Total hobbyist here but I dream of being a cut flower farmer when I grow up. Did I mention I’m 51?🤣🤣. I am so thankful for your wealth of knowledge, transparency and your willingness to share. Want a farm volunteer? 🥰🥰🤣🤣
I definitely got shook up watching this. I've been doing cut flowers for friends and family. This year I'm planning to start a flower farm stand to sell my flowers. This has me really digging deep to price appropriately and value my time more. So thank you
My first 2 years I was a hot mess. Years 3-now so much better and efficient! I love having my bouquet recipe because this year my 8 year old grand girl wants to learn to make bouquets.
I watch your channel, but I am not a flower farmer. If I were, I would watch this video two or three times. And then II would watch it a few times more. And then, I would go and do what you are doing. You are not just a flower artist - you are - but not just. You are a business owner. And that is what a farm - any farm - is.
This was an excellent video! Thank you so much for sharing your formulas. Everything that you said makes so much sense and makes choosing what to grow exponentially easier. Your market bouquets were beautiful and never looked identical.
Love the shirts! Just got both! Im listening to the part on under harvesting and remembering that last season for Mother’s Day I was out in the field at 2am with my headlamp on harvesting more flowers! 😅
New subscriber, my dream is flower farming and I love hearing from other farmers because one thing that works for one person doesn't work for another and it excites me think of what are the differences my farm will bring to the tapestry of farming ❤
Sell this information! Your crop calendars, recipe decks, record sheets, etc. I’ve been a small scale market farmer focusing primarily on vegetables for almost 15 years- this is exceptionally sound and quality content. I love the “real talk” fundamental principles you hammer away at regarding things like efficiency, ergonomic workspace design, determining value, etc. Definitely picking up notes of Ben Hartman (Claybottom farm/ the lean farm), someone I admire greatly!
@@CoramDeoFarmwatching your snap dragon video right now and saw that you recently started a Patreon! 🤦♀️ I doubled back to edit my comment, but you beat me to the punch hahaha. Thank you for putting out all this demystifying information about profitable, small scale flower growing! Hope you’re enjoying this time of the season
so glad I found your channel! very impressed with your content & presentation. I am giving this a go in a rural coastal community of SW Washington State where no retailers carry any decent flowers & florists are scarce & geared toward event type business. Should be great with your guidance.
I am so grateful to have stumbled across your channel and then your FB group. As a brand new flower farmer to be, your videos and teaching style are so helpful and just a blessing to me. Thank you for sharing and educating, this video is another homerun!
Great recipes! For the crops that you grow, like snapdragons, or zinnias for example, do you only sell the mixes, or certain varieties? If you choose certain varieties, about how many varieties of each crop wpuld you say you grow? (Just curious) I definitely agree you can get away with not growing as many varieties as a lot of people feel like we should if you are just selling at a farmstand on your property or farmers market. I admit, after watching people like Nicole from Flower Hill Farm, & seeing a lot of the bouquets on IG, I felt like I needed to have that large amount of varieties as well. But its not necessary for your average farmers market customers. There may be a small amount of customers that come through that appreciates a bouquet having airy elements, textural elements, etc. but most are just wanting a bright, cheerful bouquet to place in their kitchen! Now if you are wanting to build a business that does primary weddings & events, then yes, you'll want to grow different crops, different colors, etc. So its very important to fugure put what customers you WANT to have, & grow based on that... & I agree on the "you MUST charge a price for every single thing you put in the bouquet" It KILLS me when people say "Im not charging for tue filler because i got it free, I foraged it" 🤯😵💫 I'm like no you didnt! You either walked or drove to the location you foraged it, you spent your physical energy to go cut that filler, you soent phycial energy to carry those buckets of water, you spend money on those snips, etc. Even if its only 20 cents worth of labor, etc. per stem when considering all those things, if you do the math it ADDS UP! & You are severely undercutting yourself. Say you put 3 stems in each bouquet... When you multiply 3 stems per by say 40 bouquets per week, then multiply that by say 30 weeks (depending on your growing season) thats $720 you just missed out on. 😮 Anyways... 😂 I am so excited for the coming year! I have a couple new sales avenues. One being accepted into a co-op in a large city about an hour away from me. Im am hoping/anticipating selling at least 3x's what I sold last year based on my research & and talking to other local flower farmers that are in the co-op. 🤞
@nikkireigns yes I do! I make videos on my cutflower & vegetable farm as well as my personal garden. There's another cutflower farmer at my farmers market that fou d out about it & sells through it. It took me 2 years to be accepted. The 1st year I was denied. It's kind of like Rooted farmers but smaller. They only have about 10 farms that sell through it. It's basically to help florists buy locally, but not to have to get these 3 crops from this farmer, these 3 from that farmers, etc. Because they'll usually end up saying "this is too time consuming, I'll just go back to ordering everything wholesale!" It's a great idea! I'd lile to move towards selling g primarily wholesale becaise I have found I love GROWING. I love being in the field... I don't love designing bouquets. I'd love to harvest, rubber band them, & send them on their way... & then plant more seeds! 😆 so if I can sell a lot through the co-op, my plan is to stop doing farmers markets & only sell there, & maybe sometimes from my farmstand. I have a shed in turning into lile a little corner store.
Great! I see my loss🤦🏻♀️. I did tissue paper, flower food, stamp on paper and wrapped in cellophane water but charged $15. Is it bad to charge $20 returning to Farmers Market? I was nervous that my first year I wasn’t producing a good product. Now I look at pictures of flowers and I’m like what? Those were beautiful! Thanks Alex! It’s Irene from Line in the Sand. I do not like jars. Yep too much time because I didn’t know what I was doing! I only did Sunflower, zinnia marigolds and I foraged our land. So enlightened!
Thank you for another great teaching video. I need to find your teaching video on making the bunches. My daughter will be working with me on her summer break from university. The 2 videos have everything you would ever need to tell someone in training
GOSH this was incredibly helpful!! Thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge. Your strategies make so much sense! I will be rewatching and taking notes 😊
I’m rather surprised you don’t grow amaranth or did I miss that? Simply beautiful in fall bouquets. Love you and your hubbies videos. You’re work ethic is great😮
I really appreciate this video. I am also in Oklahoma, and am just getting started with my first year. What you have learned and shared is invaluable. Thank you so much! Oh, and I'm buying your merch, "Buy Local Flowers!" 😊 Love it!
Do you have a guide to when you are starting seeds/planting out/direct sowing to get the blooms for these recipes at the appropriate times? Fellow zone 7 girl here!
im on year 5 of growing to sale but it took till this year to find a sales outlet that would even talk to me so I deffinitely over stuffed bouquets, i was like holy moly its taken years to get to this point I better deliver as much as i can !
Amazing video full of tools, thank you!! Can you talk more about what you mean when you said you condition your flowers the day before you assemble your bouquets?
I purchased a jar bouquet last summer from a local farm stand that had 35 stems in it, including 3 sunflowers for $15. It was so beautiful but I don’t think the seller was profitable in the end.
Thanks for another awesome video! I was wondering what your opinion is on prices for a CSA subscription vs retail like a farmstand. Do you think it's better to have the same price point and a bigger bouquet for subscribers? Or to make one or the other more expensive for the same size? Cheers💐
I would price the CSA significantly higher. You can give them a bigger bouquet with that higher price but CSA customers take a lot more work (communications largely) so you should be pricing that extra labor into it. I’d do $30 minimum but more ideally $40
I personally like giving my CSA/bouquet subscribers a better value than my sporadic customers. They have invested in my product all season & they give me a place for a large % of my flowers to go weekly. My bouquets are cheapest if customers invest in all season long (10 bouquets) and slightly more expensive for the biweekly option (5 bouquets). I don't have a roadside stand, we are a bit off the beaten path. I sell subscriptions & I offer extra bouquets online weekly. I don't do u-pick either. My delivered subscriptions cost $15 more per season than farm pickup though.
We live in a high retail tax area. Flowers fall into retail here. This is my first year selling, so I need to figure out if I add that at sale or build it into my bouquet.
What I learned is that once you make flowers your business, eventually it will become “work” and you may not enjoy it like you did when it was a hobby.
Extra material is just extra garbage, so why? Our local grocery stores sell 5 sunflowers for $15, not even they over stuff. I aim for 9 stems but will go up to 11 depending on what I have available. Also, when I time my time to make a bouquet, I add in the harvest time because it is in fact a large part of the bouquet making process. I see many flower farmers inefficiently harvesting while constantly focusing on being more efficient in arranging.
Aw man, I really want a 'buy local flowers" shirt, but in a womens cut- short or long sleeve, or even a tank! I'd buy it, I just don't wear unisex t-shirts!
Such a helpful video! I am going for a more meat and potatoes approach this year. Thanks for the insight and for keeping things real! Excited to order a shirt! @luckybunchflowers
Quick question: when you say put flowers in the cooler, can this be as simple as a refrigerator? For example, could I store a few bouquets in a fridge along with my rainbow eggs? 🪺🌺 Edit: typo
Yes! I use the term cooler but we actually just have a fridge set at 36 degrees. Not all flowers can go in there tho so you’d have to check on that part. I put tulips sunflowers snapdragons ranunculus anemones and lisianthus in there from our farm
Thank you so much for putting in the time and effort to create such a thorough video.
Total hobbyist here but I dream of being a cut flower farmer when I grow up. Did I mention I’m 51?🤣🤣. I am so thankful for your wealth of knowledge, transparency and your willingness to share. Want a farm volunteer? 🥰🥰🤣🤣
I am 50, this summer I will do internship for a few days in a small flower farm. I say go for it.
I’m with you. Great tips as my hobby habits bogged me down when prepping flowers for my farm stand
Keep Dreaming…I’ll be 😅57 next month and I’m FINALLY going to be able to buy some land and start my flower farm this year.
Same ❤ but 54❤
I'm 60 and this is my first official year of having a flower farm and selling boquets.
I definitely got shook up watching this. I've been doing cut flowers for friends and family. This year I'm planning to start a flower farm stand to sell my flowers. This has me really digging deep to price appropriately and value my time more. So thank you
My first 2 years I was a hot mess. Years 3-now so much better and efficient! I love having my bouquet recipe because this year my 8 year old grand girl wants to learn to make bouquets.
I watch your channel, but I am not a flower farmer. If I were, I would watch this video two or three times. And then II would watch it a few times more. And then, I would go and do what you are doing. You are not just a flower artist - you are - but not just. You are a business owner. And that is what a farm - any farm - is.
Thank you so much for watching us!
You have such a good understanding of what it takes to be profitable! Thanks for sharing that with all of us!
This beginner, backyard, flower farmer, finds your Videos informative and entertaining. Cheers. 🇦🇺
This was an excellent video! Thank you so much for sharing your formulas. Everything that you said makes so much sense and makes choosing what to grow exponentially easier. Your market bouquets were beautiful and never looked identical.
Thank you Susan!
Love the shirts! Just got both! Im listening to the part on under harvesting and remembering that last season for Mother’s Day I was out in the field at 2am with my headlamp on harvesting more flowers! 😅
oh thank you Carol! Ah! Yes been there myself
New subscriber, my dream is flower farming and I love hearing from other farmers because one thing that works for one person doesn't work for another and it excites me think of what are the differences my farm will bring to the tapestry of farming ❤
Excellent video with a lot of information for new growers! Thanks! I also bought a shirt!
oh thank you!!
Sell this information! Your crop calendars, recipe decks, record sheets, etc. I’ve been a small scale market farmer focusing primarily on vegetables for almost 15 years- this is exceptionally sound and quality content.
I love the “real talk” fundamental principles you hammer away at regarding things like efficiency, ergonomic workspace design, determining value, etc. Definitely picking up notes of Ben Hartman (Claybottom farm/ the lean farm), someone I admire greatly!
Thank you! We launched a Patreon last month and have been selling some more detailed information along these lines to help other growers :)
@@CoramDeoFarmwatching your snap dragon video right now and saw that you recently started a Patreon! 🤦♀️ I doubled back to edit my comment, but you beat me to the punch hahaha. Thank you for putting out all this demystifying information about profitable, small scale flower growing! Hope you’re enjoying this time of the season
@@Buckinghamrabbit thank you for watching!
so glad I found your channel! very impressed with your content & presentation. I am giving this a go in a rural coastal community of SW Washington State where no retailers carry any decent flowers & florists are scarce & geared toward event type business. Should be great with your guidance.
Oh that sounds great! Thank you for watching
This is the best video yet!! I think the hardest thing when starting is to know what to grow together and when!!!
im so glad!
I am so grateful to have stumbled across your channel and then your FB group. As a brand new flower farmer to be, your videos and teaching style are so helpful and just a blessing to me. Thank you for sharing and educating, this video is another homerun!
Thank you for that encouragement Stephanie! Welcome ☺️
Thank you for your video! I do love all the frill and extra wispy blooms when designing bouquets, but I also love your simple bold bouquets!
Thank you. You are my favorite flower farm channel.
Your videos are so inspiring and so helpful, thank you so much for taking the time to make them!
ah! Thank you so much for
Great recipes! For the crops that you grow, like snapdragons, or zinnias for example, do you only sell the mixes, or certain varieties? If you choose certain varieties, about how many varieties of each crop wpuld you say you grow? (Just curious)
I definitely agree you can get away with not growing as many varieties as a lot of people feel like we should if you are just selling at a farmstand on your property or farmers market. I admit, after watching people like Nicole from Flower Hill Farm, & seeing a lot of the bouquets on IG, I felt like I needed to have that large amount of varieties as well. But its not necessary for your average farmers market customers. There may be a small amount of customers that come through that appreciates a bouquet having airy elements, textural elements, etc. but most are just wanting a bright, cheerful bouquet to place in their kitchen! Now if you are wanting to build a business that does primary weddings & events, then yes, you'll want to grow different crops, different colors, etc. So its very important to fugure put what customers you WANT to have, & grow based on that...
& I agree on the "you MUST charge a price for every single thing you put in the bouquet" It KILLS me when people say "Im not charging for tue filler because i got it free, I foraged it" 🤯😵💫 I'm like no you didnt! You either walked or drove to the location you foraged it, you spent your physical energy to go cut that filler, you soent phycial energy to carry those buckets of water, you spend money on those snips, etc. Even if its only 20 cents worth of labor, etc. per stem when considering all those things, if you do the math it ADDS UP! & You are severely undercutting yourself. Say you put 3 stems in each bouquet... When you multiply 3 stems per by say 40 bouquets per week, then multiply that by say 30 weeks (depending on your growing season) thats $720 you just missed out on. 😮
Anyways... 😂 I am so excited for the coming year! I have a couple new sales avenues. One being accepted into a co-op in a large city about an hour away from me. Im am hoping/anticipating selling at least 3x's what I sold last year based on my research & and talking to other local flower farmers that are in the co-op. 🤞
Ooohh, do you make videos? How did you find/get accepted into a co-op?
@nikkireigns yes I do! I make videos on my cutflower & vegetable farm as well as my personal garden.
There's another cutflower farmer at my farmers market that fou d out about it & sells through it. It took me 2 years to be accepted. The 1st year I was denied. It's kind of like Rooted farmers but smaller. They only have about 10 farms that sell through it. It's basically to help florists buy locally, but not to have to get these 3 crops from this farmer, these 3 from that farmers, etc. Because they'll usually end up saying "this is too time consuming, I'll just go back to ordering everything wholesale!" It's a great idea! I'd lile to move towards selling g primarily wholesale becaise I have found I love GROWING. I love being in the field... I don't love designing bouquets. I'd love to harvest, rubber band them, & send them on their way... & then plant more seeds! 😆 so if I can sell a lot through the co-op, my plan is to stop doing farmers markets & only sell there, & maybe sometimes from my farmstand. I have a shed in turning into lile a little corner store.
@@ElderandOakFarm sounds like you are headed in a great direction! I will go subscribe to your channel right now!
@@nikkireigns thanks!
Great! I see my loss🤦🏻♀️. I did tissue paper, flower food, stamp on paper and wrapped in cellophane water but charged $15. Is it bad to charge $20 returning to Farmers Market?
I was nervous that my first year I wasn’t producing a good product. Now I look at pictures of flowers and I’m like what? Those were beautiful! Thanks Alex! It’s Irene from Line in the Sand. I do not like jars. Yep too much time because I didn’t know what I was doing! I only did Sunflower, zinnia marigolds and I foraged our land. So enlightened!
Definitely do $20 and drop the extras! Your flowers will still be worth it
Thank you for another great teaching video. I need to find your teaching video on making the bunches. My daughter will be working with me on her summer break from university. The 2 videos have everything you would ever need to tell someone in training
Thank you Alex. It was so informative. You gave me some direction. I love your bouquets and set up. God bless you and your family.
GOSH this was incredibly helpful!! Thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge. Your strategies make so much sense! I will be rewatching and taking notes 😊
Glad it was helpful!
Friend! I loved all of this ❤
Thank you so much for this informative video. It's so great of you to share all this info you worked so hard to figure out for yourself!
Tremendous information. Thank you!
I’m rather surprised you don’t grow amaranth or did I miss that? Simply beautiful in fall bouquets. Love you and your hubbies videos. You’re work ethic is great😮
I really appreciate this video. I am also in Oklahoma, and am just getting started with my first year. What you have learned and shared is invaluable. Thank you so much!
Oh, and I'm buying your merch, "Buy Local Flowers!" 😊 Love it!
Yay!!
I just stumbled upon your channel and really appreciate your content! Thank you!
welcome!
Good job.. ty for sharing
This was fantastic. Great information. Your bouquets are all beautiful
Thanks for sharing your experience. This is great advice and very helpful.
You said exactly why i am taking a year of growing only without selling.
It was awesome!! Thanks so much for sharing !
Do you have a guide to when you are starting seeds/planting out/direct sowing to get the blooms for these recipes at the appropriate times? Fellow zone 7 girl here!
im on year 5 of growing to sale but it took till this year to find a sales outlet that would even talk to me so I deffinitely over stuffed bouquets, i was like holy moly its taken years to get to this point I better deliver as much as i can !
Amazing video full of tools, thank you!! Can you talk more about what you mean when you said you condition your flowers the day before you assemble your bouquets?
I just have them resting in a cool dark room in their buckets
I purchased a jar bouquet last summer from a local farm stand that had 35 stems in it, including 3 sunflowers for $15. It was so beautiful but I don’t think the seller was profitable in the end.
HA 🫣there’s no way they were
Not one bit sustainable. They likely won’t be selling in 5 years.
Thank you so much I learned some tips
Love the shirts! I've been working on some shirts & other products very similar! 😊
This is such a valuable video! Thank you! Do you offer buckets? Would be curious how you would approach buckets.
I don’t but I would still charge largely retail for them bc of the extra communication time it takes to coordinate those sorts of orders
Great video! Thank you 💐
Great video alot of excellent information.
Thank you Alex
Thanks for another awesome video! I was wondering what your opinion is on prices for a CSA subscription vs retail like a farmstand. Do you think it's better to have the same price point and a bigger bouquet for subscribers? Or to make one or the other more expensive for the same size? Cheers💐
I would price the CSA significantly higher. You can give them a bigger bouquet with that higher price but CSA customers take a lot more work (communications largely) so you should be pricing that extra labor into it. I’d do $30 minimum but more ideally $40
I personally like giving my CSA/bouquet subscribers a better value than my sporadic customers. They have invested in my product all season & they give me a place for a large % of my flowers to go weekly. My bouquets are cheapest if customers invest in all season long (10 bouquets) and slightly more expensive for the biweekly option (5 bouquets). I don't have a roadside stand, we are a bit off the beaten path. I sell subscriptions & I offer extra bouquets online weekly. I don't do u-pick either.
My delivered subscriptions cost $15 more per season than farm pickup though.
Thank you both very much! Great info! 💐
You're right! Shrinkflation is no fun!
I like the shirts too
Where do you get your craft paper and what size do you use if you don't mind. Thanks for this breakdown, it is so helpful
Amazon 18x18
Very informative..
QUESTION? Off topic. Where do you buy your summer dresses? Thanks Sister in Christ❤
Lilly Pulitzer and natural life is a lot of them
We live in a high retail tax area. Flowers fall into retail here. This is my first year selling, so I need to figure out if I add that at sale or build it into my bouquet.
Hmm ya. I see pros and cons to both but if it’s your area customers should be more used to that reality
When you say $3 a stem for a lisianthus do you mean a full stem cut from the plant? Or separate stems off the plant?
1 stem
Do you have a wholesaler that you like to use?
So what do you grow in the fall?
What I learned is that once you make flowers your business, eventually it will become “work” and you may not enjoy it like you did when it was a hobby.
I think there are many people who would be better off staying in the “hobby” realm for this reason
🍿for the algorithm
Hehe thank you :)
Do you use more than 1 bouquet recipe per selling event? ie: one day at a farmers market. If you use more than 1 recipe, how many?
No. I use one per week
@@CoramDeoFarm very helpful video and thank you for the reply!
Any tips for those who need to collect sales tax and still be profitable in a rural area with a market bouquet that's accessible to everyone at $20.
Just price that into your formula and explain to customers that sales tax is included
Extra material is just extra garbage, so why? Our local grocery stores sell 5 sunflowers for $15, not even they over stuff. I aim for 9 stems but will go up to 11 depending on what I have available.
Also, when I time my time to make a bouquet, I add in the harvest time because it is in fact a large part of the bouquet making process. I see many flower farmers inefficiently harvesting while constantly focusing on being more efficient in arranging.
Harvesting efficiently is definitely important!
Do your $20 bouquets include sales tax?
we are exempt with on farm sales
I thought daffodils are always supposed to be by themselves in a bouquet? It is supposed to make the other stems wilt faster???
They’re ok if you condition them properly
@@CoramDeoFarm Noice. What is conditioning? Nvm. I'll look it up. TIL
Aw man, I really want a 'buy local flowers" shirt, but in a womens cut- short or long sleeve, or even a tank! I'd buy it, I just don't wear unisex t-shirts!
Such a helpful video! I am going for a more meat and potatoes approach this year. Thanks for the insight and for keeping things real! Excited to order a shirt! @luckybunchflowers
Quick question: when you say put flowers in the cooler, can this be as simple as a refrigerator? For example, could I store a few bouquets in a fridge along with my rainbow eggs? 🪺🌺
Edit: typo
Yes! I use the term cooler but we actually just have a fridge set at 36 degrees. Not all flowers can go in there tho so you’d have to check on that part. I put tulips sunflowers snapdragons ranunculus anemones and lisianthus in there from our farm
@@CoramDeoFarm thank you so much for the tips! Really appreciate your channel!
Thanks for sharing your recipes ❤
Excellent information! Thank you.