• Failures + Lessons Learned - Flower Farming

    Lessons Learned From My First Year Flower Farming

    January 11, 2022 - By 

    Having never done anything remotely like flower farming in my life before, I knew I was in for a steep learning curve. Despite perhaps hundreds of hours of research and planning, I still killed trays upon trays of seedlings (mostly after transplanting), had poor yields and/or stem lengths from several crops, and had stressful weeks (and weeks) of not enough flowers. On the other hand, I also had some surprising successes — we sold out of our CSA bouquet subscriptions after just a couple days, I sold out of everything I had for the first several weeks when I finally…

  • Flower Farming

    How Much Does It Cost to Start a (Small) Flower Farm?

    December 22, 2021 - By 

    In the past few years, flower farming has seen a distinct boom in the U.S. While there used to be relatively few sources you could go to if you were wanting to go into growing cut flowers for profit, there are now more than you could ever read / watch / follow in a lifetime. However, I have found relatively few sources that give actual hard and fast numbers for what it costs to START one (although occasionally you’ll get a ballpark figure–I’ve seen some saying as little as around $600 and some saying $20,000+). Obviously there will be variability…

  • Day in the Life - Flower Farming

    Day in the Life of a Flower Farmer {Summer 2021}

    July 29, 2021 - By 

    I decided back in the spring that I wanted to do a Day in the Life post for each season of flower farming, just so you can get a sense of what the work looks like at different times of the year, and also how it changes. I’m currently just starting the super busy season, as I finally have enough flowers not just to fulfill my weekly CSA bouquet subscriptions, but also to start offering weekly (or bi-weekly) arrangements to the general public. The majority of mornings involve some kind of harvest nowadays, as well as some sort of flower…

  • Flower Farming

    Flower Farming Diaries: The June Gap

    June 30, 2021 - By 

    You know the saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know”? Yeah, I’ve definitely been feeling the truth of THAT this whole first year of flower farming. I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent individual, so when I approached this whole idea of actually going for my flower farm dream, I did a LOT of research. And I mean a LOT. Even now, several months in, I’m still studying seed catalogs for fun and browsing through a flower farming or flower arranging book nearly every day. But in all my research and all my spreadsheet-making and all my careful…

  • iris in bloom
    Flower Farming - The Homestead Weekly

    The Homestead Weekly, 16 May 2021

    May 16, 2021 - By 

    Can I still call these The Homestead Weekly when I’m only averaging one of them a month? 🙂 Not surprisingly, basically all of my time has been hijacked by flower farming. Once I’ve planted out the first big wave of all the tender annuals (which will probably happen around the 24th of this month), I anticipate that things will slow down a *little* bit until about July, when I’ll be ramping up harvesting like crazy. For May and June, I’m basically just starting some more succession planting in the grow room, picking enough to cover the CSA bouquet subscriptions (which…

  • Flower Farming - The Homestead Weekly

    The Homestead Weekly, 11 April 2021

    April 13, 2021 - By 

    I want to be keeping up on these each week (if for no other reason than the fact that they’re so good for ME to be able to look back on!), but man, life has been crazy lately. Flower farming is so much work, and though I really love it, it does take up pretty much all of my time. But since it’s been 3 weeks since my last one, I really wanted to not wait any longer before doing an update, so I’m taking a break and completing this now rather than sowing more seeds like I should be…

  • spring planted strawberry plants
    Day in the Life - Flower Farming

    Day in the Life of a First Year Flower Farmer {Spring}

    April 8, 2021 - By 

    Just for fun, I’m planning on doing a Day in the Life post for each season this first year of being a flower farmer. Not only will this help anyone reading to see the level of work that goes into managing even a micro scale flower farm operation (we’re only growing on about 1,000 square feet this year), but I’m hoping it will also be a valuable resource for me looking back. I will note, this was done on the 31st of March 2020, and it was a slightly different day than usual because my daughter was on spring break…

  • The Homestead Weekly

    The Homestead Weekly, 21 March 2021

    March 22, 2021 - By 

    Happy first day of spring on Saturday! After a lovely week of warm temps in the fifties and sixties, we celebrated the first day of spring by getting snow that night and then having the coldest night of the month yet last night :). So it goes! In the Kitchen After weeks of being insanely busy with flower farming stuff and neglecting all but the most basic survival stuff around the house, something had to change—I knew the pace wasn’t sustainable, and I didn’t want to feel like I was always making the kids and the house feel like they…

  • Flower Farming - The Homestead Weekly

    The Homestead Weekly, 14 March 2021

    March 15, 2021 - By 

    Whooooo, things have been crazy! I knew they would be when I decided to officially try out flower farming, but the past couple weeks have really proven to me that I’m definitely not used to “working” this much (aside from the work of homemaking and childcare, obviously). All in all, things have been going pretty good though, and I’m really proud of all that we’ve been doing and what we’ve accomplished thus far. In the Kitchen When I haven’t been working all day on flower farm stuff, I find I still take great pleasure in cooking, like yesterday when I…

  • Flower Farming - Gardening

    5 Things I’ve Learned About Flower Farming This Week

    March 7, 2021 - By 

    Whew, it’s been a busy week! It’s crazy how fast this dream of doing a “little flower farm side thing” has evolved over the past few weeks. Basically what started out as a simple idea for how to gain back some of the money for my cut garden hobby has now grown into a legit business venture, and I’m putting in the hours to prove it. Not only do I need to do the actual WORK of producing flowers for selling, but I’m also having to learn a ton about marketing and business and all sorts of fun things. I…