Blue Seal Farm & Home - Milford West, NH

06/13/2026

Honey tasting today! 11-1

06/11/2026

Bee Here at Milford Blue Seal West on Sat 11-1 and hear all about these Bees and taste the Honey!!

06/11/2026

A little deadheading goes a long way. 🌹 Encourage more blooms and healthier-looking rose bushes all season.

06/10/2026

What a lovely day for a garden party!

06/09/2026

That's not one flower. It's two hundred, hiding in plain sight.

You look at a purple coneflower and see a single bloom — pink petals around a spiky orange dome. You're actually looking at a crowd.

That spiky central cone holds two hundred to three hundred separate flowers packed together — disk florets — each one its own complete bloom. They don't all open at once. They bloom in a slow wave across the cone over several days, so there's fresh pollen and nectar on offer for whatever lands.

The pink "petals" are flowers too — but they're sterile. No seed, no pollen. Their entire job is advertising. Big colored flags pulling bees and butterflies in from across the yard toward the real action on the cone.

A whole marketplace built to look like one tidy blossom.

Then comes the second act. When the petals drop, each floret becomes a small hard seed. The bristly cone turns into a feeder. Come fall, goldfinches cling to the dried heads and pick them clean, one seed at a time.

Leave the cones standing when they fade. The flower you thought was one was always a hundred — and she keeps feeding the yard long after she stops looking like a flower 🌱

06/09/2026

Fun event if you are interested in meeting fellow local business professionals! We are pleased to host the Greater Merrimack-Souhegan Valley Chamber of Commerce and welcome Fulchino Vineyard of Hollis NH for a wine tasting for the group.
We will have light snacks and fellowship and networking from 5:00–6:30 PM. Come join us in the nursery tomorrow evening!
Blue Seal Milford West
351 Elm Street
Milford, NH
We look forward to seeing you!

06/05/2026

Food for thought as we sold all but 2 of the columbine...

Your columbine has finished blooming, and if you've been deadheading everything in sight, it's time to put down the pruners and read this first.

Most gardeners see faded columbine flowers and immediately reach for the scissors. That instinct makes sense, but if you do that too soon, you're cutting off next spring's entire flower show before it ever gets started.

Here's what's actually happening after those blooms fade. The plant is shifting its energy away from flowers and into seed production. Those spent flower heads are developing into papery seed pods, and inside those pods are dozens of tiny black seeds. This is columbine doing exactly what it evolved to do.

The process runs in three stages. Stage one is patience. When the flowers fade and the petals drop, leave the stems alone. The seed pods are just beginning to form. Stage two is watching. Over the next few weeks, those pods will swell, turn tan and papery, and eventually dry out completely. That's your signal. Stage three is the fun part: once the pods are fully dry, you can either collect the seeds and scatter them exactly where you want new plants, or simply leave some pods in place and let the plant handle it.

And here's something worth knowing: columbine is a natural self-seeder. Birds and beneficial insects will work those dried pods long after you've moved on to your next garden task. You don't have to do much at all.

One more thing worth mentioning: if you save and scatter seeds, expect some surprises. Seedlings from open-pollinated columbine don't always match the parent plant. You may get new flower colors, different forms, or unexpected combinations. For a lot of gardeners, that's the best part.

Once you've collected seeds or decided the pods have done their job, then you can cut the old stems back to the basal foliage. That fresh low growth will carry the plant through the rest of the season.

Today's seed pods really are next spring's flowers. Let them do their work.

06/04/2026