Flower Farming

This post is part five in our five-part series all about how to start your own small-scale flower farm. Make sure you check out the other posts in the series first so you’re caught up to speed:

• Part One: Business Plan + Site Selection
• Part Two: What to Grow + Planning Your Year
• Part Three: Marketing + Building a Customer Base
• Part Four: Harvesting + Arranging

I would wager a bet that most people who get into flower farming are dreamers. We love to envision the fields of blooms and crates of wrapped bouquets for the market, and we love the idea of working for ourselves and getting to spend copious amounts of time outside enjoying the fresh air and sunshine.

While being a person who dreams big and who can see the big picture is a highly valuable trait to have, it can also mean that we dreamers sometimes have the tendency to misjudge what the reality will actually look like. I wrote this final post not to totally scare you off of flower farming, but rather set you up so that you go in with both eyes wide open.

Managing Expectations About Your Farm

I once heard something to the effect that virtually all the frustration we experience in life boils down to unmet expectations. Therefore, to save you some unnecessary future frustration if you decide to go forward with flower farming, I’m going to try and set you up for having more REALISTIC expectations about what flower farming is AND what it isn’t.

Flower Farming Is NOT Gardening

Perhaps the biggest misconception potential flower farmers get into their heads is that flower farming will be just like gardening, except they’re going to be making money from it.

NOT SO.

As a gardener, your goal is generally one of two things: 1) to produce the greatest yield (if you’re primarily growing food), or 2) to cultivate the most beautiful space you can. Now, the first goal of producing the greatest yield is definitely true if you’re going to switch over into flower farming, but if you’re used to just gardening for the aesthetics, flower farming will have a LOT of rude wake-up calls for you.

First: You won’t actually get to enjoy most of the flowers yourself. If you’re harvesting your crops when you should (which is often well before the flowers are fully open), it’s your CUSTOMER that will enjoy the beauty of your flowers, not so much you.

Second: Even if you don’t plan on using or selling every stem, you’ll still need to be in the habit of cutting them all anyway, just to signal to the plants to keep producing. If you’ve been used to enjoying all your flowers in your garden and maybe just deadheading them once they’re spent, this ruthless harvesting can take a lot of getting used to.

Third: Often, people garden as a relaxing hobby–something that brings them delight and joy and wonder and relaxation. Flower farming will change all of that. Now, I’m not saying there won’t be moments of wonder and delight and all that good stuff, but when your plants have become your business, you think about the whole thing differently. All of a sudden, instead of a leisurely stroll out in your yard to simply enjoy what’s currently blooming, you’ll be spending the vast majority of time in the dirt working, not simply looking and enjoying. If you’ve made commitments to bouquet subscription members or to florists, you’ll also have the added pressure of needing your crops to perform a certain way (and sometimes bloom at a certain time). The business aspect definitely adds a layer of pressure and stress that just doesn’t exist when you’re only doing it for yourself.

Fourth: With gardening, you often build up “layers” in your landscape over time, keeping a “base” of the same shrubs and perennials year after year and maybe swapping out a few annuals here and there and dividing things as they need it over time. While there might be areas of your flower farm that you leave untouched year after year (such as your rows of peonies or other perennials), the majority of your farm will probably be getting constantly ripped up and pulled out and overplanted with something new, over and over again.

The Perils of Working with a Perishable Product

One of the trickiest things about being a flower farmer is that you’re working with something that has a very limited shelf life–the second you cut that stem, you only have about a week (maybe a little longer) in which that flower will look good, and if you want your customer to enjoy as long of a vase life as possible, that means you’ll need to sell everything you cut within about 48 hours of harvesting it.

The other tricky thing is the harvesting itself. With some crops, such as apples, there is a often a relatively long window of time that you can safely harvest it in, often over a span of a few weeks. With many flowers, your ideal harvesting window is often extremely small, which means that no matter how you’re feeling or what else you have going on, you’ll need to drop everything and harvest certain things at the right time no matter what if you want any kind of return on them.

Take tulips in the spring, for example. If you let your tulips “blow open,” they’re basically only fit for the compost pile at that point — you’ll be unable to sell them. Because of that, you’ll need to be checking your tulip fields 2-3 times PER DAY in the spring to harvest stems right at the “color crack” stage.

All of this means that you need to be prepared to make sacrifices — of sleep, of attending events or outings that will prevent you from bringing in your harvest on time, and of energy. There are many, many times that I don’t feel like going out and harvesting yet again for the 10th time that week, but I have to do it anyway if I want any kind of sell-able crop.

This is Not “Easy Money”

Back before I’d really gotten started, I fell into the trap of thinking that because I was already decent at getting stuff to grow, having a backyard flower farm would be pretty easy money.

I literally had NO IDEA just how much effort and thought and good ol’ sweat had to go into pretty much everything about it. Not only did I have no clue of the hundreds of hours I’d have to spend in the spring starting everything from seed and eventually planting it all out, but I also had completely not taken into account all the hours I’d have to spend marketing the business and actually trying to sell our flowers.

Sure, you might think to yourself — “I can buy $100 worth of seeds and then turn around and sell all the flowers I can grow from that and make a couple thousand bucks” — but there is so much that has to go into that process between sowing and selling that if you’re just in it to make some “easy money,” you will not be in the flower farming business for long.

Recognize that there will be a crazy amount of work involved, and that you could probably make more money doing almost anything else.

The Weather is Your Boss

And your boss can be fickle.

Sometimes she extends your growing season gloriously long, and you’re raking in way more money during the fall than you’d ever dared to dream of. Sometimes she hits you with a frost in mid-June that kills everything you’d already planted out since your expected last frost date was weeks earlier.

While you can control a lot when it comes to your farm, you can never control what the weather is going to do. So just accept from the beginning that the weather will often not want to cooperate with you, and learn to deal with whatever curve balls she decides to throw your way. Sure, you can complain all you want about it (and you will!), but the sooner you just learn to be flexible and roll with the punches, the longer you’ll be able to stick with farming in general.

How to Avoid Burnout

No matter how well I try and manage my time and expectations, I seem to hit burnout around every August or September. By that point, we’re so swamped with blooms and weeds and work that it’s all I can do just to hang on, and by the time the killing frost comes, I’m ready to welcome it with arms wide open.

However, I have managed to get better at staving off the burnout every year since my first year growing (when I was honestly worried that I’d made myself hate flowers and never wanted to see one again), and I’m sharing the following tips with the hopes that they’ll help you too.

Set Clear Boundaries

I’ll admit I’m a people pleaser by nature, so one of the hardest things for me as a business owner is to set clear boundaries and stick to them. My first season, I wasn’t super good at doing that — I often offered free delivery (or delivery at a fraction of the cost I should have), I often waited hours per week for people to show up to get their flowers, and I took on requests at all sorts of odd hours without thinking twice about it.

While I’m still working out the particulars, I definitely entered my second season with some much needed guidelines in place that seriously saved my sanity and helped me to actually enjoy much more of the process.

A few things I did:

• I no longer offered free delivery (even in the same town), which literally saved me hours upon hours every single week. Sure, it meant that far fewer people were willing to pay for delivery and I know I missed out on some business because of it, but the tradeoff of hours of my life back was worth it. (Plus it was nice knowing that on the rare occasion I did make a delivery, I was at least compensated somewhat fairly for it.)
• If someone was more than 15-20 minutes late to come pick up their flowers, I would leave their flowers on our porch so that I no longer had to wait and listen for them to come to the door. This was probably the #1 most important thing I did this year because I would hazard a guess that at least 75% of people showed up late to pick up their orders, some of whom were well over an hour late. Not feeling like I had to hang around inside waiting meant I was able to get back out on the farm and work on other tasks since I knew they could just get it off the porch.
• I haven’t started this yet, but if I get any “same day rush” orders where I’m not given at least 4-5 hours notice, next season I’m going to charge an extra $5 fee. Ditto if it’s someone wanting a custom order on a Saturday. (I don’t do any on Sundays at all.)

Anticipate Tricky Situations

Tricky situations usually come in a couple common forms: 1) family members or friends expecting freebies or special treatment, and 2) expectations not being clearly communicated between you and the customer, which creates misunderstanding.

I’ve actually been super lucky in that pretty much all of our family and friends have bent over backwards to support us on so many levels (including purchasing flowers at regular, full price from us), but the one that does seem to come up under that category sometimes is the expectation of free delivery. If it’s someone who has helped us out a ton with the farm in one way or another, I don’t worry about charging delivery, but if it’s just a neighbor or friend who knows I live close and doesn’t want to come pick something up, it can get tricky. I can’t tell you what to do in every scenario, but just keep in mind that your time is valuable and that you are running a business. You also need to keep in mind that what you do now might set up future expectations, so think about what you’re willing to (cheerfully) do, and what you aren’t. Sometimes I’m truly happy to do something a little extra for the family members and neighbors who have literally done so very much to support us in this dream, but if someone asks me to do something and I feel resentful, it might mean that a different expectation needs to be communicated.

Speaking of communication, it’s critical that you make your communications between you and your customer as clear as possible so that one or both of you doesn’t end up frustrated. That means being very clear about final price (including any extra fees), what the product will look like, exactly when they’ll come by and get it, if they need to pay beforehand, acceptable forms of payment, etc.

One other tidbit I’ve learned from personal experience: if someone is paying for a custom arrangement or bouquet to be delivered, make sure you take a picture of it before you deliver it so that the buyer can actually see what it looks like.

Keep Your Expectations Reasonable

From the get go, I had the unspoken expectation that I would try and sell every (usable) stem, every time. While this expectation meant that I was really good at hustling and staying on top of harvesting, it also meant that by the height of summer, I was completely and totally exhausted. My first year, I just kept pushing through anyway, with the end result that I was literally almost ready to throw in the towel and quit flower farming for good. Heck, I was ready to never grow a single flower again! However, after a long and necessary winter that forced me to rest and take a big step back, I could see that I did still love growing things, but that I just needed to be a lot more intentional with my time and energy.

That meant that I learned to do away with the expectation of selling every stem and that I instead built in “safeguards” for myself. For me, that meant that once I fulfilled my necessary CSA bouquet subscription obligations for the week and any custom order requests that I was willing to take on, I looked to my energy levels to see if I had anything left to do pop up sales. Sometimes I did, and I really did basically sell every stem. Other times, I decided to ease up and just do the bare minimum. As a result, I was in a much better state of mind (and body) at the end of my second season than I was at the end of my first, and I had no intentions of quitting!

Schedule Rest — And Do It!

This might mean you always schedule a little vacation in the middle of the growing season or that you regularly give yourself a day off during the week, but whatever that rest looks like for you, make sure that you actually do it. The work to do on a flower farm is literally never ending, so it is vital you schedule breaks and take them, or you WILL burn out or get sick or start to resent the business.

I’ve taken vacations during both growing seasons so far, and even though it does mean that it’s kind of a crazy catch up game coming back, it also has meant I’ve been in a much better head space when I do. I also started blocking out one “non-farm” day per work week out of necessity, which has been a lifesaver. Sometimes I’d have custom orders or florist requests come up on those days, but just knowing that I had nothing else scheduled meant that I felt more able to choose to take on those extra work opportunities or not.

Get Help If You Can

Even if you can’t afford to hire even a part-time employee, you might be surprised by how many people are willing to help you out, just because of the nature of your work. I’ve had several neighbors offer to help just because they love flowers and gardening so much and wanted to learn some extra skills, so they’ve come over to help me harvest or do other farm-related tasks so that they could learn more. I’ve also had many people who have offered me flowers from their yard to use in my bouquets if my own don’t come on when expected, and I’ve had people offer parts of their yards for me to grow on as well.

One of the best things I did my second season was training my husband on how to harvest everything, whereas before I’d just done it all on my own. Now, with both of us working full speed, we can often do a full harvest in about an hour and a half or two hours tops, and it’s also made the task way more enjoyable since we’re out there together. I’ve also started to train my kids on basic farm chores like weeding and helping us plant bulbs in the fall so that the work doesn’t have to take so long.

If you don’t have family that can help, seriously consider using a little bit of your money from selling flowers to hire someone once a week to come and help for a few hours. One of your greatest assets as a business owner is your own mental wellbeing and health, and if you’re feeling at the top of your game, you are much more likely to be more profitable than if you’re constantly stressed out and pushing yourself past your limits.

Final Thoughts

Like any job, flower farming has its benefits and disadvantages. And some of flower farming’s greatest benefits (working outside! being your own boss!) are some of its hardest pitfalls (working outside no matter the weather! never feeling like you can take a break!). But even despite this being one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever taken on, it’s also probably the job I’ve loved the very most.

I love that flower farming is something I can do out of my own backyard, with my kids and husband right there beside me. I love that flower farming challenges me on every level, and that it gives me chances for both physical exercise and for mental stretching and creativity. I love that what I create with what I grow brings people joy and delight, and that I can see firsthand that sometimes it’s the smallest things that can make the most difference in someone’s life.

So I accept the whole package, the beautiful AND the beyond frustrating, the successes AND the setbacks.

I can’t tell you if flower farming is the right path for you, but I hope that this series has given you a clearer picture of what the job actually entails.

And that’s a wrap for the series! Did I answer all your questions?

This post is part four in our five-part series all about how to start your own small-scale flower farm. Make sure you check out the other posts in the series first so that you’re caught up to speed:

• Part One: Business Plan + Site Selection
• Part Two: What to Grow + Planning Your Year
• Part Three: Marketing + Building a Customer Base

So you’ve finally managed to grow some flowers, and you’re ready to actually start selling them. Where to start?

Just as in most things with flower farming, the learning curve will seem steep at first. You might very well be Googling every single type of flower to see how and when it should be harvested, or you might have your ebook of Cool Flowers constantly up on your phone and your copy of Cut Flower Garden permanently open on your kitchen counter (as I did my first year). The fact is, there is a LOT of very specific information you’ll need to eventually internalize when it comes to harvesting specific kinds of flowers, but the good news? The more you do it, the more it becomes second nature, and you won’t even need to question it anymore.

Let’s start from the beginning, though.

Note: There are affiliate links to books and products mentioned below.

Harvesting Basics = The Four C’s

Clean

You don’t need any fancy tools to harvest — just a pair of sharp snips (these are my favorite, and they’re super affordable), a pair of sturdy work gloves, and a bucket filled with water. However, before you march off to cut down your darlings, you absolutely need to make sure that everything is completely clean. A good rule of thumb I’ve often heard? If you wouldn’t feel comfortable drinking from your bucket, don’t be putting flowers into it.

Flowers are tough, but one of the things that can bring down their vase life the very fastest is for them to be exposed to a bunch of bacteria. So, make sure you clean your snips with hot, soapy water before using them, make sure you clean all your buckets, and then you’re good to head out and get started.

Cool

Although in a pinch you might have to break this rule, you really should avoid cutting during the hottest part of the day whenever possible. The flowers don’t like it, and not all of them will recover from being cut during midday. Cutting during the early morning is the most ideal, but the second best time to cut is later in the evening, when the sun is already starting to set.

Also, with very few exceptions, you should immediately put any just-cut stems straight into cool water. I’ve seen a lot of flower farmers cut a whole armful of stems before putting them in a bucket, and for me anyway, I think they’re taking more of a risk of stems flopping by doing that. I harvest a max of 2-4 stems before I put everything into my bucket, and with extremely sensitive flowers (such as lilacs and other things that grow on woody stems), I put every single stem straight into water after stripping the leaves and doing any other special harvesting techniques (which I’ll talk about below).

Cut

When you actually cut your stems, try to cut cleanly, with one good snip — if you’re having to twist your shears around, they aren’t sharp enough (or you’re not using a big enough pair). In most cases, you’ll be cutting deep into the plant to get the longest stem length you can, above a set of leaves. This can seem counterintuitive at first because it will mean you’re often sacrificing side buds, but remember — you basically train your plant how to grow. If you’re timid and only cut shallowly because you worry about sacrificing side buds, you’re telling your plant to actually produce on shorter, bushier stems rather than producing the tall stems you’re looking for.

After cutting the stem, cut or strip off any foliage that will be under the water line before putting the stem straight into your bucket of water.

Condition

Once you’ve cut all that you’re going to, you do NOT want to start arranging with the stems right away — that is a recipe for the flowers to get stressed and wilt on you. Instead, you ideally want to let the flowers “rest” in a cool place for a few hours or as much as overnight. That way, when you take out the stems to arrange with them, they will be fully hydrated and looking their best.

It’s worth noting that with some very sensitive crops, such as basil or mahogany splendor hibiscus or honeywort, the plant might look wilty if it’s harvested in any kind of heat at all. Even more especially in those cases, the conditioning rule should always be met, and if you find that a stem is STILL wilty after an overnight rest in a cool place, then you can either try searing the stems and leaving it for another 24 hours, or you can call it a lost cause and cull those stems.

Flower-Specific Harvesting

While I can’t possibly cover how to harvest every single kind of cut flower in one blog post, many times you can follow certain patterns or rules for several different kinds of varieties. For flower-specific harvesting, I recommend purchasing the two books I mentioned above — Cool Flowers and Cut Flower Garden.

General Rules of Thumb

One of the main rules of thumb with harvesting is that you have to know whether the plant you’re about to harvest is a “cut and come again” flower or if it’s a “single stem” flower. The vast majority of things that are grown for cutting are cut and come again, which means that the more you cut them, the more they’ll grow and produce. However, there are a few plants that most flower farmers will grow that will only produce one flower per plant.

• Examples of Cut and Come Again Flowers: zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, snapdragons, rudbeckia, statice, most celosia, branching sunflowers
• Examples of Single Stem Flowers: single stem sunflowers (such as the whole ProCut series), stock

If you’re cutting from a plant that is cut and come again, you want to cut for the stem length you want, which will often mean you’re cutting close to the base of the plant and sacrificing side buds. Make sure you cut above a set of true leaves so that the plant can continue to grow for you. If you’re cutting a single stem flower, obviously you don’t need to worry about preserving ANY of the plant — in fact, I’ll often just pull up the whole plant and then cut the roots off.

With many flowers, you’ll want to cut when the flower is just starting to unfurl, or, if it’s a spike with multiple flowers growing up the stem (such as a snapdragon), you want to cut when just the lower set of one or two buds is open. THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS TO THIS. With certain flowers, such as rudbeckia or dahlias, you need to wait until the flower has fully opened before you harvest, either because the flower won’t really open more once it’s harvested (as is the case with dahlias), or because if the flowers are harvested before they’re open, they’ll flop (rudbeckia).

When in doubt, just do your own harvest test — cut a flower at several different stages and keep track of how it behaves over the course of the next week in the vase.

The Wiggle Test

Sometimes a flower will look like it’s totally ready to cut, but you might find that its neck flops and breaks for you within a day or two of harvesting, or that the flower head droops. In that case, chances are high that the plant needs to pass “the wiggle test” before it can be harvested.

What’s the wiggle test?

It’s when you take your fingers about 6-9″ down the stem of the plant and give the plant a little wiggle from side to side. If the stem you’re wiggling stays stiff and unbending all the way up to the flower, it’s ready to cut. If the flower or top flops from side to side, or if there’s any “give” in the stem, it’s not ready to harvest yet. Sometimes if a stem seems close but I’m not sure, I’ll also gently feel the “neck” of the flower (the part of the stem just below the flower head) to see if it’s still bend-y at all. If it’s not totally stiff and hardened but instead is still a bit pliable, it’s not ready.

Flowers that this applies to: Zinnias, Celosia, Gomphrena (I’m sure there are others)

Searing

Sometimes if you “sear” the cut end of a stem in boiling water or over an open flame for about 10-15 seconds, it helps the plant to be able to take up water better, which means it will drastically improve its vase life. Searing is also a good strategy to help any plants that are sensitive to being harvested in the heat — such as basil, mahogany splendor, or honeywort — to rehydrate if they’ve “flopped” on you. Plants that I ALWAYS sear include dahlias, poppies, and woody stems, which I talk more about below.

Sarah Raven, in her book A Year Full of Flowers (which is one of my absolute favorites), says that she actually sears the majority of her stems, at least in the spring and summer. She says that by autumn, fewer flowers need it. In other words, searing is not ever going to HURT the stem, so if in doubt, just sear, especially if you notice that the stems are flopping after harvest at all, or if the vase life isn’t at least a handful of days. She goes on to say that for woodier stems, you need to sear for closer to 30 seconds in boiling water and for softer stems, you only need about 10.

Woody Stems

Shrubs are a fantastic addition to bouquets and arrangements, but they do take a little bit of extra harvesting work in order to look their best and actually last. Take lilacs, for example — many people think that lilacs don’t make a good cut flower because they’ll often die on people after just a day or two after being cut. However, if you employ these special harvesting techniques, I’ve had lilacs last up to a week in the vase.

First, if you’re harvesting a woody stem just for the flowers, you’ll want to strip as much of the foliage off as you can. Keep in mind that every leaf you leave on a stem is something more that needs to be hydrated, so unless you’re really wanting those leaves for a particular visual look, take them off. Second, after snipping the stem at a 45-degree angle, you’ll want to take your shears and make a 1-2″ cut vertically up the stem, as close through the middle of the stem as you can. Then, you’ll want to take one of the halves and kind of bend it up and out a bit so that more of the inner part of the woody stem will be exposed to the water. Then sear the ends for 30 seconds in boiling water and then place the stem immediately after in cold water and let the stems condition overnight.

Doing this should drastically help to increase the vase life of anything you cut from a shrub or tree.

Arranging

Okay, so now your stems have been harvested, stripped of leaves, and conditioned. You’re ready to arrange! But where to start? The first time you start trying to arrange with your flowers can be really daunting, so ideally, you want to make sure that your first time (and maybe even your first several times) isn’t for an actual order.

A lot of arranging comes down to consistent practice and learning to develop a good eye for what looks good, both of which will improve over time. In the beginning, give yourself lots of permission to play around and make mistakes and just try new things. If an arrangement ends up coming together beautifully and you think it’s worth trying to sell, try it! However, it’s sometimes nice just to take the pressure off of yourself and save your first several arrangements just for your own home — you can consider them your “rough drafts.”

Wrapped Bouquet Vs. Vase Arrangement

When you first approach arranging your flowers, you need to decide initially if you’re going to do a wrapped bouquet or a vase arrangement, since the techniques for assembling both are entirely different. If you’re going to make a market bouquet, you arrange the whole thing in your hand. If you’re making a vase arrangement, you obviously start from the get-go right into the vase.

Watching a video will be far more effective than a written explanation, so if you’re doing a wrapped bouquet, you can check out this YouTube video on the technique.

If you’re wanting to try a vase arrangement, I always recommend starting with your structural foliage stems first, which will create your overall shape for the arrangement as well as create a kind of pillow or support system for the flowers. If you’re trying to fill a rather large vase, I would go one step further and take some clear tape and make a grid over the vase opening — that way the stems will stay where you want them to stay and won’t be flopping around every time you try and add something new.

Generally, you want your stems to be about double the height of the vase — otherwise, the arrangement will look awkward. I also prefer vases that flare out at the top, or at the very least, that don’t flare in, because that has the effect of “pinching” the arrangement and making the flowers stand upright and vertical rather than letting things spill out and look more abundant.

The best thing you can do is study a step by step guide to doing this so that you can start to get a feel for how to put together your own arrangements. I’ve detailed several books below that I refer to regularly that have scads of in-depth picture tutorials.

Color Scheme

When approaching your arrangement, you’ll generally go one of three ways with color — you’ll either stay monochromatic and use all shades of just one color (maybe mixed with white), go analogous (meaning that you’ll stick with colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, such as reds, oranges, and yellows), or you’ll go for contrasting colors, which is where you’ll go for things on the opposite side of the color wheel (purple and yellow, blue and orange). You can get more complicated than these three color schemes, but these will provide a great jumping off point.

The other main thing to consider is the “tone” of each color. You can have both a cool yellow (think highlighter yellow) and a warm yellow (think autumnal yellow), and that needs to be taken under consideration when you start to mix with other colors. For example, it often looks strange to mix a really cool-toned shade with a really warm-toned shade of a different color.

Texture + Shape

Just as a good artist approaches his or her work with a critical eye for the various aspects of good art, so too should you approach your flowers. Just as you would learn in Art 101, in addition to considering color, you need to consider the textures and shapes you’re including in your bouquets. Are you varying the heights of flowers and making sure to include some spikes in there? Are you including different textures, such as using an airy spray of saponaria or frosted explosion grass, or the seedier textures of amaranth or orach? Are you making sure you’re varying the different sizes of blooms so that you’re not just using one same size over and over again?

This is not something you learn overnight (and trust me, I’m definitely no professional yet), but it IS something you can develop and notice more of over time.

Further Resources

Even though my original plan hadn’t been to be a farmer florist, that’s the direction that I seem to be going over time. And I’ve found that I actually really love the arranging and design aspects of it! Because people have asked me to start doing more actual “arrangements” rather than just wrapped market bouquets, I’ve been building up my collection of favorite floristry books, as well as increasing the number of floral designers I follow on Instagram.

Here are some of my absolute favorites:

Favorite Floral Design Books

• A Year in Flowers by Erin Benzakein
  • The gold standard. Not only does she do step-by-step picture tutorials of many different kinds of arrangements (bridal bouquets, flower crowns, centerpieces, etc.), but she also breaks it down by seasonal ingredients AND has the most amazing appendix in the back of all the different stems and their vase life. A must own.
• Color Me Floral by Kiana Underwood
  • I keep checking to see if she’s published another book because I find this first one she did so stunning! Even though this entire book is filled with monochromatic arrangements, she proves that sticking to mostly one color is anything but boring. I also love that for each arrangement, she gives a natural “stopping point” if you want to keep it more simple, or then keeps going for a few more steps to make it truly opulent. So fun.
• Seasonal Flower Arranging by Ariella Chezar
  • There are some floral designers whose style I’d love to try and emulate, and there are others who I like because their style challenges me a bit. That’s how Chezar is for me. Her work is gorgeous, but some of it is more unusual, which I find exciting. I like to see how she both follows and breaks the traditional rules of floristry in her designs.
• From Seed to Bloom by Milli Proust
  • I fell in love with Milli Proust’s Instagram ages ago, and when I found out she was releasing a book, I snatched it up almost as soon as it came out. I love the wild, natural look of her designs, as well as her moody style of photography. I was hoping that she would do her own photography for her book, but it’s also been fun to actually see her in action since she hired another photographer to take the pictures for her. This book not only combines step-by-step how-to picture tutorials on how to create certain seasonal arrangements, but it also has a lot of tips on how to actually grow the flowers too, which is a nice bonus.
• The Flower Hunter by Lucy Hunter
  • This is my favorite book to curl up to for a comfort read. I like that this goes beyond just floral design — it’s also a collection of essays about finding beauty and cultivating an eye for ingredients (no matter where they might come from) and about the creative life in general. This is the perfect kind of book to gift to someone because it’s equal parts gorgeous and inspiring, and you don’t have to be a floral designer (or wannabe floral designer) to appreciate it.

Favorite Instagram Accounts

• Milli Proust
  • I particularly love her “Windowsill Wednesdays” series.
• Tulipina Design
  • This is the IG of Kiana Underwood, who published the Color Me Floral book above.
• Cakeatelier Amsterdam
  • Each of her arrangements is modern but aesthetically pleasing, and I also love that each one includes at least one whimsical, unexpected element.

If you have any books or Instagram accounts to add, let me know! And as always, drop a comment below with any questions you have.

This post is part three of a five-part series detailing how to start a small-scale flower farm. You can find part one HERE (all about general business plan and site selection) and part two HERE (which is all about what to actually plant).

Note: There are affiliate links to books and products mentioned.

The Importance of Marketing

You might think, as so many of us in the flower farming world did when we first started out, that your end product is so beautiful that it will practically sell itself. Unique, locally-grown flowers? Who WOULDN’T want that?!

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Let me tell you the tale of two different farmer’s markets, done one year apart:

Our first year flower farming, we decided to be a vendor at the local farmer’s market, which only lasts for about a month (on Saturday mornings) at the end of summer. While I had built up a (very) small following via social media, I hadn’t been posting to it much — I’d been too busy growing, harvesting, and arranging! However, I figured that at the farmer’s market, since we were among the only people selling flowers at all (and especially the only ones selling the kinds of bouquets we were selling), that our “product” would just fly off the shelves, metaphorically speaking. After all, what we had was unique, beautiful, and priced affordably for our area.

What actually happened was that although some people did, in fact, make an impulse purchase from us that first year because the flowers were, in fact, beautiful, we found that we had a LOT of flowers left over after each market, and we seriously talked about how farmer’s markets just weren’t going to be worth the time and energy we had to spend getting ready for them and actually carrying them out.

Then our second year happened.

I was determined to build up our local following on our flower farm’s social media, so I’d made it a point to post relatively regularly (usually 2-4 times a week) throughout our growing season. I’d also posted about our farm on local Facebook groups and paid for several targeted ads, which gave me an immediate uptick in people visiting our profile and “liking” our page. By the time we committed to try out the farmer’s market one more time to decide if it could be worth it, I’d grown my local following by several hundred people, had regular customers and custom order requests almost every week, and I’d also done a speaking gig at the local college at an entrepreneurship seminar.

All of a sudden, the majority of people coming up to us at the farmer’s market knew exactly who we were, and they had even sometimes come specifically just to buy from us. We were selling out of most everything we brought, and by the last market, we had sold out of almost everything in the first half of the market, and I actually had to run back home to harvest and bring back more for the last half.

What was the difference?

Well, you could argue that my flower arranging skills were more refined by my second year. But all in all, by far the biggest difference was that people came to the market looking for us, which meant they were much more likely to buy from us.

Where + How to Find Your Customers

Before you dive into different marketing strategies, you need to first define WHO your ideal customer is, which is why it’s so important to make sure that you’ve defined your general business plan as well as what you’re growing and offering BEFORE you start marketing your farm.

If I’m offering flowers to the general masses via farmer’s markets or pop up sales, my marketing strategy will be much different than if I’m wanting to be a farmer florist and do weddings and events, or if I’m wanting to sell to wholesalers or florists.

Define who your target customer is FIRST, and THEN develop your marketing strategy.

Once you’ve got a good idea of what you’re wanting to offer and to whom, here are some of the outlets you can use to find your customers:

Social Media

In general, social media can be one of your most valuable tools in building a customer base, and fast. You can create a business profile for free, you can get family and friends involved in sharing your business, and you can pay a relatively small amount for ads that will get shown specifically to people who live in your targeted area and demographic.

Since social media will often be one of the first places people will check to find you, it’s definitely worth having a business profile and posting to it regularly. For me, I try to make sure my social media for the farm is more than just pretty pictures of the flowers — I try to add value by sharing business insights or growing tips or interesting tidbits that help people to actually learn about something or to be inspired to try something themselves. (In case you’re curious, you can follow our farm on Facebook HERE and on Instagram HERE.)

While some people will like your business enough that they’ll follow just for updates about what you have available and for how much, you’re much more likely to get people invested in your business by putting more thought into your posts and making sure they are adding value to your customers’ lives.

Website

Since Google searches often won’t immediately turn up a social media for a new business, it can definitely be worth your time to set up a website. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy, but you want to make sure to include the most important things on there like who you are, what you offer, how much it costs, and where you’re located. You’ll want a place that shows how people can contact you, and you’ll want to include tabs such as an introduction to who you are and the mission of your farm, as well as a tab that shows different examples of what you’re selling at the different price points.

Go for a clean, simple layout (it’s hard to go wrong with basic white!) and get the best photos you can, whether that’s through studying some basic photography techniques yourself or paying a professional to take some pictures for you.

Another valuable thing about a website is that it makes it easy to start up an email list, which means that you can send out important business and selling info to interested customers without having to rely on the (often frustrating) algorithms that social media sites employ.

We started our farm only on social media for the first couple growing seasons, but as our business has grown and more and more people have started asking for a website, we’ve decided to invest more time into one ourselves.

Farmer’s Markets

While it’s ideal to have people know who you are before you ever step foot into a farmer’s market, the market itself is still a great way to get exposure to a wide variety of people, many of whom might be your ideal customer since people who like to shop at farmer’s markets tend to appreciate things like local, sustainably grown flowers 🙂

Ideally, you’ll want to invest in having a large sign done with your farm’s name and logo and work on having a great display, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough for now — sometimes it’s best just to go for it, even if your set-up isn’t the very best it could be. Our first two years we didn’t have a sign or the fancy display, and we still had customers and business every market.

I will say that one thing you’ll definitely want to try and have is a business card to give people at the market. We didn’t print out business cards our first year, which ended up being one of our biggest mistakes. People will very rarely remember your farm’s name after the fact, and while some people will pull out their phones and follow you on social media right then, few actually do. A business card gives people the info they need on how to contact you later, hopefully when they’re actually looking specifically for what you’re selling.

Cold Calling

If you’re looking to sell to a very specific target customer like a florist or a wholesaler, your best bet is often just to cold call florists in your area and ask if they’d be interested in you sending over your pricing and availability sheet.

A few major points here:

I wouldn’t recommend calling florists and sending them the information until you actually have stems available, or at the very least, until you’ve had at least one growing season under your belt. I was so eager my first year to build up my business that I sent out price lists to every florist in the area, only to not actually have the kind of volume they needed when they needed it or the specific types of flowers by the dates that I’d thought. I didn’t sell a single stem to florists my first year as a result.

A better way to approach the situation as a new grower might be to cold call just to ask if the florist would be interested in buying from a local flower farm, and, if so, what kinds of flowers they’d be most interested in purchasing locally. Then, when you actually have some flowers to offer in bulk, you can call those interested florists back with specific amounts you have available as well as what price you’re asking.

“Samples”

Samples are a fabulous way to show people the quality and beauty of your product and to get more people to dip their toe into buying local flowers than otherwise would on their own. There are many ways you could approach this, and, like everything else, the method you choose should be determined by who you want as your ideal customer and by what exactly you’re selling.

If you’re wanting to sell subscriptions, a great place to start giving some samples would be to local businesses who might appreciate flower displays in their business on a regular basis, such as restaurants, title and mortgage companies, university administrative offices, senior care centers (especially with a stack of business cards so the person in charge can suggest it as an option that family members could purchase for a loved one in the facility), local boutiques, etc.

If you’re wanting to attract people who might purchase your flowers through a pop up sale online, you can set up a little stand on a busy street advertising free flowers and give away single stems or small bunches with your business card attached, or you could do something like that at a farmer’s market (hopefully along with some larger flower arrangements that you’re actually trying to sell!). If you want people to actually stop by your farm so that they know where it is, you can advertise on your social media, on local classifieds, or by putting up flyers around town (just like you might for a garage sale) that you’ll have free flowers available there. Just make sure you clearly define what time you’ll be out and available.

Co-ops

Once you start looking around, chances are pretty good that you’ll discover that other people are flower farming around your area already. Start doing some research to see if there are any established flower farm co-ops around you, and find out the rules to apply and join. Basically, a co-op is where a group of flower farmers gets together (usually once a week, sometimes twice) and everyone brings all the stems they have to sell bundled up, usually in lots of 5 or 10. Then the venue is opened to florists or to the public so that people can come in and purchase the flowers they want in the quantities they need.

Co-ops are great because they give you a built-in customer base that you don’t usually have to seek out yourself, and it also means that fewer of your stems will be left unsold. This can also be a great option if actually arranging the flowers yourself doesn’t hold much appeal to you, or if you’re growing a high volume of a certain kind of flower that’s highly sought after (like garden roses or peonies or ranunculus).

Keep in mind though that there is usually a process you have to go through in order to prove that your flowers are high enough quality to be acceptable and that you can follow through on delivering higher quantities of stems regularly. Because of this, some collectives may not accept first-year growers.

Building Trust

As most any business owner will tell you, your business will not last long if there’s not trust between you and your customer. Sure, someone might be willing to take a chance on you once, but if there’s not a relationship of trust built through selling a good quality product and by cultivating a respectful relationship, then you will not get future sales from that customer. Make sure to keep the following in mind while building up your flower farm business:

Only Give the Best

Decide from the get go what your standards for selling flowers are–are you only going to sell florist-quality stems and cull the rest? Are you going to accept minor bug or storm damage as long as the flower is still in relatively good shape? Are you going to try and only include things in your bouquets that are expected to last a certain number of days in the vase?

For me personally, I try to make my flowers as close to florist quality as possible, though I’m okay with putting a few stems with minor bug or rain damage into an arrangement as long as it’s not super noticeable or doesn’t detract from the arrangement. I also try and make sure that nearly every flower in the bouquet will last at least a week, with a few notable exceptions (such as dahlias and roses, which are just short-lived flowers, period). That means that I cull stems that I harvest past the ideal time, even if they still look good that particular day, and it also means that if there is some damage, I try to remove what I can, such as by stripping all those leaves. I also try hard to only include things that I’ve done vase tests on personally, so that I know about how long they’re supposed to last. There were a few times I included really cool looking stems into some arrangements without doing vase life testing first, only to discover that many of those stems flopped after only two or three days.

The quality of locally grown, fresh cut flowers is truly one of your best assets as a flower farmer, so make sure you’re only selling flowers that you’d be comfortable giving to a client who was testing you out for, say, a massive custom wedding order in the future. Because the fact is, you never know which customers might buy more from you later on (sometimes MUCH more), so make sure that every bouquet leaving your farm is your top quality.

Put Your Face Out There

This is one I’m still working on, but I can at least now see the importance of it. I can’t remember where I first heard the story, but I once heard that the point that Floret Farm started taking off was when Erin Benzakein started putting her face on everything to do with her company. The fact is, people love to be able to associate your small business with an actual human, especially a human they can eventually come to know and trust. When I think about my favorite flower farming YouTube channels, I think of how much more likely I am to support them and their business simply because I feel like I “know” the farmers behind the farms and therefore want them to succeed.

This is one I definitely still struggle with because I’m usually the one behind the camera–not in front of it–but it is one I’m trying to work on.

Be Generous

By far, one of the most successful things we have ever done as a small business is our pay-it-forward program, which actually kind of started as an accident. Our first year flower farming, we decided to just go for it and offer CSA bouquet subscriptions. A relative of my husband’s wanted to show her support of our new farm, but she didn’t live close enough for us to actually deliver any bouquets to her, so she just bought a subscription anyway and told us to give the bouquets to people who lived in our area who could use them.

Since we were new to the area ourselves and didn’t know too many people, I posted from the farm’s account to a community Facebook page, asking for people to DM me and send me names of people they knew who could use some free flowers to cheer them up. We got many more nominations than had been paid for, but it ended up being a perfect win-win all around since we often had flowers that first year that didn’t sell and that I didn’t want to just throw away, but that I also didn’t want to have to put a ton of thought into who to give them to every time.

Fast forward to now, and the pay-it-forward program is a huge part of our growing year. It’s also had the somewhat unexpected side effect of being very, very good for the business since 1) people generally like to support businesses that are generous and give back to the community in some way; 2) once people saw that we followed through on our commitment to give out bouquets to the family and friends they’d nominated, they often gave us more business as a result; and 3) giving out the bouquets meant that more people were exposed to our business, more people got to experience firsthand the quality and beauty of our flowers, and more people started becoming our customers as a result.

We didn’t start the program to grow our business–rather, we had always wanted giving to be a big part of our flower farm–but it still had that effect, anyway.

Follow Through

And along with following through, also try and adopt the mindset to “Under-promise and over-deliver.”

I’ve made a lot of mistakes while growing our business, but one I’ve tried super hard to always stick to is to follow through as close to 100% of the time as I can, and if for some reason I can’t, I always ‘fess up as to why and offer some kind of alternative. That means that with my CSA bouquet subscriptions, I always let people know my plan at the beginning of the season, as well as provide regular updates if necessary throughout the season if certain factors will affect the usual timing of the bouquets. If I was planning on a crop that never came through, I make sure to post about it on our social media so people know not to expect it. If someone was hoping for something specific that I’d said we’d have but then we don’t end up having it, I make sure to personally text or message them to let them know why, as well as point to some other places they could look instead.

Customers need to be able to trust that you’ll deliver what you say you’ll deliver, and if you can’t for some reason uphold your end of the bargain, you need to let them know.

A Few More Resources

YouTube Videos

• Backyard Business: Branding and Marketing by Shifting Roots
  • Shifting Roots has a lot of really good videos on building a small flower farming business, but this is one that’s very particular about how to market and grow your business when you’re just starting out. A great place to start.
• Can You Grow it, Can You Sell it? The Business of Farming by You Can’t Eat the Grass
  • Although the couple behind this channel originally started out in the business of mostly farming and selling food (with flowers on the side), they’ve since totally flipped their farm into doing almost exclusively flowers, and they’ve found a ton of success through just two main sales outlets: their local farmer’s market and then having a roadside stand at their actual farm. Although this older video of theirs focuses more on marketing and selling vegetables, the same principles usually still apply to marketing and selling flowers. This is a good place to go if you’re looking into doing farmer’s markets for sure.
• Flower Farming Business series by The Gardener’s Workshop
  • This four-part video series is pretty low-tech and not the greatest visual quality, but the information is excellent. The woman behind The Gardener’s Workshop has been flower farming for decades, and this series is definitely worth listening to, especially as you’re just starting out.

Instagram

• Lynsey Taulbee
  • I follow hundreds of flower farmers on Instagram for inspiration, but Lynsey with Muddy Acres Flower Farm is a staple. Not only is her farm super profitable, but she has totally turned traditional wisdom on its head in her pursuit of trying to be the most effective cut flower farmer she can be and then shares all the triumphs and failures along the way. Her IG account is packed with bite-sized bits of information about everything to do with flower farming and building a flower farming business, and even though I don’t personally want to totally emulate her business model or style, I’ve learned a lot from her account nonetheless.
• Micro Flower Farm
  • The flower farmer behind this account grows everything on just 6,000 square feet, and she is able to produce (and sell) a ton. I love her tips not just on how to make the most of limited space, but also how to grow your business and find your market.

Books

• The Flower Farmer’s Year by Georgie Newbery
  • Sometimes it’s hard to find flower farms that have actually been doing it for several years, so when I find someone who has done flower farming and obviously been successful enough with it that they’ve made it their livelihood, I make a point of paying attention. Georgie Newbery has been a farmer florist for a decade in the UK, and I like that her book speaks both from experience over several years AND that it is current enough that she knows how to market and build a business in today’s economy. She has a whole section devoted just to marketing and social media strategy, as well as other chapters written specifically about the business side of flower farming. Even if you don’t live in the UK (as I don’t), this is still definitely worth owning.
• Small Farm, Big Dreams by Jennifer O’Neal
  • This is a new release by the duo behind Pepper Harrow Farm, who I first discovered on YouTube. I love how they show that flower farming can become much more than just growing and selling flowers in market bouquets — they delve into lots of other strategies for making an income with your farm, such as teaching workshops, offering u-picks, or allowing photographers to come in and take photos at your farm for a fee.

I’d love to know any insights or questions you have when it comes to marketing a small business and finding your ideal customer — drop a comment below and share your thoughts!