What I'm changing on the flower farm this year!

Hey everyone it's Brie here at Blossom and Branch Farm and today we're going to be talking about some of the changes that we are making here at our farm both in Colorado and our Minnesota farm. Some things that are kind of we're pivoting with this year based on all kinds of things from weather to market expectations to what our customers do and don't like. So today that's what we're going to get into. Let's go. So for those of you who are new here I actually have two farms. One is here in Colorado and it's just under two acres. It's a flower farm, cut flowers. The reason that it's small is because most cut flowers are harvested planted by hand. They're maintained by hand so small is key and once you start scaling up you have to hire a lot of staff to help maintain it. So I'm able to maintain the farm here in Colorado pretty much by myself. I do have two farm hands. One is Savannah. Six years she's been with me now. She's instrumental. She's like my right hand gal. She knows the ins and outs of everything here at the farm. She's a preschool teacher during the year so it works for her to be a seasonal employee. I also have a second employee. Her name is Dawn and she also started with me five years ago. They usually do about during the growing season about six hours a week and the rest is pretty much me. And then we also have our farm in Minnesota. That's my family farm so I'm actually the fifth generation farmer out there in Minnesota and it's 200 acres mostly corn and soybeans at least for the last 40 years or so and my dad actually moved off the farm in 1976. Decided he did not want to be a farmer and then my grandpa got very sick and had to sell off all of our cows so since then it's actually been under control of tenant farmers and this last year my dad and I took over 15 acres of that and kind of started farming it very differently. Tweaking a lot of stuff out there so there are also some changes that we are making this year for that farm potentially based on kind of some market stuff. Here in Colorado my farm mostly is retail. A lot of flower farms will sell wholesale so they'll sell to florists, they'll sell to other wholesale florist companies who then sell to florists. So typically when you're growing a lot of things a lot of one thing so say you grow a lot of sunflowers maybe you can't sell 500 sunflowers at once retail but you can sell those to a florist or to a wholesaler. So a lot of flower farmers do it that way. Here at my farm because we are small and also because we are fairly suburban which means we're only about 15 minutes from downtown Denver it's a very unique space not many large properties at this part of town so it's nice because it's actually easy for a lot of people to get to our farm so for retail our farm is actually very very accessible. So what we do instead is we actually do we used to do an on-farm market where we would make the bouquets and sell them. We've actually found that people love being here at the farm and they love cutting their own flowers so as much as people have loved doing bouquets and sometimes we'll still do custom bouquet orders especially for people who are regular customers like most of ours are but most of the time now what we're doing is you pick so on the weekends we sell tickets for you pick people bring their own jars they come and they harvest flowers and it's more of a community building experience it's a it's more of a you know fun it's become kind of a Saturday morning Sunday morning ritual for a lot of people who come and they can kind of sit in the field they can sit we have various seating areas around they can sit their coffee they can have their kids come and watch the sheep or you know they'll just run around through the woods and play that's been a really great way both to kind of grow our community and also it's really nice for us as farm employees because we used to have to harvest all those flowers and then make those bouquets and assemble those bouquets and then sell those bouquets whereas for you picks people harvest them themselves so it saves us work now there is a downside of you picks which is that usually most people who are just coming on off the street don't know how to necessarily pick their own flowers so often they'll cut them too high or maybe they'll cut them at the wrong stage so we try to give everybody kind of a brief tutorial and a talk and a walk through before they start picking but it actually seems to work out pretty well we haven't ever had any major issues with the you pick format so we're definitely doing that again we are starting weddings back up again the reason we stopped doing very customized weddings where you know people would write to us and say like oh my colors are pink and very specific shade of pink and we stopped doing those weddings because unfortunately what we grow is very weather dependent it's very you know sometimes a shade of white can change based on the temperature we can't be that specific and i don't want to be buying flowers in from somewhere else usually if doing a wedding i'm saying okay we grew them we harvested them you know your farmer that's what people are looking for so what we started doing is kind of two options so we'll do like a color palette that's all kind of whites and greens and neutrals or we'll do a very colorful palette and then from there people just give us artistic freedom so which is really fun for us actually because we can we can kind of we do kind of talk to our brides still and see if they have anything in mind but it's fun for us to be creative and it's also fun for the brides because they're always beautiful no one has ever complained about like oh i didn't like the color palette or whatever it was that you picked and you know it's very seasonal so it's a very specific type of bride who wants that usually they're smaller weddings they're just more casual so a lot of the weddings we're doing now it's just kind of a couple bouquets usually a couple boutonnieres maybe a couple of buckets of flowers so they can decorate or do whatever they want with it it fills in a lot of the gaps in the off seasons for us so times like june when we don't have a ton of flowers yet maybe not enough to do a u-pick but we do have enough maybe to do some weddings so it's a nice gap filler for us here at the farm we are also doing more workshops this year which i'm really excited about so workshops usually what i do is i do a couple different formats usually it's flower focused so we'll do a workshop in the spring around peonies peony harvest then we'll do an arrangement with peonies we'll talk about kind of how to put your peonies in a vase and form and flow and those kinds of things and then everyone makes one and takes it home we also do one for the dahlias in the late summer and then in between there we do various workshops so all kinds of different topics all kinds of different things on gardening cover cropping you guys know i've been running workshops in paris both for garden tours we have one in april but it's sold out i've been doing some kind of down a little bit more central france for more gardening style workshops and many of you have been asking if we can do one here in the so in april we're doing an on-farm here at blossom and branch workshop where it's a three-day immersive all meals are farm to table here at the farm and we're doing things like cover cropping dividing propagating soil blocking cover cropping all kinds of different topics and then i have one more in france actually that's not sold out it'll be taking place in september at a beautiful chateau down near limoges that i've been to and is phenomenal and gorgeous and the one in september in limoges guys is going to have not only gardening but they're also going to have wine tasting beekeeping um some animal husbandry beer making cheese making type workshops along with the gardening so anyway if you want to find out about all of that stuff i'll put the link down below to sign up for our newsletter so that you can be kept informed of all that so that's kind of what we're doing from the business side of things i have just learned over the years that there are certain things i really really like to do and there are certain things i really don't like to do as a flower farm i hate doing farmers markets to me they're terrible i hate sitting out there in the heat with flowers sitting on the blacktop and then they get all wilty and then people aren't happy when they take them home because they are all floppy it's just something that again we have just figured out as a business does not work for us in terms of timing and kind of gardening and seed starting we're also making some adjustments based mostly on our weather so like probably most of you who are kind of in the southwestern part of the u.s it's been a very warm and dry winter for us so far i think it's our warmest winter on record it was 60 degrees today in january our soil hasn't even frozen so based on that i'm adjusting all of my seed starting timing two weeks earlier this might seem a little bit dramatic and it probably is but because i have all of these hoops and things i can always tunnel things if i need to but usually by now our soil will be frozen usually by now we will be having lots of snowfall which we haven't been having um so again looking ahead into the forecast for spring and just kind of having done this for several years watching weather trends it's just what i'm predicting is that our our last frost typically would be mid-may i'm anticipating it's going to be early may so again adjusting everything on seed starting i'm also growing a lot more drought tolerant things like i mentioned we haven't really had any snowfall so i'm bumping up how much is in my field that can withstand lack of water i'm anticipating probably here in colorado we have many many water issues even though i have a ditch and we have some agricultural water rights they can shut that up at any time at their discretion so what i'm anticipating is that we're going to have to be our water so i'm growing things like more yarrow more echinacea more rudbeckia more hummingbird mint so things that even if we don't get a lot of water will still bloom and we'll also still survive this is my entire field and every year what i do is i go through and i kind of look at okay so last year i had an entire row snapdragons which means about you know 600 snapdragons or so and maybe i felt like that was too much or maybe i felt like it wasn't enough and then i can just kind of swap and pull things in and pop things in depending on each year so some of the things that i'm doing this year is actually we had two full rows here that were golden currents and the reason i have the golden currents in the field is because one they're a great wind block but number two it's wonderful for attracting birds into my space so the golden currents the birds love those the more of that kind of habitat and bird producing plants we can have in the field the more birds we have in the field the less pest problems we have but i had two rows and two rows was just quite frankly too much um they're quite large shrubs and they were taking up a lot of real estate and we have so many choke cherries and american plums right next to the field so i figured we could pull one of these rows out so i'm actually going to be swapping in a lot of those native drought tolerant things that i mentioned so things like those goldenrods those native sunflowers rubeccia lacy phacelia and the yarrow another thing i'm doing in terms of field plan is i mentioned we have workshops in the spring with our peonies so one of the problems that i often have is that we have not a lot of filler blooming at that time that our peonies are growing so i'm experimenting with starting some earlier stuff this year we are going to be really pushing the limits on how early we can plant a lot of our frost tolerant seedlings like our snap dragons our annual phlox our feverfew our orlya all of those things are very frost tolerant we're going to see if we can really harden those off and push the limits on how early we can plant those so that hopefully oh and lacy phacelia which i love lacy phacelia is a really great very very cold tolerant early bloomer so what we're trying to do is get a lot of other stuff blooming at the same time as those peonies and our baptisia and our clematis because usually we have all those kind of early perennials going but it's tricky here getting those early annuals blooming at the same time that really can bulk up those vases so we're going to be working on trying to get some more early blooms in terms of projects and things i'm working on around the farm i'm converting the main beds around the greenhouse which are typically my kind of garden vegetable production areas we have a lot of perennial things in there like our asparagus i usually grow potatoes and tomatoes kind of like a potager style the problem is i planted it and then i planted a native prairie meadow right next to it and so what's happening is i'm getting a lot of those meadow grasses growing into my garden space and also it's just a little bit it seems ridiculous to say because it's not that far from my house it's maybe like 50 yards but i want it closer to my house i want that kind of little protege area to be right off my back step so that i can just quickly from the kitchen run out and grab something so i'm going to kind of relocate a garden so i'm going to relocate that kind of garden around the greenhouse convert more of that into native meadow space and then i'm going to actually build a new protege up next to the house so it's probably going to be a little bit more formal a little bit more shaped beds i'm going to play a little bit with scale out there and then also i'm going to be putting a little pond up there so it's all going to be diy all right so that's it kind of for things that were things that i'm adjusting this year on the farm so if any of those projects i'm interesting you make sure you're subscribed so you can kind of stay abreast of things that we are going to be planning that we're going to be doing together don't forget to like and subscribe if you like this video and if you didn't please don't tell me that because it'll crush my soul okay love you guys bye