MAN, FLOWER FARMING IS HARD WORK!
One of the downsides of watching modules from Floret before we’d ever put a seed in the ground, is that we were not prepared for how hard flower farming would be, and the Floret videos sort of skipped over those details quite a lot. I guess it’s a bit like trying to tell a pregnant mother what it’s like to be a new parent. You can try to paint a fair picture, but until you actually do it yourself, you have no idea.
Flower farming is NOT gardening. Our first season felt a bit like gardening because, even though we planted in rows and used netting and stakes, we were growing on such small parcels that it was manageable, even though we lived “off property” and had only the evenings and weekends to tend to the plants. During mid July of the first growing season, it became clear that we were going to need more growing space. We laid black plastic tarps to kill the grass and planned for much larger growing space. Once the spring of 2019 rolled around, we had increased our field space three fold. We still were not living on the property. Every day after working full time, we would hop in the car and come to the fields to tend to them. We’d been bitten by the flower farming bug. Field expansion, building a cooler, building a DIY greenhouse wood frame, building a DIY aquaponics system, amending the soil of every grow bed, broad forking, planting, staking, laying weed fabric, laying irrigation, harvesting, weeding. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
There were days when we could barely move. Our backs, shoulders and necks were sore beyond belief. We were covered in bug bites, sunburned, dirty and sweaty all of the time. Summer weekend field days normally required several showers just to feel slightly clean and odor free. I found myself becoming more and more irritated with the Pinterest version of flower farming. I took a picture of Tom one day after he cleared and prepped a space for some heirloom peonies. We laughed at how dirty and exhausted he looked but the photo captured the reality of flower farming perfectly. I split screen that photo next to a Pinterest shot of a woman, “glammed” up and looking serene as she floated through beautiful flower fields with thousands of blown open blooms. The responses and comments on Instagram confirmed what I suspected was true; people know that “real” life doesn’t look like those glossy filtered shots on Pinterest. People also appreciate, like I do, when they are shown and told about the real story of flower farming.
It was shortly after that post that Tom and I decided that we weren’t going to do only the “glossy” and “filtered” version of flower farming. We were going to tell the whole truth. What is the truth? That growing flowers on a larger scale as a business is REALLY hard work. It is also beautiful. It has changed our lives AND our backs hurt A LOT. These things can co-exist and we’ve decided that the truth hasn’t minimized the beauty in our blooms, it has made them even more spectacular and meaningful. We think our customers tend to agree as well.
Next week on the blog…
Is this a business or a really expensive hobby?