shape. Out of pity I planted it, but it only mustered a few sickly buds. Will to live, but failure to thrive.

Like seedlings, young people are generally resilient. But unlike seedlings, they have the capacity to bloom even if their early growth conditions were less-than-ideal. It was physically impossible for that neglected seedling to blossom like a comparably healthy one would at maturity. Thankfully, this isn't necessarily so for humans.

Our family along with several friends are foster families for the county, and these youth are never far from my mind when I’m transplanting carefully nurtured seedlings. Although many foster care success stories exist, there seem to be just as many youth that experience poor outcomes—especially in Ohio, which was ranked in the bottom 10 percent of the nation last year in foster youth outcomes.

What can be done on an individual level to turn the tide? For our family, participating in the flawed but functioning system was the answer. There are others. But we're continually told the need for more foster parents is great. I'd love to chat about our experience if anyone is interested in learning more. Please reach out if that's you!

💐

Happily, this year's summer-sown orlaya had nearly perfect germination and are thriving young transplants in the backlot. Unless something goes awry, I expect to harvest bunches mid-spring.

11/12/2023

Fall CSA recap + overdue thoughts

Last winter’s planning carried me through about July, and since then I’ve felt behind on record-keeping, reflecting, dreaming. At the peak of summer all I could do was stay on top of essential tasks like irrigating, harvesting, and filling orders. Now that the seasons are shifting, I’m happy to return to this quieter, less labor-intensive work (now that my tulip bulbs are all buried).

All the flowers are dead, but brilliant foliage is keeping me enamored with the outdoors. I can’t help thinking about Hannah Levinson's (of Dayton Daily News' 'Day in the Life' column) sage comparison of autumn’s grand show to what she (and I) aspire to when we enter the autumn season of our lives: vibrant and celebratory, not sad and atrophied. Talking with Hannah reminded me the parallels to our human experience that we find in nature are worth reflection and sharing. I hope to do that in this forum going forward, in between snippets of this past year that didn’t make it onto the grid.

09/07/2023

Autumn, almost.

08/17/2023

Summer CSA Recap

None of these bouquets contained each exact ingredient I planned they would six months ago… but fortunately established perennials like hydrangea, artemisia, ninebark, and phlox were ready substitutes.

White marigolds planned for summer got eaten by the neighborhood groundhogs, along with some sunflowers and herbs. Other sunnies were stunted, possibly by the stone foundation of the houses formerly standing here. It’s just far enough below the surface to escape the tiller, but not deep enough to allow crops to thrive. Now to move some beds… again!

Looking ahead to the fall bouquet CSA, which starts next Wednesday, I’m thankful for each person who purchased a share and made this another sell-out season. Lots of autumn goodness to come, namely dahlias 😍

08/16/2023

Flower Arranging Workshop at Pink Moon Goods
Saturday, September 23 from 10:30-11:30am

Experience fall floral abundance in this relaxed 1-hour workshop. Using dahlias, amaranth, strawflowers and more beauty grown on the backlot, you’ll craft an elevated everyday arrangement using a kitchen staple—a Weck canning jar from Pink Moon Goods. We’ll talk about the flowers we’re using and how you might showcase them in your design.

During the workshop, I’ll demonstrate how you might arrange the same selection of flowers in different ways using sustainable goods like with a ceramic flower frog, drinking glass, or pitcher--all carried by Pink Moon Goods! You'll have the option to purchase any of these items to craft your arrangement in if desired--and you'll still take the Weck jar home.

Expect to leave this workshop with--
• your autumn arrangement in a dual-purpose Weck jar
• fresh ideas about how to display flowers using household containers
• time for private shopping at Pink Moon Goods before opening at noon

Address

Historic Inner East
Dayton, OH
45403

Website

http://www.backlotbuds.com/

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