Sea & Soil Botanical Design

Sea & Soil Design is based out of Wellfleet Massachusetts, Cape Cod. I have been a Massachusetts girl my whole life, but it wasn't until I was 22 that I made it to Cape Cod. And happily, I made it almost all the way to the tip on my first try! As a newly minted flower farmer and perpetual nature lover, I feel really lucky to live in Wellfleet. Wellfleet draws in people who love nature.

And you’re like, “Yea. Duh. Who doesn’t love the beach?”. It’s not just that Wellfleet has the pristine Atlantic National Seashore beaches, with their desert white dunes and swaying sea grasses; it is also filled with sandy, pine duff laden paths that wind through the scrub pines and oaks and deposit you amongst fairytale like glens of mosses and lichens. Wellfleet also has freshwater kettle ponds that are spring fed, with turtles and fish and native flowers blooming all around. It also is an excellent birding location, a place to see elegant swans and herons swooping through the estuaries and rivers.

Wellfleet is not however, a good place to grow many agricultural goods. The place is basically a sandbar, but sand is good material for plants that need fast draining soil, and as long as you have the time, you can always build up the nutrients in your soil. I was lucky enough to start Here & There Farm and Sea & Soil Design in an established Wellfleet garden.

The weather in Wellfleet is pretty agreeable especially compared to the rest of the cold weather New England. We are in growing zone 7a in Wellfleet. The spring in Wellfleet is not my favorite. Lasting from March until late June, it is rainy, windy and messy! It’s not cold, but it’s not warm either and temperatures don't get above the 50’s very often. This can make getting baby plant starts out and thriving a tricky thing to time correctly.

Our summers are hot and humid, but brief, and you have several different bodies of water to jump into anyways. The fall is perfect in temperature, and the first frost many times doesn't come until the end of November. Winters here are generally mild because of the warming influence of the ocean. In the last several years we have had a couple of week long periods of below freezing temperatures when icebergs floated past as you were looking out on the harbor. Still, generally temperatures don't go below freezing and this makes it possible to maybe overwinter some warmer weather crops.