Tour a Regenerative Flower Farm in Colorado | Cottontail Farm x Lafayette Farmers Market

Hi, I'm Ginny. I'm George. And we're the owners of Cottontail Farm here in beautiful Longmont, Colorado. We started our farm in 2022. We purchased this property with our house on it in 2020. And after we lived here for about a year, the property was just zoned for agriculture, but just a completely empty big grass field. And we sort of realized this is just so much space that we're just mowing the grass. And we decided we wanted to do something more productive and more meaningful with the land and something that, you know, connects us a little bit more to our community. Yeah, we're kind of in peak bloom season right now. We have a ton of beautiful celosia coming in. I'll show you our, the question of the week was one of our celosias. This coral reef celosia, people couldn't get enough of it this weekend. It's just super funky looking, not something you see every day. It's estimated that over 80% of flowers sold in the United States are imported, which creates a huge carbon footprint. They're shipped over on these big air conditioned planes and often heavily, heavily sprayed with chemicals. So being able to provide pesticide free flowers to our community that has grown miles from their house was a pretty appealing idea to us. So yeah, this is our dahlia patch here. We've, we're growing, I think almost a thousand tubers this year, which is a big increase from what we've done in the past. The little bags on top are to keep grasshoppers and bugs from eating them. So dahlias take quite a bit of time from when they put out the bud to when the flower is ready to harvest. So if we don't cover them, they'll just get decimated by bugs. So definitely adds on a lot of extra time and effort, but I mean, it's worth it. Like they're stunning. So they're a big part of our late season crops. I would say they're probably most people's favorite thing that we grow. Most people are crazy for dahlias. This is our new favorite variety this year. It's this super cool, I already harvested some of them, but this one will probably be ready to cut tomorrow, but like, we'll get the flex on this thing. So cool. Some stripes too. Yeah, that's a really cool one. We learned this week, actually, that there are between 20 and 50,000 dahlia varieties, which we only grow a handful of those. But it's really cool to, you know, try new ones every year, see which ones you like, which ones store well. This is another funky one we grow. We call them brain flowers. So you kind of can harvest them. You could harvest them like at this stage if you wanted it in a bouquet, a more manageable size, but this kind, we like to get nice and big, like a brain. And then when it comes to be around Halloween, we sell them as like brain bundles. It's pretty fun. Like just, you know, we try not to take things too seriously. Like they look like a brain. It's pretty funny. And they're huge. Aren't they crazy? And they're like velvety feeling and they dry like this too. So, um, this is our best, best brain year, which is exciting. Yeah, but they are thriving in the tunnel. So, um, we're going to put another tunnel in next year. We're going to grow almost twice as many ranunculus, I think. I think a lot of people think that flower farming is pretty glamorous and you're frolicking through the flowers. It's like a fairy tale. We do get to be surrounded by so much beauty and we're very grateful that this is what we get to do every day, but it's a lot of hard work, a lot of really long days. There's only really a few weeks out of the year that the field looks like it does right now. A lot of the year it's, it's dirt, it's tiny seedlings. You're down on your hands and knees planting for 12 hours a day, battling bindweed. You're in, out in all conditions. Like it's really hard. It is really rewarding to see what you can do, but there's a lot that goes into it. I think behind the final product, um, there's a lot of sweat and hard work and, and dirt pretty filthy most of the time. But yeah, then we get to, you know, this is what makes it all worth it is, is seeing what, what we can grow and what we get to share with everyone. But, you know, the, the markets I think every week are kind of a celebration of, of where we're at up into that point in the season. This is some of my favorite colors. Aren't they stunning? So yeah, Lysianthus is another one of our favorite flowers we grow and one of our more specialty crops. Um, they are a big investment for us. They're very difficult to start from seed. They require some really specific conditions and they also take a really long time. So we do buy plugs for them. So we get teeny tiny baby plants that we put in, um, in April. Um, so we've covered them with plastic mostly just for hail protection because we don't want to risk losing them. Um, but they're just stunning. Like this is my favorite color of all of them. Just a gorgeous like ombre of colors on here. Each stem gives you, you know, we've counted some that have like eight blooms per stem on them, which is just wild. Um, and then they also just have an incredible vase life, like two, even three weeks on them. Um, and the grasshoppers don't, and the grasshoppers don't eat them. They hang out on them, but they don't. Yeah, they hang out on them, but they don't eat them. Now getting into farmers markets, we're selling a couple hundred bouquets a weekend, which is just mind blowing to us. I think every week we're like, this is too many flowers. And then we sell out again. And it, it's just so cool to see the response from our community and the support that people have for us and what we're doing. Like it's a lot of hard work, but being able to see the joy and the beauty that we're able to bring into people's lives, like I think we could all use a little bit more of that. So I would say that's what, that's why we do this is to, you know, see that reaction on people's faces when they walk up to our booth and they're just, you can just see people light up and to think about our flowers, you know, sitting on their counter every day that week, it, it really brightens people up and, and brings a lot of joy into people's homes and lives. And we, we also, you know, people buy our flowers for a lot of special occasions, whether it's, you know, birthdays or anniversaries, or for a loss of something or someone, it's cool to be able to play a small part in those important, you know, life moments and to, to have flowers be part of that. Or a lot of times we'll hear, oh, those were my wedding flowers, or my grandma used to grow those, or they really connect you to a lot of memories and, and things like that. And it's really cool to be able to, to be a small part of that in people's lives. Yeah, we're really grateful for the markets. Like it's also just really cool to like actually talk directly with the people that we're selling to. And we've gotten to know people and that's really special.