Many people who go into flower farming (esp. on a small scale) are often 1) totally new to agriculture in general, and 2) beginning entrepreneurs. In other words, you’re not only new to growing on a larger kind of scale, but you’re also new to the whole idea of how to actually run a small business. As such, mistakes are inevitable.
No, but really–
The sooner you can accept that you WILL mistakes as you figure stuff out, the faster you can pick yourself up from any “failures” and use them to your advantage.
I’m now going into my fifth season flower farming (and my second season doing it as a full-time gig that fully supports our family), and over the years, I’ve made a LOT of mistakes, including every single one of the ones listed here. And if you’re a beginning flower farmer (or even just a year or two in) and you find yourself falling into one of these traps, I’m here to tell you that it’s actually OKAY — failure and making mistakes and doing things less than ideally actually are all a part of the process for most of us when it comes to learning to build a successful business.
However, I hope that by reading about some of my mistakes, you might be able to avoid some of the pitfalls that might slow your progress, or at the very least that you might look at some of these tendencies with a more critical eye when/if you encounter them on your own flower farming journey. But in the end, know that just jumping in and trying lots of different things comes with its own value and lessons, so don’t feel bad if you find yourself falling into some of these traps, even after being warned about them!
You really will figure things out as you go.
Let’s get on to the ten most common mistakes I see beginning flower farmers make though, shall we?
Note: There may be affiliate links to books, products, or services mentioned in this post.
Growing all the things
News flash: most of us who go into flower farming really love growing things. Shocker, right?! So what that means is that we are already predisposed to wanting to grow all the things, even if it actually doesn’t make the most sense to do so.
Typical scenario: you love gardening, you discover the idea of cut flowers from some source, and then you go and buy every single flower listed in Cut Flower Garden or The Cut Flower Handbook and dive right in (or was that just me? ha ha). Or maybe you start following a bunch of flower farming accounts on Instagram and just start buying everything that they grow, or that they tell you they like as a cut flower.
There’s really nothing terribly wrong with doing this at first, and in fact, it can definitely be super useful to get a lot of practice growing a wide variety of crops, but after your first or second year, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE you to start ruthlessly culling down your list of what you grow.
There are lots of reasons for this, but I’ll just list a couple:
First off, if you grow all the things, you generally won’t get really good at growing any one of them, and you especially won’t be KNOWN for growing any one of them. As more and more flower farms start to pop up, it will become ever more important to specialize yourself, at least somewhat.
Second, it gets expensive growing a lot of different things, and it makes things messy. When everything needs different harvesting instructions and post-harvest instructions and succession times, the more you’re growing, the trickier your planning/scheduling/harvesting gets. You’ll also find that you tend to waste time and resources splitting your attention into so many different directions, which can lead to some crops actually never really getting harvested at all, or at least not to their fullest potential.
So once you’ve found out what you like growing and what sells well, whittle your crop list down as ruthlessly as possible to streamline your planning and workload exponentially.
The best resource I know of that provides a deep dive into this topic of intensive crop planning (specifically about limiting what you grow) is the must-own (in my opinion) book, Flower Farming For Profit.
Taking shortcuts on your soil health
I was so much more excited about my flowers in the beginning than my soil, and I took every shortcut you could — I didn’t run soil tests, I didn’t add amendments some years, I just went for the cheapest sources of bulk compost I could find, and BOY, DID I PAY FOR IT (and am still paying for it, unfortunately, in some areas of our farm).
Trust me, it is NOT worth it to cut corners here. Get your soil tested, find a high quality source of excellent compost (if you’re in Utah, we actually became a distributor for the mushroom compost we source by the semitruck in bulk, so we can hook you up if you’re around here), and follow the amendment instructions listed on your soil test results.
A good rule of thumb: Be willing to spend the MAJORITY of your funds your first couple years on building your soil. Therefore, if you have $1000 to spend on developing your cut flower patch, spend around $700 on your soil and the remaining $300 on your seeds and plants.
You will thank me later.
Not accounting for your own labor/time
Once you start actually selling your flowers, it can be tempting to think, “Because I made $4500 in sales this year and only spent $3000, I made $1500 in profit!!”…and then build your next year’s plan based on that, without accounting for things like your own time spend planting, weeding, harvesting, selling, and delivering the flowers.
“Is it really that big of a deal?” you might wonder. “Especially if I really enjoy doing it and would be doing all this anyway?”
It is a big deal, and I’ll tell you why —
If eventually you find yourself in a position of needing to hire someone for any reason and you haven’t built in the cost of delivery/labor into your prices, you will quickly find that your “profitable flower farm” actually isn’t profitable at all.
Say you broke your leg in late April, right when everything is needing to be planted and you’re selling stuff for Mother’s Day. Let’s say you need to hire someone for 8 weeks to cover all the physical stuff you can’t do during that time. If you’re all of a sudden shelling out $15/hour to pay someone else to do what you’ve always done, you start to rethink offering your bouquets for something like $10-15 apiece.
One of the best things we ever did on our farm was that my husband and I started timing how long it took us to do common farm chores (harvesting bunches of flowers, planting out a tray of plugs, etc.). This has made it exponentially easier to make sure we’re charging the prices we need to in order to make this actually sustainable long-term.
You are not doing yourself any favors if you charge too low of prices and try to justify that it doesn’t matter because it’s just you doing all the work. If you want to be in this for the long haul, you need to actually start thinking like a business owner and look at how many hours you’re putting into this thing (and charge accordingly).
Failing to plan for profit
This goes hand in hand with the mistake above, but I’ll be honest with you — I didn’t actually plan for profit at all until my third year in business.
What do I mean by that?
Well, for my first two years, I just set an arbitrary overall sales goal I wanted to try and hit. (Like my first year—I set my target super low, at just $1200.) I didn’t actually think about how I was going to try and make that money (in other words, I didn’t break it down into the different types of sales channels or anything), and I definitely didn’t sit down and try and estimate how many expenses I would have in any given season.
I got much smarter as I went along, and I not only started setting an overall sales target for the entire year, but I also now break down how much I need to make in all our various sales channels to make that overall target, and I also comb through my expenses every year so I can estimate with a decent amount of accuracy what our expenses will likely look like the next season.
Doing both of those things has allowed me to actually make money on my farm, rather than having all of it fly out the window the second it comes in because I hadn’t really planned out how I was going to make a profit from all of this.
Copying what everyone else is doing
This is a tricky one, because you often don’t know what you don’t know at the beginning, so all you feel you really can do is copy what you see someone else doing who is successful at it.
But I challenge you to look deeper, especially when you have a year or two under your belt, at avenues where there is low fruit that no one else around you is stepping up and grabbing. This comes by familiarizing yourself with the industry as a whole, but even more importantly, with what your customers are saying that they actually want. Sometimes what you’re wanting to sell and what people are actually wanting to buy are two very different things. But if you give your customers an outlet, trust me, they will tell you exactly what they want to buy from you.
For example, our self-serve farmstand was born out of the endless complaints we were hearing from everyone about the terrible flowers available at the local Walmart, which is our only main retailer in the area that carries grab-n-go bouquets at a more affordable price. That hadn’t really been in my original sales plan at all, but it ended up taking off very quickly because we were filling a real need in the community.
Another one I’ve heard of where I am (but chose not to pursue) is that people often ask if we offer pots of forced bulbs for winter gifts (like hyacinths or paperwhites or tulips). We have chosen not to take that particular low-hanging fruit for the time being, but we have heard it from enough people that we know there would be a market there if we ever chose to go for it.
So pay attention — what are people asking for on local Facebook groups? Get to know your local florists or other people in the flower industry, and listen to what they’re saying that they wish they had better access to, or that they can’t find a good source for. Sure, you might not have gone into flower farming to become known for forcing bulbs in winter, but that might end up being what you get known for if you pursue that niche where the need already exists.
Doing anything that will make a buck
In the beginning, there’s a bit of a necessity a lot of time with just taking whatever offer of a sale is made to you, but as you start to build up your business, learn to say no to things that really aren’t worth your time or focus. For the first few years, I took on all sorts of crazy jobs at all hours, like taking on custom orders for very particular clients for only $10 (and very last minute, at that!) that required an hour’s worth of communication upfront. (I wish I was kidding. That actually happened multiple times.)
As you get more established, work on creating boundaries around your time and around the minimum amount you are willing to do a job for.
Endlessly investing in more flowers rather than investing in yourself and your business acumen
You might notice a theme emerging here, and that’s this — many of us who go into flower farming would usually rather spend a lot more time focusing on the flower side than on the business side, to our cost. A good rule of thumb is that for every hour you spend on the actual growing/harvesting/working with flowers, you should spend an hour on the business side (marketing, social media, business strategy, tracking in spreadsheets, etc.).
If you neglect to do this, you will find that your farm likely won’t stay in business for very long.
My very favorite affordable place to start building up your business savvy is to purchase and read the phenomenal book Flower Farming For Profit cover to cover. If this book would have existed when I first started, my business would have grown sooooo much faster. Trust me, this book is worth every last penny, and it’s one you will want to have on hand to reference over and over again.
Not starting an email list and website right away
This was one that took me foreeeeeever to do. I didn’t create my farm’s website until we were wrapping up our third season, and I didn’t start my email list until we were going into our fourth. Knowing what I do now and seeing what a massive difference those two things have made on our sales just makes me kick myself that I didn’t do this from the get-go.
Social media can be a great way to build up your business, but the algorithms are often finicky to businesses, and if you count on them as your only marketing outlet, you will often be frustrated or disappointed. Your email list is something you own and your website can attract people to you much better who go searching for what you offer on Google, and having both of those things in place was a huge reason why we could afford to take our farm to a full-time gig for both my husband and me this year.
Your website does not have to be fancy or complicated (mine certainly isn’t). You can check out my farm website here (and join my email list too, if you want to see how I go about doing that each week). I simply built mine through Squarespace, which I’ve been really impressed with. They made it really easy and intuitive for me to pick a style I like, add products, and build things out as I had time.
Only making a crop plan rather than thinking about a marketing plan, too
The theme continues, as you can see — in case you haven’t gotten the message yet, it’s critical that you focus just as much on the business side as on the flower side if you’re going to succeed at this!
When I first started farming, I would usually wait until I had flowers in hand before I started offering them for sale, mostly just because I needed to get actual pictures of what I was offering! (Bonus Lesson: Make sure you take a gazillion pictures of everything from the get go. You never know when you’re going to need a picture of just that activity/flower/section of your farm.) And while I was lucky enough to see some success with just posting whenever I had stuff to offer, I’ve noticed that I’ve had exponentially more success by building up anticipation to a product release first, much like you would a traditional product launch or new series release on t.v. Start throwing out teasers several weeks before, then gradually release more and more details as you go. An excellent podcast on the subject is Episode 45 of The Dirt on Flowers about creating a successful launch.
You can also check out the blog post I wrote on how to start marketing your flowers as a total newbie.
Taking it personally when it’s not as “easy” as other people make it look
Perhaps the biggest mistake of all is beating yourself up when things don’t go as planned. When weather or pests take down your flowers, or you make a silly mistake and forget to water and things die, or you put yourself out there over and over again only to seemingly hear crickets.
My fellow flower friend, this is not an easy journey, what we’re doing, and if you find yourself encountering self-defeating thoughts or feeling like an impostor or even questioning your sanity a bit for wanting to do this, you are not alone. Regardless of what you might see on social media or have somehow gotten into your head to believe, flower farming is just like any farming — really hard work.
But we are made to do hard things, and our souls long for a challenge with a purpose, and that is EXACTLY what flower farming has come to be for me — a challenge with a purpose much greater than just making some income. It’s become my mission in life to increase the amount of beauty in the world, and if it was easy, the reward wouldn’t be nearly as sweet. So expect some hard curveballs to get thrown your way, but also expect some pretty sweet surprises—this flower farming journey will surely be filled with a lot of both!
Now let me hear from you — what are some of the mistakes you’ve maybe already made as you’ve started on your journey? Or are there any areas where you would like me to give some more guidance? I’d love to hear! Go ahead and leave a comment below 🙂
