4 Things You Need to Know as a Beginning Flower Farmer
Are you a new flower farmer or looking to start a flower farm? If so, this article is for you!
As long-established Permies with many years of veggie patches and a small food forest under my belt, we were lucky to have a bit of a head start when we started flower farming. The lessons we learnt while growing food also indirectly applied to growing flowers on a larger scale.
New Lessons Learned When Starting to Grow Flowers
I'll admit, though, that even we got overwhelmed at the beginning of our journey with the tsunami of advice and recommendations that exist out there when starting a flower farm.
With this in mind, I'm going to offer some clear and straightforward suggestions to you.
Here are four essential things we've learned as new farmers that we think all new flower farmers should know about!
#1: Understand Climate and Water Availability
Think about your location's specific climate and water availability and explore relevant strategies that address these issues.
Why? Because these are the main things that you cannot change, and learning how to work with your situation will save you a heap of energy and heartache. Trying to get plants to grow in an environment they can't contend with or having too much or too little water will be an ongoing battle for the rest of your farming life if you don't turn these limitations into huge pluses or minimize their impact!
Your in-depth knowledge of your piece of land is the most important information you will hold.
#2: Be bold!
Expect some successes, but also expect lots of failures! It's all part of the learning curve you must go through to become good at this. (Many, many, many seedlings have met their demise on our farm, and that's okay!)
Experimenting is worthwhile. For some reason, most of the gardening books in our bookstores in Australia are written by people in the Northern hemisphere, and despite our very best efforts at following their instructions, there’s nothing we can do to make the pretty English blooms in those books survive an Aussie summer!
However, we have experimented on our farm, and it turns out those books that lied to us about what “should” grow also lied about what shouldn't. Things that are supposed to be annuals have turned out to be perennials in our field.
And things that should have died by the end of autumn (fall) have continued and flowered right through winter. The rules aren't rules! They are just the experiences of some gardeners and won't necessarily be yours! Sow it and see!
#3: Small-Scale Experiments
Try lots of things on a small scale (different methods in different beds, for example), so you can find out for yourself on your land what works and what doesn't before you commit to large-scale works. And when it comes to methods, feel free to mix and match them. No need to be a purist!
To illustrate this, let me share with you some of the strategies we use. You'll notice the methods described below are usually attributed to food/vegetable growing. The reason for that is there are very few models here in Australia for field-grown flowers. The Slow Flower Movement is very young here, and even amidst our small network, there are few of us who are growing in the tough conditions that exist on our farm.
Our little farm is located in “The Perth Hills,” east of Perth in Western Australia. Our summers are scorching, with heatwaves taking our temperature into the 40s (over 104 degrees Fahrenheit). Our tomatoes literally cook in their skins on the plants!
We realized early on that we had to be smart about our approach to growing flowers, so we considered lots of different growing methods for home and market gardens like those of Elliot Coleman, Jean-Martin Fortier, Charles' Dowding, and Paul Gautschi. Then we took a logical approach to using their relevant elements in tackling micro-farming flowers in our harsh climate.
American farmer Paul Gautschi's Back to Eden method is one we borrow from. His method involves placing a very thick layer of wood chips over his compost-covered soil. (See photos below.) His soil is never exposed to harsh sunlight, and as a result, the wonderful microbial organisms, which are the building blocks of good soil, survive and thrive under this layer. The thick layer also smothers and prevents weeds. There are critics of this method, and it certainly doesn't work well in cold, wet areas or humid ones (a farmer in Florida tried it and found their running grass was a nightmare to manage in this scenario). However, this is a technique that makes sense for a farm like ours.
Weed Free Woodchip Bed
Bed Preparation
We also use Charles Dowding's No dig approach. Charles is based in the UK, and one of his reasons for using no-dig philosophy is related to weed issues. Weeding the soil's surface is common, but when you dig into the soil or turn it over, new weed seeds are exposed, lay on the surface, and germinate as soon as there's rain. Understandably, this is a real problem in Charles' garden in the UK, where rain is plentiful.
The weed-seed issue is only relevant to the soil in our field during the winter months. However, Charles' method meets other important criteria for us.
Firstly, not breaking up and aerating the soil reduces the likelihood of it drying out (the last thing we want!) and, secondly since we're using a thick layer of woodchips, not digging means that this layer remains undisturbed—else it would have to be raked away or get turned in from the digging and need replacing.
Allowing the soil to remain undisturbed also preserves the mycelium network, which is especially critical in our dry environment. For us, combining these two completely unrelated methods results in a sensible approach that meets our needs.
#4: Get on those social media forums and ask!
The flower-growing network is an incredibly generous bunch of people, and you'll find far more cooperation and collaboration than competition in every sense.
Yes, the volume of information can get overwhelming, but if you approach those suggestions and ideas as just that, rather than gospel, you'll find you have fun working things out. The Team Flower Community is a great place to ask questions and receive feedback from those who are in the thick of it—just like you!
So there you have it! In summary, our advice to you new growers is this: Don't look for the “best way” to do things because there isn't one. Your farm should be approached as one big experiment! (Or many, many small experiments.)
Be open to trial things and ready to accept failures when (notice I didn't say if) they happen. This will allow you to approach things with curiosity, observe the results carefully, tweak things, re-evaluate, make discoveries, and ultimately enjoy success. You'll soon become an expert on what it means to farm on your particular patch!
Happy farming!
