Start where you are.
The Business is born.
Four years ago, when we were testing the waters on our dream of starting a family farm business, we decided to start with where we were, and just increase it. We’ve been homesteading since 2015 and had plenty of experience with several things. While not yet an expert, we felt some confidence that we had enough to begin. We had to choose what made the most sense with what we knew! The discussions included things like meat goats, meat chickens, and veggies. After we learned that we would need almost 150 goats, that was an easy answer…no, thank you.
2 goats is more than enough!
My daughter moving the pasture-raised chickens.
Let’s back up for a minute…Years prior to our move to the farm, we used to buy a CSA share from a local veggie farmer. What is a CSA, you ask? It stands for Community Supported Agriculture which means that you are committing to the farmer, with a payment, that you are buying a share of their future crops (weekly or bi-weekly). This payment usually helps the farmer at the slowest time of sales yet highest time of expenses.
When we first began purchasing yummy veggies direct from a local farm, we had to learn what so many of them were and how to prepare them! Our overall experience was great, but we felt a lot went to waste as we slowly learned how to eat them. We decided to offer a simplified version of this so it wouldn’t be so intimidating to others like it was for us.
We kept it simple with offering a few lettuce varieties, fresh herbs, eggs, meat chickens, and flowers. We called it Harvest Box. It was exciting!
Logo created by BillyB
Thankfully, we were told by the wise gurus ahead of us, keep it small as you get practice with growing consistent quality crops, handling money and customers, weather, etc. It was a major learning curve to keep up with weekly orders while dealing with any crop issues!
Midway through our season we were getting requests for flowers, but I hadn’t planted as many because they were only a small part of the Harvest Box. I felt terrible having to turn away customers, so I started to research cut flowers and discovered that cut flower farming was a thing. Ha! Who knew?
My first custom order!
I told Steve about flower farming and we both agreed that it was a fantastic idea to expand into cut flowers. Sounds simple, right? An official business and major planning! We had a lot to learn! This first year in 2021 had our days packed with farm chores on such a level we had never experienced. I was also a stay-at-home mom now turning into stay-at-home/work mom. Many hats, many tears, many victories, and many prayers! Here is a snapshot of a mid-season day that first year…
Ready for a nap?
Here we are in 2025, entering our 5th growing season but our 4th year with a focus specific to flowers. And we are just getting started!
I can’t wait to share with you our next steps of scaling up our business to bring you more flowers and more experiences. All the details will be in the next blog post in March! Please continue to share, comment, email…it is so encouraging to us!
Please know that this is only possible because of our customers, brides, designers, florists, and you. We pour our heart and soul into growing quality flowers…especially unique flowers that you don’t see all the time. We are so grateful for your continued support!
