Hello!
Now that the season is well underway, we are emerging from the shrubbery to introduce the people behind this project:
Sarah (left) and Elena (right), bringing you beautiful locally grown and foraged branches, foliage, textural flowers and other wild things, for your floral work.
Sarah is the Farm Manager at Mount Wolfe Farm, and wears many hats; Elena is the Branch Manager doing our harvest & delivery each week and responding to your inquiries. We especially love finding offbeat items to stoke your design creativity. Please reach out if you’re looking for all things lush, wild, and green 🌿
Species spotlight: Pagoda dogwood (Cornus alternifolia)
We love this Ontario native understory tree as a foliage plant in the early spring for its graceful branching structure, ridged leaves, and delicate appearance. When spotted in the woods, its leaf sets are almost reminiscent of butterflies (or fairies🧚) landing on the branch.
We’ll have lots of it on the market shops this week!
Graceful flowering Canada wild plum (Prunus nigra). There a small stand of this native tree close to the laneway on our farm and I had to pull over to quickly harvest on my way out! The bud stage is that fast. Spring is really on her own timeline this year and it’s my privilege to try to keep up!
Excited about our first drop of the season at @thelocalflowercollective & their new location! The space feels fresh and full of potential. We love seeing the local flower movement grow 🌱
It’s been a slowly emerging spring for us and a few of our fave spring harvests are behind expected dates, but we hope to have more full offerings in the weeks to come.
Good morning Millgrove! We are excited to share that for the 2026 season, we’ve joined the Millgrove Flower Hub in Waterdown as a grower-member, and are excited to be offering our meadow and woodland foliage and wildflowers, all sustainably harvested from our farm. We plan to offer lots of extras through the market so you can get a feel for our harvests in person, but I made a little roundup here of a few of our favourite greens and branches. Excited to meet you!
Hello from the farm and woodlands where we are slo-o-owly emerging after a long winter. Watching the forest’s leafy unfurling and hoping we can share our early spring offerings with you in time for Mother’s Day! Watch this space for black cherry, pagoda dogwood, and young tamarack 🌱
We had so much fun harvesting sooo many evergreens and making wreaths with so many nature enthusiasts these past few weeks! Thank you to everyone who took part— we hope you are enjoying fragrant fresh evergreens at home.
@goodlot.beer@societyclubhouse@thebarnintottenham and @soraurenmarket , thank you for being such gracious hosts 🌲
This marks the close of our season— see you next spring!
It’s wreath-making time at the Sorauren Farmers’ Market!! Drop in to Mount Wolfe Farm’s DIY wreath bar to make your own real, fresh wreath. Price: donation of $40-$60+ sliding scale. It’s Christmas market vibes now! Drop your favourite Christmas emojis in the comments.
Things to do Toronto | Farmers Market | Christmas market | shop local | diy
THANK YOU for another great year at @thelocalflowercollective !
We feel lucky to have been part of TLFC since its inception in 2018. Over the years we have learned so much from fellow growers and from the florists we sell to, and our harvests have been part of countless events, from beautiful formal weddings to wildly ambitious artistic installations.
Thank you Jaime, Jess, Bernie, Laura, and everyone who comes through these doors, for being part of building such a robust hub for local flowers, and making our work more fun 🌿
Branchily yours, until next year!!
- Elena & Sarah
It’s a beautiful day to harvest grapevine and build these wreath bases for wholesale orders and for this week’s workshops!
I’ve been reflecting on the durability and disposability of seasonal decorating. These wreath forms should last a few seasons of reuse, adding fresh evergreens each year, but when their useful life ends, they will easily return to the soil, breaking down in a yard waste heap or compost bin.
A beautiful aspect of natural craft is this cycle of creation and decomposition— this knowledge that our crafting has a minimal ecological impact and isn’t resulting in more plastic eventually destined for centuries in a landfill, helps me find some respite in a winter season dominated by consumer culture. Hope to see you in one of our wreath workshops this week— ticket links in the usual place 🌲
Learn wreath-making with a certified tree nerd 🌿
OK, so there’s no such thing as a certified, but if there were, it’d be us. We know branches and greenery backwards & forwards!
When crafting with materials sourced directly from the natural world, you get the opportunity to really tune in to their characteristics and personality, and in turn how to harness their inherent beauty in your creations.
After countless hours walking the land here at the farm and getting to know the white pine, green spruce, cedar, and grapevine that will be our star materials in wreath-making, we learn so much about these plants through observation, and are excited to share with you. Their different shades, textures, densities, and flexibility of the branches themselves all come into play.
Come craft with us— experience the connection to nature through working with evergreen boughs, and come away with a beautiful wreath made by your very own hands. Only a few more days to sign up! Link in the usual place ⬆️
Notes on freshness and seasonality ✨🌲
Today I’m harvesting beautiful fresh Evergreens for wholesale orders, and realizing that our wreath workshops are just over one week away.
Finding the right timing to hold our workshops felt like a tricky balance: we wanted a time early enough to capture people’s excitement and holiday anticipation, but close enough to the celebratory dates toward the end of December (Christmas, the winter solstice or Yule) that the fresh evergreen wreaths would still be looking and smelling fresh.
In some traditions, the use of evergreens is reserved for right before the holiday itself— my German great grandparents decorated their Christmas tree just in time to light real candles on the tree on Christmas Eve, and I think there’s something beautiful about keeping the beauty sacred to just one day. Nowadays if you wait that long to get a tree, the tree lot would be empty. It’s nice to prolong the period of enjoying holiday decorations, but living plant materials have their limits and too much time in a dry indoor environment will result in some crispy branches and messy dropped needles.
If you want to make the crafting process part of your own tradition and holiday anticipation, sign up for a workshop: Nov 26 at GoodLot, or Nov 28 at Society Clubhouse. PS - the wreath you craft, or the workshop experience, would make a great gift 🥰
