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Starting a flower farm? Are you ready for beautiful buckets of flowers? Beautiful photos? Most of all are you ready to work? Planning, buying, seeding, growing, selling, advertising, photography and loving every minute of it!!! Well mostly every minute of it.
I am pretty sure that the definition of “farming” should be:
1 : activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something: a : activity that a person engages in regularly to hope to earn a livelihood; people looking for work. b : a specific task, duty, function, or assignment often being a part or phase of some larger activities that never seem to end
Starting a flower farm
Starting a flower farm can be a bit daunting…Do you know what you want? Full time, part-time, farmers market, wholesale, farmer florist?? There are so many avenues that you can take with flower farming. Get a piece of paper and a pen. and write down all your thoughts about it. What you want, why you want it, how much money you can put into it, is your partner on your side. Do you have to rent land, can you start in your backyard. Are you going to go natural and organic? Do you want to do bulbs and tubers? All annuals? Just write it all down. Do not sit and think about it…just start writing and let it come.
I started growing flowers in 2017. I live on 2 acres and that is plenty of space to grow a ton of flowers….not exaggerating. You can grow a lot of flowers in a small space.
Start small
This is the space I started with! 6 beds, 3 feet wide by 20 feet long. I would suggest your first year starting small. You can plant several varieties in each bed, so you will be able to make bouquets and have a taste of planting and caring for a variety of flowers.
This is a shot from part of the field in 2020. I am more then 20 times the size that I started out. These pictures are taken 4 yrs apart. I am thankful that I started small. Each year I have added more bed space. Each year I have learned more about what I am working towards and what I am steering clear from.
Research
I would suggest doing a lot of research. A good place to start is with this book called “The flower farmer” by Lisa Byczynski. It is in my opinion the best book out there for great information on starting a flower farm. I still go back and read things out of this book. Lisa gives you a good outlook on most of the avenues you can take with flower farming. Another book that I started out with is a book by Erin Benzakein called “Cut flower garden“. Erin does an excellent job on showing you how to start seeds and what type of varieties of flowers you should grow. With these two books you will be off to a great start.
Seed starting
Here is a blog post on how I start seeds indoors. Again when you start small you can do all your seed starting right in your house. I am just now looking into other options for my seed starting spot, but I have been able to start thousands of seeds in my basement, without much disruption to our family life.
Soil blocking or cell trays
Should you do soil blocking or seed cell trays? This is just a matter of preference. Try them both and do what you feel works for you. You will find information and passionate opinions on both ways of seeding and I have come to the conclusion that both ways are just fine. I use seed cell trays like these ones and love how my seedlings turn out.
Where to sell your flowers.
There are so many avenues that you can go down for selling flowers. Here is a list of a few of them.
- Farmers Market
- Flower shops
- Roadside stand
- Wholesaler
- Etsy ( dried flowers, seeds, pressed flowers)
- Subscriptions ( ex CSA)
- Retail store
Here is a link to a follow up post called Starting a flower farm part two. There you will find what brand of seeds I use, what kind of fabric I use, why I use it. So head on over there and see what that is all about.