New Flower Farmer Planning…And What to Do When it All Falls Apart

I’m a planner by nature. I love to-do lists, color-coded calendars, creating step-by-step guides. In late 2022, we registered for the Gardener’s Workshop online flower farming school and I was thrilled when Lisa Mason Ziegler talked about the wall calendar that she uses to manage the seeding, planting, growing, and harvesting schedule on her farm. Before we had even finished the class we ordered our own giant monthly calendar and I got to work penciling in week numbers, order dates, seed starting days, and when we anticipated getting our first flowers out in raised beds.

Dave and I spent hours reviewing the online workshop materials, watching YouTube videos, reading books (and more books), and consulting the backs of seed packets.  We knew exactly how many weeks sunflowers should take to germinate, how long before the first frost we should start snapdragons, and how long celosia would spend in our grow room before hardening off on the porch and being planted in the garden. On our giant calendar, I merrily highlighted the flowers we planted as soon as we tucked the seed trays on the heat mat.

So enthusiastic! 

So naïve.

It’s probably not an understatement to say that pretty much nothing went to plan during our first spring growing season. We were building our beds from scratch and did not account for how long constructing beds would take. First, because it was still really early in the year, the ground was too hard for digging. Second, the BCS tractor we ordered that was essential for tilling virgin ground took longer to come in than we expected. And, third, and very important, the old farmhouse we had moved into needed a lot more work than we anticipated and we were spending so much time talking about asbestos abatement, new wells, termite inspections, and water treatment systems.

We finally did get into a groove and got the rows for our “experimental” vegetable-flower garden built. It was a struggle to combat the existing grass, but we also successfully built three 75-foot beds as phase one of our planned 1/8-acre plot. Our schedule slipped a few weeks and our cool season flowers got in the ground a lot later than we had wanted. But we seemed to be making progress, learning along the way and getting set to start the next three beds.

Then Dave ended up having to go in for surgery and found out that he was basically going to be out of commission for the rest of the spring and much of the summer.

Our plans to have a fully flowering 1/8-acre flower farm in 2023 needed to be scaled back. And while it was disappointing that the carefully planned schedule wasn’t realized, we probably had been way too ambitious for our first year given we were learning so much about flower farming at the same time that we were getting settled in a new house.

So, we ended up taking this opportunity to figure out what lessons we learned in our first few months (e.g. putting Bio360 mulch down for sunflowers is a waste of time), how we can improve some of our processes (e.g. small soil blocking trays are inefficient for our grow room set up), and how to address some unwanted visitors (I’m looking at you, groundhog family). We enjoyed the flowers we grew, experimented with harvesting and making bouquets, and spent more time on getting marketing materials set up. Now, we have a flourishing microfarm that isn’t quite what we had intended at the beginning of the year when I marked up our calendar, but we are well-positioned to grow our farm this fall and into 2024. Stay tuned!