Starting a Flower Farm

Sounds idyllic.

11 years ago, I had no idea the journey we would take with our property. I knew a few things, we needed a place to live, and I always wanted gardens. I had a lot of ideas of what our next home would be, especially if it was to be our “forever home”. I also had a lot of ideas of what I didn’t want.

Turns out, our new home fit almost all the check marks of things I didn’t want. In the end it satisfied two main checkpoints – it was affordable, and it had everything we NEEDED.

Hind sight is 20/20 right?!?! Fast forward through 11 years of non-stop renovating and changing and soon a clearer picture started to form. The tight layout of a split level opened up and transformed with each small improvement on the inside. Outside, I built rock walls, gardens, and we opened our space more and more.

In 2021, I took a huge leap. I decided that we were going to clear cut a big portion of our property. My initial idea was to have more sunlight and space to build more gardens. The idea was to create a full self sufficient homestead, a fruit basket, vegetable garden, herb garden, and animals. There was this deep, internal calling that hilariously felt like the Field of Dreams. My internal self kept focusing on one thought – if you build it…. but there was never a finish, just the strong desire to start building.

I planted new trees, added raspberry bushes, strawberries, shrubs, built rock walls, and we dug a pond. It felt like we moved (and are still moving) logs, rocks, and stumps non-stop.

We got more animals, increasing our chickens from 8 to 48. We bought and birthed goats. We got waterfowl.

It was starting to come together. We had a farm.

The added animals were bringing in revenue, but they were also costing a lot of money to feed, energy to keep up with, and of course our goat kids were birthed during a major flooding of the goat market. I was selling fruit herbs, eggs, and produce. Still, I wasn’t quite sold this would be enough to support me full time.

A friend of mine kept nudging me that I should grow more cut flowers. Flowers were how I started this whole adventure. After years of landscaping for other companies, I had been slowly growing my landscape. By 2021, I had 14 large perennial beds and probably thousands of perennials growing. Still I had never really considered cut flowers. In 2021, that same friend gifted me a bunch of dahlia tubers. I threw them in the ground and didn’t really give them much of a thought other than- these are pretty. In the fall I dug the tubers and divided and tried again. I had never been one to make bouquets before and I had enjoyed bringing flowers inside. Taking my friend’s advice, I decided to buy a bunch of tulip bulbs. It couldn’t hurt to test out her hypothesis that flowers would help get me to my goal. On a cold, rainy November day I planted a couple hundred tulip bulbs and waited for spring.

I sold out! Even better, I made a profit.

My dahlia’s were bigger and better than the year before and I officially got hooked. Then I dove in head first researching everything I could about flower farming, cut flowers, building a business, markets for farmer florists.

I started building new permanent beds, expanding our lot for cut flower beds, and we kept clearing. That feeling….. If you build it…. took on new meaning. I hadn’t known I was building a flower farm, but once the vision was there, I couldn’t shake it. Even my husband Nick was on board, or at least his thought, “Flowers are better than more animals.” The more I started to visualize it, the more I knew this is what I had been growing all along.

My husband once said to me, “Someday I will buy you the farm you’ve always wanted.”

Instead we built it together.

Welcome to Flora.

I hope you’ll follow us on this journey as we start year 1 of our flower farm.