I Started a Flower Farm With £0 — Here's What Happened

Nine months ago I took on this bare muddy grass field in the hopes I could turn it into my new flower farm. Here's the story of how I did it. I've been growing flowers for nine years but last year everything changed and I found myself starting over. I moved into my campervan and started thinking about what I was going to do next. I wondered whether I should continue flower farming because I wasn't sure whether I could make enough money to sustain myself. But by late summer I decided I wasn't going to give up on flower farming and I started looking for a plot of land to rent. I posted on social media asking if anyone had any land I could use. If this didn't work I had a letter written up to send to local farmers explaining who I was and what I was looking for. I was looking for somewhere between half an acre and an acre and ideally it would be fenced already and have access to water and be in the right location. Luckily I got a few responses via social media and the day after I posted I came to see the It was the first and the only plot I came to visit because it fit the bill completely. It's two-thirds of an acre, was fenced already with post and rail, is flat, has water access and is relatively close to a local town. So I said I'd take it. Signing the contract on this new field was both exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. I had the opportunity to start again from scratch using all the mistakes I'd made in the past to get it right this time. But at the same time I had no money behind me and only a few hundred pound coming in every month from youtube meaning I really had to make this work financially which was an extra weight on my shoulders. It was October 2025 when I took on the field and all I had was a few perennial plants I'd dug up and started from seed, a couple of old tools and some plastic pots. There wasn't anything to plant in the ground just yet and it was getting too late in the season to plant anything anyway. Because of the late start I realised I couldn't start preparing any beds yet and it would have to wait until spring. In November I had a polytunnel put up. It's a 20 by 30 foot tunnel kindly gifted by First Tunnels. This would be where I would do my seed starting, grow heat-loving annuals and extend the growing season. I decided to do no dig in the polytunnel, collecting cardboard from a local furniture warehouse and laying it down underneath a layer of compost a few inches thick. Once the polytunnel was up and the beds were made the winter months that followed felt bleak. At one point I felt like we hadn't seen the sun in months. It rained a lot and the flowers felt so far away. There wasn't much I could do on the farm but I did make sure to get the whole thing fenced with chicken wire to stop the rabbits and hares getting in, a mistake I've made once before. Over winter I kept myself busy with manufacturing my new line of tools, building soil blockers and broad forks, posting to customers and working on a new line of compact blockers for smaller growers. I was also busy thinking about how I was going to set up the new beds on the farm, wondering whether I should go no dig, use tillage or not, how big the beds should be, what crops to grow and where I would sell the flowers. Once February came around I was ready with a plan of action. I'd make three blocks of beds each containing 10 beds which were 12 meters long and one meter wide, so 30 beds in total filled with mostly annuals that I could grow for retail sales. Things like snapdragons, ammy, zinnias, marigolds and dahlias that I could sell through familiar avenues like farmers markets. February is the time of year that most growers start sowing seeds because we get adequate daylight, the weather starts warming up and it gives the plants enough time to grow before planting them out in spring. This year I decided to use a grow tent to start my seedlings so that I could have more control over the conditions my seedlings were growing in, which ended up being one of the best decisions I made this year. I bought a second-hand grow tent and some shelving from Facebook Marketplace. I then added some lights and an oil-filled radiator to heat the space. The whole setup costed me about 300 quid. My plan was to start around 4,000 plants from seed, all of them in soil blocks, which was another big win and I'll get onto why later on in the video. Because the grow tent provided stable heat, light and humidity, the germination rate of my seedlings was really good and the plants were really healthy and happy. We ended up having a really variable spring with fluctuating warm and cold temperatures which I know affected a lot of growers in a bad way, so I was grateful for the grow tent. The seedlings were growing on really nicely but time was ticking on and it was now March and my field still wasn't drying out. I was starting to worry that my plants would outgrow their soil blocks and I wouldn't have any beds to plant them in. As an experiment in late March, I put down some plastic sheeting to kill off one of the banks of flower beds to see whether killing the grass like this gave different results to the other techniques I was going to try. While the grass was dying off and while I was waiting for the field to dry out, I continued to sow seeds, pre-sprout dahlias and care for the plants through March and April. Usually I plant out in early May when we have our last frost, but when it came to mid-April I still hadn't made a single flower bed and I had 4,000 plants ready and waiting. I was starting to get really worried. Luckily the weather slowly started to improve and the ground started drying up by late April. Once I thought it was dry enough, I hired a turf cutter and set to work removing 360 square meters of turf. I'm remembering now why I hated doing this so much last time because it's such hard work. It wouldn't be so bad if you could just push the machine along, but it's all of the rolling up the turf and moving the turf that's the most difficult bit and the bit that slows you down a lot. I've been a little bit naive about how long this is going to take me. I think it's probably going to take me all weekend, not just a couple of days like I thought it would. This was such a hard physical job but I managed to get all of the turf cut in just three days. The last section! While moving the turf I discovered that in certain parts of the beds there was a massive couch grass problem. I pulled out wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows full of roots and I was really hoping it wasn't going to be a huge problem for the rest of the summer. Once that was done I hired a rotavator to cultivate the soil to make it easier to plant into. It worked over really nicely and I felt like I was making real progress towards my new farm now. While I had the rotavator on higher I removed the plastic sheets from the middle bed to see if the grass was dead underneath. It looked pretty dead apart from a few areas where the light had been getting in. I decided to rotavate it anyway and if the grass started to regrow I would just cover it back over with the sheets. This bed was really different to rotavate compared with the other two where the turf had been cut and removed. The soil hadn't dried out like it had on the other beds and the organic matter was clogging up the blades leaving it with a much chunkier finish than the other two beds. I finished rotavating on the 10th of May which was almost bang on the average last frost date for the year. I had trays and trays of soil blocks and dahlias that were ready to go in the ground so I started marking out the beds and planting them out. This part was equally exciting and nerve-wracking. The plants were going in the ground ready to grow on and become beautiful cut flowers but at the same time there are new risks like pests, diseases and the weather. From the middle of May through to the middle of June I worked non-stop until every row was full of plants. This is where the soil blocks really showed their strength. It was so easy and quick to plant out the soil blocks. There was no faffing around with plastic trays or pots either. This was a massive win for me especially since I was planting so many seedlings. I'm just getting ready to plant the final bed. I'm so excited. I'm going to have a celebratory cup of tea when I'm finished but I've got Ami and Cosmos in the last bed. I'm going to do half and half so let's get this final bed planted. After that was done I couldn't stop walking along the rows and admiring the straight lines of plants and seeing my plans become reality. Now that the farm was planted I was concerned about how much bare ground was on show, particularly in the pathways. I knew I was going to have a serious weed problem on my hands if I didn't do something about it. I had some spare cover crop seed so I decided to sow this into the pathways for some ground cover. Over the next few weeks I watched the seeds germinate and grow as well as the plants in the beds. I've been feeding weekly with the living feed from the are the sponsor of today's video. They're a small team of people who are really passionate about helping us put life back into our soils. They produce two products, the goop and the living feed and I've been loving using both this season. I used the goop in my seed starting mix to add living biology to my seedlings and then I followed up with the living feed after that. My plants have thrived this year and I've been able to plant out really nice big healthy seedlings into the ground this spring. The goop can be used to add biology to your seed starting mixes or as an inoculant for your soil and the living feed can be used as a foliar feed which is an effective way to provide your plants with the nutrients that they need. By using the goop and the living feed my plants should be more drought tolerant, more pest and disease resistant and produce better quality flowers come summer. Try the goop for yourself by scanning the QR code on screen or clicking the link down in the description. A couple of weeks after planting I noticed that some of the seedlings were not looking so good in the beds. After some investigation I discovered that I had a wireworm problem in an isolated area of the farm. This one has a wireworm that's literally, well you can see there's no roots for starters but you can see that it's kind of bored its way into the plant at the bottom. These worms are a common problem for growers who've recently converted pasture into growing space. I began tackling it by putting potato traps in the soil and sowing mustard in between the beds. So far I've removed hundreds of worms from the soil and it looks like some of the affected seedlings are starting to recover which is a big relief. By the end of June the first few flowers started to arrive on the farm. Icelandic poppies, ammy and snapdragons in the polytunnel, then limonium sewer warii, snapdragons and bunnytails out in the field. I even started making my first few sales from the flowers, selling wholesale to florists and friends. It feels amazing to finally have flowers in my hands again and I love flower farming so much because it gives you tangible results from the work that you're putting in. I'm spending time outdoors in nature doing what I love. I can't wait to see what the next few months has in store. I'm expecting lots of flowers to come from my plot and I'm still searching for the best way to sell them. Stay tuned for upcoming videos where I'll continue sharing my progress and talk you through how I'm aiming to make £20,000 from my new plot this season. If you're inspired to have a go at growing your own flowers then have a new mini course coming out this summer called Grow Your Own Bunch. If you want to get on the waiting list for that mini course then I'll put a link down in the description. I hope you found this video helpful. I know lots of you who are setting up flower farms this season have followed along on the journey and you've that it's been really informative. So thank you again for watching and I'll see you again soon.