How to Start a Flower Farm

Before you order a single seed, work out where those flowers end up. Not roughly. Specifically.

Farmers markets, a farm stand, florists, weddings, subscriptions, wholesale, straight to customers, dried, value-added, edible. Each one wants a different mix, at different times, in different quantities. A wedding florist and a market grower can be growing almost nothing in common.

I got this wrong at the start. I was completely certain I was starting a wholesale operation. Grow at scale, sell the stems, done. The market had other ideas. It turned out people did not want my flowers, they wanted the flowers Lizzy and I had put together.

That pivot is the reason the business looks the way it does now. So listen to what your market is actually asking for. It is better information than your plan.

A smaller growing space lets you learn crop timing, harvesting, succession planting, what your customers actually want, and how selling works, without an enormous bill for the privilege.

Starting small does not mean thinking small. It means learning your system before you scale it.

I started with about a thousand seeds in 2016, purely to see what it was like. It felt like a lot when I was holding the packets. It is not a lot when you are trying to fill a market stand every week.

The mistakes are the tuition. I bought a small hoop house, put it up, and then realised I had sited it too far from everything else. So I dug it up and moved it. By myself. Just try to make sure your mistakes are the cheap kind.

Before you give a crop valuable growing space, ask what job it is going to do. Is it a focal flower? A bouquet workhorse? An accent, a filler, greenery? A premium crop, a dried product, something your customers ask for by name?

The best crop is not the prettiest flower. It is the one that fits your climate, your system, your customers, your labour and how you sell.

Your first flowers should be the ones most likely to succeed, not the ones you are most excited about. Success does two things at once. It builds revenue, and it builds the confidence and infrastructure you need before you take on the harder crops.

We did not grow dahlias for years. We did not grow lisianthus for years. There is a whole list of things we deliberately left alone. I was careful with sunflowers early on because our deer pressure is serious, and I was not doing this as a hobby where it does not matter if a few get taken. I did not have room for that mistake.

Before you spend heavily on plants, understand what you are planting into. Your soil type, your drainage, your organic matter, and what it is going to need from you.

Here is what nobody tells you: your soil can change completely within a hundred feet. On our farm we are close to the Bay and one section is heavy clay so dense you could throw a pot with it. Walk further out back and it is sandy, almost like being at the beach. Same farm, two entirely different problems.

We put down somewhere around two and a half tons of amendment last season. Mushroom soil and sand, spread with a tractor scoop and a manure spreader. That is not a one-time job, it is every year.

If you do one thing before ordering seed, get your soil tested. Your local extension office will usually do it, and the people there genuinely love talking about this. Amending blind is expensive.

Starting from seed means understanding timing, days to maturity, what each seed needs to germinate, spacing, succession, quantities, and how every crop fits the plan around it.

Some seeds want light and have to sit on top of the soil. Some want bottom heat. Some take twelve weeks and are not worth the greenhouse space, which is why we buy lisianthus as plugs rather than starting it ourselves.

The number people underestimate most is quantity. Not how many seeds, how many plants you need in the ground on a given week to fill a given order.

That is the roadmap, and here is what it actually looked like for me at Wildly Native Flower Farm.

It started with a margarita, honestly. I was out to dinner with my friend Cindy King and she said, why don't you grow flowers? And I sat there thinking, why on earth have never considered that?

So I said, you know what, I can do that.

If you would rather hear it than read it, this is the conversation the whole guide came out of.