According to our trusty friends at Merriam-Webster, agriculture is “the science, art, or practice of cultivating the soil, producing crops, and raising livestock and in varying degrees the preparation and marketing of the resulting products.” It’s a fine definition, but…if we were allowed to quibble a little bit…we might suggest inserting “the emotional reward” after “the science, art, or practice” part. Arguably, the emotional reward is the best part of farming, and it feels a mite shortsighted to leave it out. To prove our point, we offer the following evidence:

Some flowers—of which the snapdragon is one—have delightful scents. Every morning, there is a special moment when we open the doors to the high tunnel that houses the blooming snaps and are greeted by a nighttime’s worth of sweet snapdragon scent. It’s a small thing, but it is definitely not a bad way to start the day.
Some flowers—of which the snapdragon is not one, but dianthus is—do a funny little perk up before they start to bud. It’s a small tell that always prompts a small smile. Our first wave of dianthus is just starting to stand up, so we are smiling a lot these days.
Some flowers surprise you in the best ways. Last spring, we planted a variety of campanula that refused to bloom. Although frustrated, we decided to leave it where it was, and it ended up overwintering next to our (budding!) row of scabiosa. A few weeks back, it did the “funny little perk up” trick (see #2), and voila! We now have flowers. Surprise!

And there is a lot of emotional reward when you successfully sprout three successions of sunflowers without losing more than three trays to mice. Mice simply adore sunflower seeds—perhaps they are aspiring baseballers?—and it isn’t always easy to convince them that the seeds we use are destined for greater things than being a mere midnight snack. Admittedly, there is a bit of science to this feat (we use mint spray as a mouse deterrent), a smidge of art (imagine us dancing through the greenhouse, surrounded by a fresh, minty mist…), and lots of practice (we spray routinely, every night). But it is the emotional reward, the satisfaction of seeing the seeds emerge with their little green tails, that we enjoy the most.

That is…until we get to harvest them as blooms and pass them along to you. That is the point of our agricultural endeavor, and—without argument—the greatest small joy of what we do.