Hello and welcome! We are Torrie and Matt, and we have four children ages 8 and under. When I (Torrie) started this blog, we lived on a “suburban homestead” in northern Utah, and our dream was to one day own more land so that we could pursue our desire to cultivate the land, learn how to create stunning bouquets of blooms from our own cutting garden, become more self-sufficient, and raise animals (though that last one is more of Matt’s dream than mine).
Little did we know that just a year after starting this blog in March 2020, we would learn that Matt’s company was relocating to a much more rural location three hours’ south, which would allow us to purchase a home with more than double the land we’d had to play around with before. Soon after moving and with a LOT of encouragement from my husband and friends, I decided in March 2021 to go for a pipe dream of mine — starting a small backyard flower farm. I didn’t really have any expectations for my little farm other than that I knew I loved growing cut flowers, and I knew that I wanted to be able to share them with the world.
I had no idea just how much that decision would change the course of our lives forever.
Season by season, our farm kept growing and growing, and we quickly noticed that even on our 0.6-acre property, we weren’t able to keep up with demand. Then, in 2023, two very important things happened — I gave birth to my fourth and final child, Naomi, and my husband unexpectedly lost his job. Naomi came six weeks early, and we found out at birth that she has Down syndrome. It was a total surprise, but we felt strongly that she came exactly as she was supposed to and that she would enrich our family in ways we could only guess at. We talked about how the flower farm might someday get big enough that it might provide some awesome opportunities for Naomi and for us to do some outreach events for other people in the community who also have Down syndrome, but the idea still seemed firmly rooted in the future.
Then when Matt lost his job just a couple months later, a lot of curious happenings had us totally rethinking our original plan of letting the flower farm just slowly grow over time until (maybe) we eventually went all in on it. We had a neighbor offer to rent about an 1/8 of acre of land to us, we started selling some other things (like mushroom compost) on the side, and all of a sudden, we realized we had what we needed to just make the leap to full time.
We still have lots of dreams in the future (starting with finding more land to actually buy), and we hope you’ll follow along with our journey as we continue to develop our flower farm and grow from our mistakes. I particularly blog nowadays to share some of the key ways of growing a profitable and successful flower farm from the ground up (and with limited space), as I wished I’d had more access to that kind of information when I was just starting out. Welcome to I Dream of Acres!
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