Naming the Future

First Flower Farm
 

     Of  all the labors of love needed to get my small farm up and growing, finding a focus and choosing a name are proving to be the most emotionally involved (aside from handling rejected farm market applications and not earning a paycheck). A name is a big deal, whether it is labeling a new baby or a new business. Come to think of it, new babies and new businesses seem to have a lot in common: lost sleep, sore bodies, emotional roller-coasters of pure euphoria and intense self doubt, and heaps of hopes for the future misting every moment.
     During four idle hours in the car over Easter weekend, I came up with about 20 possibilities for farm names. Some were based on things I like or consider part of my sense of self: the color red, zinnias, red shoes, braids, my Michigan childhood, the several ancestors who inspired my lifelong love of growing things. Other names suggested the humorous things that inhabit life here at this particular place: our charming house, which looms up from below with its added metal chimney like the Toonerville Trolley, The Farm Dog and his fertilizer-contributing role, the feisty red squirrel who sits just outside the kitchen window everyday at breakfast shouting at nothing apparent, then climbs straight up the stucco to the second-floor roof when we come out to fill the feeder, or the two big white cedar tees that were about the only landscaping of merit this place still had when we moved here.
     Everyone had a different opinion, depending on their interest in back-story and opinion as to the value of including humor in my business image. Should the name be geneeric, or should it immediately reflect that mine is a flower farm? Will that leave me restricted to only flowers if I go on to grow vegetables, too, once I can afford to expand? Hmm... Lots of decisions!
    It was my elder daughter who declared mine to be a "Pocket Farm," not a "micro farm," categorically speaking. What is a "pocket farm" and how is that different from a "micro-farm?" There is no difference, really, aside from the marketing flavor injected into each of these categorical terms. "Micro" is trendy and high-tech, verging on haute—micro chips, micro fridges, micro-greens. A "pocket" is something my sewing, small-town, rotary-phone-using semi-Luddite self can get behind. A pocket is cute, a place to put important things like candies, allowance and yes, Kleenex. A micro-anything is gratuitously small and easily lost.
My interpretations aside, a "pocket farm" is like a "pocket park": small, unexpected, a little surprise out of context with its surroundings, like my farm in the midst of a residential suburb; a little green spot of respite.  So there, for those of you that have missed the tiny-everything wave sweeping through pop culture, is why this is a pocket farm.
     The actual farm name is not so easy to settle on. But I have chosen one, and it has started to feel familiar: First Flower Farm (or maybe it's First-Flower Farm, if I can get that hyphen to be a flower, for which I will have to call in tech support). "First Flower" because, as I write this, it is spring and I, like almost everyone in the cold-bound North, am starved for those first flowers to arrive. First Flower, more importantly, because the earliest memory I have of thinking of myself in connection to plants is that of spotting, in my grandmother's rock-edged garden, an Easter lily she had planted the year before, and toddling in to sink my face in its fragrance. I have always been certain that was the moment I became a gardener. Also, First Flower because of my mantra, which I am investing all my energy into following quite literally at long last. So that this farm, First Flower Farm, becomes the first open bud of Bloom where you are planted.