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Ep.20: Sunflower Steve: A Farmers Journey of Passion & Perseverance
2.2k Plays1 year ago
In this episode of The Backyard Bouquet Podcast, Steve Kaufer, also known as Sunflower Steve, shares his journey from planting a prairie garden to becoming a renowned sunflower seed breeder. Starting with planting native prairie flowers in Wisconsin, Steve's passion for flowers has led him to cultivate unique sunflower varieties over the last 20 plus years. Through trial and error, Steve established relationships with large retailers and wholesalers, eventually focusing on high-volume production of sunflowers and zinnias. His innovative methods, such as using birds of prey to deter rodents, set him apart in the flower farming industry.
Steve's dedication to seed breeding led to the discovery of a rare double-flowering sunflower named Gigi, sparking his interest in enhancing sunflower genetics. By carefully selecting and cross-pollinating different varieties, Steve has created stunning bicolor and maroonish colored sunflowers. Despite challenges like frost and pest control, Steve's unique approach to flower farming showcases the intersection of nature, innovation, and dedication in creating beautiful blooms. Join Steve on a journey through the vibrant world of sunflowers and the art of seed breeding, where each petal tells a story of resilience and growth.
Shownotes:
https://thefloweringfarmhouse.com/2024/05/12/ep-20-growing-sunflowers-with-sunflower-steve/
In This Episode You’ll Hear About:
- 01:15-05:16: Steve's Journey: From Flower Farming to Sunflower Breeding
- 13:19-16:23: Maximizing Efficiency and Planning for Contingencies
- 0:26-23:33: Evolution of Steve’s Flower Farm
- 24:35-32:01: From Hobby to Breeding Success
- 37:51-41:40: Protecting Sunflowers from Rodents and Birds
- 01:06:30-01:09:47: Sunflowers and Camp
- 01:10:33-01:14:33: Breeding and Growing Unique Sunflowers
Learn More About Sunflower Steve:
- · https://sunflowersteveseedco.com/
- · https://www.instagram.com/sun_flower_steve
- · CBS Sunday Morning: https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/0Hr_4AyQAfnOZQeb44TCkxu_omlTvF4E/
- · Camp: https://www.crosswoods.camp/
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Transcript
Introduction to Backyard Bouquet Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Backyard Bouquet podcast, where stories bloom from local flower fields and home gardens. I'm your host, Jennifer Galitzia of the Flowering Farmhouse. I'm a backyard gardener turned flower farmer located in Hood River, Oregon. Join us for heartfelt journeys shared by flower farmers and backyard gardeners. Each episode is like a vibrant garden, cultivating wisdom and joy through flowers. From growing your own backyard garden to supporting your local flower farmer,
00:00:32
Speaker
The backyard bouquet is your fertile ground for heartwarming tales and expert cut flower growing advice. All right flower friends, grab your gardening gloves, garden snips, or your favorite vase because it's time to let your backyard bloom.
00:00:55
Speaker
Hi, flower friends. Welcome to today's episode of the Backyard Bouquet podcast.
Meet Sunflower Steve: His Journey and Background
00:01:00
Speaker
Today, we're joined by a truly unique and passionate individual, Steve Kofer, who you probably know as Sunflower Steve, a renowned sunflower seed breeder who has been growing cut flowers for over 20 years. Alongside his family, Steve has cultivated an extraordinary flower farm specializing now in his unique sunflower varieties.
00:01:23
Speaker
But Steve's passion doesn't stop at sunflowers. He's also deeply involved in training birds of prey and his family owns a summer camp. Today we'll hear from Steve about his passions intersect along with the story behind becoming a sunflower breeder. So without further ado, Steve, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today. John, you're welcome. So nice to finally meet you. I've been following you on Instagram for a long time. So very nice to meet you.
00:01:48
Speaker
Likewise, I've been enjoying your amazing seeds that you've been sending me for the last few years to trial and as of lately, your amazing honey that we can't get enough of. It's incredible. So thank you. I'm so honored to have you here chatting with us today. Again, I'm glad to be honest. It's been kind of fun to be able to reach out and touch people at a
00:02:13
Speaker
you know, be able to talk to people and share stories of people that I never would have had an opportunity to without this little flower that showed up at my place, you know, 20, 15 years ago now. Absolutely. Well, it's amazing how with the presence of social media, the local flower network is really expanding and we're able to connect with people around the country. And I'm so grateful that my path crossed with you.
00:02:38
Speaker
So if you don't mind starting us out today, will you share with us how did you become a flower farmer 20 plus years ago? Um, I'll try to do it in a nutshell, but I basically in 20 not 20, 1999. Wow. That's going to age me. Um, I lost my job due to a corporate downsize. And prior to that, my wife and I bought a farm 10 years earlier in Wisconsin and I fell in love with the native American Prairie.
00:03:05
Speaker
and everything that went along with it, the grasses and the flowers. And there's a company out of Winona, Minnesota called Prairie Moon Nursery, and they specialized in prairie seeds.
00:03:17
Speaker
I started planting a bunch of things on our land just to better the property for wildlife. And then a good friend of mine who's a biology teacher who kind of turned me on the prairie stuff told me, well, you know, some of those flowers are back in the day, you know, 20 plus years ago, some of those seeds are worth a fair amount of money. So I thought, well, that's kind of cool. Maybe I can reap a little benefit back from plant and make the land better and make a little money off it. So I started growing
00:03:39
Speaker
native prairie flowers in rows, actually.
Steve's Flower Farming Innovations
00:03:43
Speaker
Within maybe three acres of prairie grass, I would grow native flowers every six feet so I could drive my mower down between them for the first few years, but in rows so that eventually I could harvest them and sell them back and make a little money. Fast forward to 1999 when I lost my job.
00:04:01
Speaker
I had blue baptism growing, and I got that seed from Prairie Moon Nursery. But then I also had cream baptism growing, baptism leukofia. It's a short little cream-colored baptism. It looks much different than the other ones. And that actually came from a little prairie cemetery about 40 minutes from my house, a little chunk of ground that had never been touched since they came and settled the prairies. So this is where
00:04:24
Speaker
All these folks that came across here trying to eke out a living on the land when they passed away, there's this little prairie cemetery. So everything there is native to hundreds and hundreds of years here. And my friend had gotten permission to collect seed off of there years ago to do some stuff for his class. He had given me some of that seed. So long story short, I didn't want that cream crossing with the blue because it'd be contaminated. I couldn't sell the seed to Prairie Moon Nursery.
00:04:48
Speaker
I got injured and while I was convalescing, I thought, geez, if that blue crosses with the cream, I won't be able to sell it. So I told my little girls, I have four daughters. I told my little girls to go out and cut those blue flowers down and just throw them by the side. I was going to transplant them farther away so they wouldn't cross. I didn't think about it when I planted them. Anyway, they cut the blue indigo down, the blue baptism, they put it in a vase for me.
00:05:12
Speaker
And I was sitting there looking at it on the mantle and it was like, wow, you know, those are kind of pretty. I wonder if a flower shop would be interested in those. You know, again, this is 24, 25 years ago. So I took them to my local florist. I grew up as a kid about an hour away.
00:05:26
Speaker
And I've been in sales my whole life. So my sales pitch was, you owe me 10 minutes of your time. And he said, why? I said, for all the Mother's Day gifts, flowers, Valentine's flowers. I screwed up flowers. I bought from you guys over the years. And he agreed to talk to me. So I showed him the Blue Map tizzy. And he was blown away. He'd never seen it before. And right then and there, something I had thought, well, there might be a side income here.
00:05:51
Speaker
So that whole summer I would bring him a lot of my fairy plants over and he would test them out in floral solutions and coolers to see what worked and what didn't and put them in arrangements and see how they looked. And so he really helped me out a lot, kind of took me under his wing. I knew nothing.
00:06:09
Speaker
In fact, I kind of had a disdain for doing a lot of flowers and gardening because as a kid, my mother would make me plant, you know, three to 400 marigolds every year. And since it wasn't my choice, I really didn't like it as much. But when I started growing the prairie flowers, I kind of started liking them more because it was my decision. Anyway, the very next year, I was getting my hair cut at a place in town and I discovered that there was a farmer's market down. I could go sell some flowers. So I planted a few things, some of the, you know, cosmos and
00:06:39
Speaker
some sunflowers and like bells of Ireland and all kinds of things I saw at the farmer's market. So we started doing farmer's market and I saw some some silosia at my, the lady that cuts my hair and I had never seen that. So I said, what is that? And she told me her sister was growing it and selling it to a big retailer over in the Twin Cities. I live about an hour from Minneapolis in St. Paul. And so she got me the number of this big retailer and I called and I called and I called and she never answered the phone.
00:07:07
Speaker
So finally, I just went over there with a bucket of their golden Alexander's. It's a fairy flower. It looks like a yellow Queen Anne's lace. So I went over the bucket of those and I walked in the door and the gal said, may help you. And I said, yeah, I'd like to see Cindy.
00:07:22
Speaker
And she said, can I ask who's asking? I said, yeah, tell her Steve's here to show her some flowers. So she went in the back and I'd say this, I remember thinking, man, I sure hope she knows the Steve. So she came out of the door and she saw my face and she's like, I don't recognize him, but he's got a pretty bucket of flowers. And she goes, you're Steve? I go, yeah, Steve Crawford. She goes, oh yeah, you've left me some messages.
00:07:45
Speaker
And I was thinking, yeah, I haven't returned my call. And I understand now why, once I was in there, that she gets calls every day of people trying to get in because they're so big. But I had something different and something she'd never seen before. So then that first summer we started, she did the same thing I did the year before. She started testing things and kept bringing all these native flowers she'd never seen before. And then she said, well, are you growing anything else? I said, well, I've got some sunflowers and a few things I'm growing from the farmers market.
00:08:15
Speaker
And she said, well, why don't you bring me some samples of those too? So at the end of that season, she told me, you know, we grow a lot of where we sell a lot of sunflowers and we'd like to buy sunflowers from next year. And how about zinnias? You grow zinnias. I'm like, I have no clue what they are,
Challenges and Advice in Flower Farming
00:08:31
Speaker
but let's grow them.
00:08:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I went big right away on the zinnias anyway. I put like a half acre zinnias in right away. Oh my goodness. The next year and all the berries giants. And then I think I planted somewhere between six and 8,000 sunflowers that next year in succession plantings thinking that would be enough. Well, I came to learn later that, you know, that wasn't near enough, but I remember like the third or fourth week into that next season. She stayed at a truck coming from, I think it was California and it got broke down in Nebraska.
00:09:02
Speaker
And I'd been bringing her maybe 100 sunflowers a week. And then she called me up and said, hey, we have a big event. Do you have 800 sunflowers? Can you get them here by five o'clock? And he's like, well, I have them for my farmer's market, but you'll buy them all right now. And she said, yeah. Well, farmer's market is kind of a crapshoot. You can show up and it rains and nobody buys your stuff.
00:09:20
Speaker
So I drove over there with the 800 sunflowers, like, holy cow. And she says, well, how many can you do a week? And I said, well, I've got about, what was it, 6,000 or 8,000 plants. And she goes, well, I can take the rest of them for the year based on the weeks. And then at the end of the year, she finally told me, she said, we can do way more than that for a year. So fast forward. That kind of was how I got my feet wet. And then we started doing another farmer's market.
00:09:47
Speaker
And then I found a couple of people that had worked for her company. Now we're working for two big wholesalers in the city. So within two and a half, three years, I now add a big retailer, two wholesalers and two farmers markets. I also do want to preface this though, during this time and learning about this and having setbacks of bugs and bacteria and weather, which I had no clue about. I was a city boy. I mean, I grew, I love the outdoors. I grew up hunting and fishing, but I didn't do nothing about growing things.
00:10:16
Speaker
I have a wife who has a job, really good job. She's a nurse practitioner. And without her, through all these years, there's no way I could have made it to continue on. And same thing with my one gal at the wholesaler and my one gal at the retailer. Without them taking me under the wing and showing me how to bunch what the industry standards were in height and how to buy a new new PC, again, I don't think I would have made it this far. In fact, I think the year that I found
00:10:44
Speaker
the flower we'll talk about later. That year had a really bad year. We had a big drought. I lost almost everything. And the gal at the one store can convince me to keep going on. It'll get better and you're doing good. And had she not done that, I probably would have turned that field under and never found that one flower.
00:11:02
Speaker
Anyway, fast forward to 2007. Do you have any questions in here that I've been throwing a lot of information at you? Well, I'll just make a few comments here. I love that you said that you went in to the florists and you actually showed them your product because so many people will say, like I hear from newer farmers, I just can't get in with any florists. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Why don't they want my flowers? But you, one, you had something unique.
00:11:31
Speaker
that your florists weren't familiar with. So it sets you apart from everyone else. And you showed them your flowers and told your story. Those three things are really what sells the flowers because we can all grow flowers. But if you can grow something unique,
00:11:46
Speaker
Show your flowers and tell your story. What a difference that makes. I also love that you acknowledged that your wife made a lot of this possible because it's not easy getting started in flower farming. It's really easy to get wrapped up in social media.
00:12:02
Speaker
especially now. It wasn't probably such a problem when you were getting started because social media was just getting started and Instagram didn't exist. But nowadays you look online and you see these fields full of flowers, yours especially. I mean, you grow hundreds of thousands of flowers and someone could say, I want to do that, but not realizing all the trials and struggles you've been through. Can we pause on moving forward with your story for a minute and talk about some of those early struggles and trials that you experienced?
00:12:31
Speaker
if you would be willing to share a couple. Sure. I would say, and I remember, you know Nicole from Flower Hill Farm. Yes, absolutely. Same thing. I met her in her second or third year and she was planting, I mean, all of this stuff, so many things. And that was one thing I found out by about your somewhere between three and five that I was planting too many things. I was trying to plant so many different varieties. I was having failures on some. And when you're trying to manage different field,
00:13:01
Speaker
of different flowers and different plantings of each flowers. Now you've got like 40 different basically environments of each one of those. You got all these different flowers which all have different needs, all have different moisture needs, all have different spacing needs, they have different diseases and all that. So I remember saying to Nicole, you know, pare down, you don't need to have so much stuff. Find the things that work well in your area. And number two was when we first started going to farmer's markets, everybody had the same thing.
00:13:29
Speaker
Except us. We had the same things everybody else and then the prairie stuff. All the prairie flowers went in as accents. A lot of them aren't big showy flowers, but they were accents that nobody else had. And I remember telling Nicole that first year as well, the thing you'll see with a lot of people that are doing farmer's markets, a lot of them don't have perennials.
00:13:48
Speaker
And if you can show up early or show up with perennials that they don't have, you know, and there's an investment up front. And I think she went a little crazy. I showed her my field of like 600 limelight hydrangeas in, and she saw a sun set picture of those. And she's like, I got to get those. And I think she put 300 of them right away, which is good. But to have have perennials as well.
00:14:09
Speaker
because annuals, you can have a big windstorm that flattens them out. And the perennials are generally a lot sturdier. And you can have perennials on the front end, like peonies, lilacs, and things like that. And on the back end, I grow a lot of Ilex winterberry. So it extends your market. And not having so many things to worry about, that was one thing I learned early on. Number two, like you said that
00:14:32
Speaker
There's just things you don't plan on, like weather and droughts and things like that. So I always planted, I didn't at first, I would plant like, if I thought I was going to sell 10,000 sunflowers, I'd plant 11,000. And until I met a guy actually from California, he's actually the largest grower sunflowers in the country, Dostringos. And they would plant 50,000 sunflowers in a week with the expectation of harvesting 25 to 30,000. Wow.
00:14:59
Speaker
For two reasons. One is, if you're going through the rows and you can cut every step, you're maximizing your time because that's one thing you can't get back is time. And at a certain point,
00:15:12
Speaker
As those are opening up, they're not opening as uniformly. You might start getting bug damage or whatever. If you jump to your next field that's got 100% blooming and you can have way less time to harvest it, it's so much more efficient. And for the heck, at the time, seeds weren't as expensive. For the extra whatever is $200 maybe to plant that many more seeds. It's insurance against weather and bugs to make sure, especially for me,
00:15:38
Speaker
At a certain point, one of my customers was expecting 25,000 sunflowers a week. 25,000 sunflowers a week? Yeah. Wow. My first big sale of 800 that one week, I was going, oh my gosh. From 2012 to when I actually stopped doing cut flowers in 2022, is that when I stopped? Yeah. When they first get rolling probably about 1,500 sunflowers a day,
00:16:07
Speaker
And then once the fields started coming in on top of each other and stuff, we'd harvest between 2,500 and 3,000 sunflowers every morning. And if you have a big customer like I did, and they're expecting it, and you have part of your field gets blown down, they're going to be like, I don't care. I still want the flowers. And it's not them. They have projections they made. So if it's not the person themselves, they're just trying to do their job.
00:16:30
Speaker
So that was one thing I learned plant plant more than you need to. And if it costs you an extra $50 to plant that many more flowers, so you're covered, you have enough, a lot of people worry about not selling everything they have. You're not gonna know. Yeah. And there was a line I read Lynn by Zinski's book. Jesus can't remember is called I could go pull it out. But there was one farmer in there that gave advice of flower farmer. Yep.
00:16:57
Speaker
Yep. I read that back in the early, early years. In fact, I still have a menu. I went to a restaurant with the first flower, first floral shop I ever went to, um, the guy that kind of helped me out and went to a restaurant. I flipped the menu over there. It was the placement. I'm sorry. And wrote down all the things that he thought I should grow. And he gave me her name. So I, and I still have that placement. Oh, that's awesome. Anyway. Um, there was a farmer in there that's talked about going to farmer's market and how do you compete with all the other people? One thing he said was leave your junk at home.
00:17:27
Speaker
Leave the bad stuff at all. I mean, sometimes you look at flour, like 99% of the petals are perfect, but there's a couple of bad ones and just grow enough so you don't have to worry about harvesting that one. So another thing, advice I would give if somebody's doing this for flour farming, not just for their own backyard cut flour. If you're serious about it, get a walk-in cooler. It doesn't have to be a big one, a six by eight. It comes back to the thing of time.
00:17:53
Speaker
If you see a storm coming, you can stuff the day ahead of time, put it in the cooler and flower solution, and you can hold them for up to 14 days. Mine, we're always out of there usually in 48 hours. The sunflowers you can hold for 14 days? Yeah, usually at about four or five. That comes back to harvesting. I harvested them when they're like one petal might be lifting off the face. We put them in floral solution.
00:18:18
Speaker
And after, if they'd been sitting there long, sometimes if I had a special event where I'd have to stack them up, I didn't have to do much. At about day or four or five, we'd give them a fresh cup, put them in fresh water. So, and all through, all of professional floral solution as well.
00:18:32
Speaker
I didn't used to think it made that big of a difference, but it really does. So having a cold place to store them, it slows down the bloom and also flower food. And even peonies with the cooler, if they come in in a rush, you can cut them. And I mean, I've never held them that long. They say you can hold them up to six weeks. I mean, I've held them for over a month in a cooler for a wedding. In no water, just lay them sideways and keep them dry.
00:18:56
Speaker
So a cooler I think is essential if you're serious about this. And again, it comes back to buying you time. If you need to make bouquets and you have nowhere to cool them, they're dying that whole time that you want to put them together. So if you can slow that down, if you suddenly have to plant something or you have a greenhouse and the roof came off or something stupid comes up, they aren't getting worse sitting in a garage or on a porch or in your house. They're in a cooler and you pretty much have slowed them down to a really good slow hibernation, if you will. That's a great point.
00:19:25
Speaker
Yeah, to be a flower farmer, you really need a cooler unless you're going very small scale and you're turning everything the same day or the next morning. So let's talk about. But even there, but even there I'll interrupt you really quickly. Um, we've found like when we do our lilacs and people would say, well, lilacs wilt so quick.
00:19:44
Speaker
Well we cut our lilacs from sun up to 10 or 11 in the morning so it's actually getting fairly warm out. And the first thing we do on those is cut the leaves off right away because all they're doing is sucking away. You don't have the foliage for an arrangement but it's drawing all the nutrients away from the flower.
00:19:58
Speaker
And you cut all those off, and we would cut them, put them in floral solution, and we would leave them in the cooler for a day, day and a half. So they're slowly sucking up all that flower food into the flower itself without the flower degrading at all. And we could get six and seven days out of a lilac easy, sometimes up to 10 days. So without that cooler, yeah, if you cut them even as you're turning them, give them to a customer right away, without that slow cold conditioning to allow it to travel up there, three or four days maybe. And that's been my experience anyway.
00:20:28
Speaker
Amazing. So let's go back to your story. You have shared so far that you have grown your flower farm because at the time you were growing all kinds of flowers. You were starting to get large orders. You were saying that you had a customer place an order for how many thousands of sunflowers a week?
Sunflower Seed Experimentation and Development
00:20:55
Speaker
In 2008, we were doing about 20,000 sunflowers a week. Along with other flowers? Yeah, at that time we were still doing farmer's markets and we were still doing single stems where I'd bring a bucket of like 300 stems out of, you know, a particular variety to a place that would then make them themselves. And that was the same year in 2007. I also found out, this is a city by now,
00:21:23
Speaker
Why are all my sunflowers getting shorter and the heads getting smaller? And I talked to a farmer friend of mine at church and he said, well, how often do you plan to cover crop or augment the soil? And I was like, what's a cover crop? So I wound up idling a field that year and I planted some clover and the very next year I had some sunflowers come up out there. Again, I don't know how many was less than less than a two dozen, I would say. And, um,
00:21:51
Speaker
I noticed some sunflowers coming up there which baffled me because everything at the time I grew was a F1 hybrid. Back then I used to grow like all the pro cuts that were available, sun rich series. And so it baffled me because they're all pollenless. So how could a pollenless flower produce viable seed?
00:22:08
Speaker
And that's when I discovered the windflower that I called Gigi. She was golden maroon, double flowering, looked like the Van Gogh one, like a teddy bear. And I had never seen anything like that before. And to this day, I don't know why I didn't have snippers on me. I was going to cut it and bring it in the house and I didn't. And that's when I collected the seeds off of that ear thinking, well, I wonder if this thing could even produce seed because there's nothing but petals on the face.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so from the very next year for 2008 to 2012, we still did two large wholesalers, one large retailer and two farmers markets. And I was growing zinnias and cosmos and silosia. And geez, I can't even think of all of them. One thing I wasn't growing was dahlias. Interesting.
00:22:50
Speaker
Well, because we have to dig them every year and a lot of places I saw, you know, I actually knew a guy that was growing him and he offered to sell me some really cheap. I'm like, you know, by the time it gets to fall, last thing I wanted to do is be digging dahlias. So I didn't do dahlias, but I pretty much every other thing you can think of that would be in a bouquet, we grew as well as in 2003, I added like cranberry viburnum. I added some perennials, cranberry viburnum, all the lilacs.
00:23:15
Speaker
have over 3,000 lilacs, I think nine different kinds. Snowball viburnums, two different types of hydrangeas, three different kind of islets. I guess another viburnum, the blue muffin viburnum. I'm trying to think in my head where they are in the fields. So I added all these perennials too. So we had all these different varieties.
00:23:37
Speaker
And enter 2012. Now we have had, we have four daughters and I'm losing my child labor because they're going off to college. So I'm finding labor around here was being harder to find just kids to work. Um, I was very fortunate. I did have a couple of young men that worked me from me from like ninth grade till the, when they graduated college, they were, they were great, just great kids to work. Um, but in 2012,
00:24:05
Speaker
My wife and I sat down and said, this is crazy. We're spending all our weekends at farmer's markets. It was great for the kids. My kids got to learn how to deal with customers. They got to learn how to make change. They got to learn how to interact with adults. It was a really good experience, but it was becoming so time consuming. So in 2012, we pivoted and we said, what do we do well? We did sunflowers really well. We did zinnias really well as far as annuals.
00:24:27
Speaker
And then we had all the perennials still. So we cut back to just doing five stem bunches of sunflowers and seven stem bunches of zinnias. And we stopped doing farmer's markets. So that was the big pivot year. And all that time, I still was kind of monkeying around with this one flower on the side, the one I told you about earlier. And it was having limited success, seeds here, not seeds here. Some were producing, some weren't. And it was kind of, for me, a getaway from the grind of doing all the other things. So when we did that big pivot to doing
00:24:57
Speaker
high volume of a fewer amount of flowers. I think that was mentally for me, it was a lot easier. It was actually more work, but mentally trying to organize and keep all this stuff. All these balls in the air was a lot easier to do. So I kind of lost my train of thought there. So when we did that big pivot,
00:25:21
Speaker
Then I saw this one flower that, the double flowering one thought, well, that could be one I could add to my mix because nobody else has that. So my brain started going, how can I...
00:25:32
Speaker
produce this thing on a mass scale, and I'll be the only one in the Twin Cities with it. Nobody else will have it, so my mindset was just cut flower. So when I first started monkeying with it, I was going towards something I thought for the cut flower market. And so, to be honest with you, I was probably throwing away some really cool single ones, cutting them down and culling them that I'll never get the genetics back for because my mindset was cut flowers.
00:25:52
Speaker
So moving forward, from 2012 to 2022, we are still doing all of those with my big, those few things with my big customers. And at the same time, that's when I started monkeying around with the other one, I really didn't even start thinking about seeds till COVID. But we could talk about that in a second. So I want to back up for a second and say, I was just at a greenhouse this morning, and the gal and I were talking, she's letting me do some of my seeds over in a greenhouse. And
00:26:20
Speaker
She said that there's some people that came into her greenhouse and we're asking about certain trees. And she said, well, we don't care those trees because they're not good for our zone. And that was another mistake I had seen people make. They see something that's really cool. They want to grow it. And it's right on the edge of being where the zone is and they invest money in time and it doesn't work. And I did the same thing too. Um, I actually planted, it's supposed to be winter hardy peach tree for up here. And for two years we had a climate where it actually, we could do it. And then we got our real winters back and I lost all 40 of them. So, Oh no.
00:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, that was going to be something to say if somebody's thinking about tinkering with something, unless you have a microclimate that's really, really good for it, you can still try and push the envelope. But that never really worked out for me. So anyway, where was I in the story? Where would you like me to go with this story? Well, let's go back. So 2008 is when you found this sunflower growing, Gigi growing in your cover crop that shouldn't have been growing there. Correct.
00:27:16
Speaker
And serendipitously, you didn't have your clippers on you that day to cut it and bring it inside. Imagine had you cut that flower, how differently life would have been today. But instead you let that flower go to seed. Do you remember how many seeds you got from Gigi? I do 12.
00:27:37
Speaker
I do because I remember there was 572 for whatever reason I counted them and I was squeezing them one at a time to see if there was, everybody sees a seed and they realize they think it's a seed, but that's just a seed haul. If there's no German side of it, no nut inside of it, it's an empty seed. So I was squeezing them and I squeezed a pile and finally got one. I'm like, oh, there is one. And they had 12 seeds. And the next year I grew them in a flat and they all came up.
00:28:00
Speaker
and 10 of them were, I didn't know at the time, I planted them out and 10 of them were not, I mean, a couple of them didn't even have heads on them and they were kind of deformed and all that. And one came back exactly like the parent plant. And the other one came back this really, really dark, like pro cut red color, really dark maroonish and it had some yellow streaking on the throat. So I had these two really cool ones
00:28:23
Speaker
And I just kind of kept working with those, the seeds I got from them, but each year I get hundreds and hundreds of seeds and very few viable ones. So yeah, you say, had I cut that down, I'd never be where I'm at. There are so many things in this story, Jim, that are like that. I mean, if my friend encouraged me after that disastrous year to stay in it the very next year is when I found Gigi.
00:28:46
Speaker
just meeting Nicole online for the first time and getting involved. And showing I showed her that and she was like, Whoa, that's crazy. And just all these little things that kept going along with this flower. And now if you want to go back again, so then 2000 from 2008, probably 2016, I was just monkeying with them. And I didn't have one one bad year in there, I almost lost my due to a storm. But again, I don't exactly remember what it was probably year four or five, I noticed
00:29:14
Speaker
The double flowerings ones almost never had maybe one seed on them. You know, a whole seed had and like one good seed. And the ones that were semi-devils that had an outer ray of petals like a normal sunflower and some people call them eyelashes, about half of the face filled with petals, those had a lot more pollen.
00:29:32
Speaker
So I actually moved two of those plants that were just copious amounts of pollen right next to two really cool ones that were double flowering that I couldn't even see the stamens. And every morning I would take the heads and it would just basically clap them together and just pour that pollen on these double flowering ones. And then the next year, I think I had about 3000 viable seeds. And then it kept going exponentially from there. I started getting more seeds, not necessarily more doubles, but a more opportunity to have more doubles.
00:29:59
Speaker
And so say I planted up 5,000 seeds the next year, instead of having like five or six doubles, I would then have five or 600. So I had more to work with to possibly get the genes that would then pass on their genetics. And I think it was 2016 is when I finally, and again, my brain was still thinking, you know, cup flowers. So I was looking for uniformity and things as 2016, the first year has separated out.
00:30:23
Speaker
uh by colors that were in the field. I put flags on everything that's kind of maroonish flags everything it was kind of fallish flags on everything that was like a really strong by color and started moving them around like that and again still thinking that this is to me for a cup flower. Were you doing that to separate them for breeding purposes or to just keep track of them? No for breeding purposes I thought well this would be a nice one like itself I planted like in
00:30:47
Speaker
you know, late June, early July, I could sell this one in the fall because those are rusty dark colors. And then, so yeah, that's why I started separating them out. Again, I was still 90% focused on my cut flower thing. This was, this was kind of a hobby on the side. And, uh, just to kind of do something other than the grind, because it does get old doing it seven days a week for, at the cutting season was about 14 weeks, but you've got the four weeks on the front side of it. And then four weeks on the back side of it. So every seven days a week, every day, you know, and
00:31:17
Speaker
when I used to do cup flowers, here's a quick technique. If you're doing a lot of sunflowers and you don't have enough time in the day, you can do it like I did. I get up at two in the morning with a headlamp on. And the reason I did this is because I went through a few employees over the years that they would see a flower and they'd be on the fence, should I cut it or shouldn't I cut it?
00:31:41
Speaker
And just when you kind of got them trained in, they quit. You get a new kid the next year. So I had the two kids with me for a long time and I had these rotating door of these other kids. So finally I decided you got to strip the leaves off of them anyway. So if I get up at two in the morning and I go through the field, the headlamp on, and I'm doing a field of 25, 30,000 flowers, you strip the leaves off everything that needs to be cut.
00:32:01
Speaker
When my guys showed up at five 30 or six in the morning, all they do is if the stock was missing leaves, cut it. There's no question. And it's sped up efficiency like crazy. They can put their headphones on, not even think about it. Just if there's no leaves, just cut it, cut it, cut it. And so the cool thing about doing seeds, I get up at like five in the morning. I get to sleep in an extra two to three hours.
00:32:22
Speaker
That's still early for most people. I get up about four to five. Um, once we're in full season, it's four o'clock in the morning, but these days I find myself trying to sleep in a little bit and sleeping in is like four 30 these days. So five o'clock sounds nice. And I can't even imagine two o'clock. That's, that's dedication. You know, that being said, there were times that, um, I'd be on my way back from making a delivery. My guys be here working and stuff. I get so tired. I would literally, I have a big delivery ban. I would just,
00:32:49
Speaker
Pull over put it in park at one in the afternoon crime and pillow the back just kind of back and sleep for an hour so i was not opposed to taking nap in the middle of the day you know eighty eighty five ninety degrees i don't want to go to work in any way anyway so i have really strong believer napping but you know in order to get the stuff done i found it up a two or three in the morning i could just get it done there's
00:33:09
Speaker
No distractions at all, it could stay focused on it. And the flowers actually do better too. If you're cutting the flower, when it's not actively growing, it's a state of torpor, a state of rest. There's no exchange of fluids going up and down the stem. There's way less stress on it. So, and people don't, well, I think, I don't know if they've shown you pictures, but we didn't even cut into water. We would cut them dry, you know, 36 inch long stems. We cut them dry and put them in these big cubes I had.
00:33:36
Speaker
and get them in the cooler, completely no moisture at all, get all the field heat on them, and then we'd work with them after that and cut them and put them in water. So sometimes they weren't even in water for four or five hours. But as long as they're in the cold, the ones they're not in the cold, they're not stressed out, they handle it just fine. And you don't dry store your sunflower, so they always go in water, is that correct? Yeah. So at first, no water when we first cut them, but once they're cut and they bunch it all the other and they do water.
00:34:02
Speaker
I did used to do, we did farmer's markets and we would cut them one day, put them in the cooler for well over a day, day and a half with no water at all. And then this would be in the fall and then we would dye them for fall bookcase. I don't know if you've ever seen, I could send you a picture. If you take, let's unrich orange, cut it, leave it in the cooler, let it dry out for a day.
00:34:21
Speaker
and then cut it and put it in flower dye, put it in hot pink flower dye. It turns them blaze orange, like the hunting things that people wear, the bright orange. It turns them just super bright orange and not an ugly orange. It looks like the blaze hunting orange. And in Wisconsin, I mean, we sold those all day long in the fall.
00:34:41
Speaker
You couple that orange with a purple, the contrasting colors are almost like the Denver Broncos. Selling orange in the fall in Wisconsin is really easy because that's half of people's clothing line is either camo or orange. Okay, so you're in Wisconsin. We haven't talked about your growing zone yet. What growing zone are you in? They say we're 4B, and I would say over 23 years, probably average of that, but there's some years that I think we're a little warmer than that. There's been a couple of cold winters too, but there's been
00:35:11
Speaker
several years during this whole thing where the overall temperature would probably would have been warmer and there was three times I can remember where it was so warm I just thought I was going to plant in April, you know, two weeks before my last frost date.
00:35:25
Speaker
and there wasn't a single year where I didn't get hit by frost. You had two weeks where it's like, well, there's no waving at frost. No waving at frost. We actually had frost, not while I was growing flowers, but in 1992 on Father's Day, June 10th, we had a frost. Oh my goodness. And it really devastated the crops around here. So overall, we're zone 4B. And the couple of times I thought we weren't zone 4B, I got reminded we were. So can you plant sunflowers before a frost or do you suggest after?
00:35:55
Speaker
I usually like to wait about a week until after you're at last average first frost. I've sometimes planted on the last frost date because most of the times our soil temperature isn't warm enough for them to jump up right away and get stung. It usually takes five to seven days to get out of the soil. May 4th is my average last frost date. I usually get in between the 4th and the 10th every year for the first planting. Then I used to plant every week for 12 weeks to get that succession planting. I don't do that anymore.
00:36:22
Speaker
And how long does the sunflower typically take from the time you sow the seed to when you can harvest it? The ones that I grow were 55 to 60 days. Sometimes, sometimes in the middle of July and August when the daylight hours are longer, or you get a, it's a full moon. It's 92 degrees out at night. The flowers, it doesn't know the difference between day and night. It's bright enough and it's warm and humid enough that they continue to bloom almost all night long. So sometimes we would have plantings coming in on top of each other.
00:36:50
Speaker
Oh my goodness. And so were you harvesting at nighttime then? No, we just, that's why sometimes that, you know, we plant 10, 15,000 more than we needed every week. Okay. And that's, you know, we could talk about the flower murals later. And that's where that came in where we had all these excess flowers. So gotcha. And
00:37:07
Speaker
Before we go back to your story, since we're talking about growing sunflowers, I want to help some of our listeners who aren't as familiar with growing them. You shared something with me a few years ago because I was struggling to get my sunflowers to grow because the crows were eating them. I would literally turn around and the crows would be eating them. So what are the methods you recommend for planting sunflowers? Do you direct sow them? Do you start them in trays? What's your advice?
00:37:35
Speaker
I do 95% direct so because I do so many, we do so many flowers and that's really where we're doing the cup flowers. And I've had people recommend, can't you mulch or can you do this practice?
Falconry and Farming: A Unique Combination
00:37:51
Speaker
And I don't think they understand when I'm planting three acres of sunflowers, I can't really mulch everything. But yeah, for me,
00:37:58
Speaker
A lot of people ask me about direct seeding too. How do you keep the chimp monks and the rabbits and the squirrels away? And as you mentioned earlier in the intro that I've been flying birds of prey and hunting birds of prey since I was 10 years old. I practice ancient art of falconry. So when I started doing flower farming, I was in this unique position to have about the greenest flower or about the greenest way to get rid of rodents that you can have is I have a trained bird of prey. And so I, you know, it's about the first two or three years
00:38:28
Speaker
I flew the birds, but we can only hunt them in the off season. We can't plant them during the summer. We have to be by by the normal legal hunting season. So as soon as November rolled around, we'd be flying the birds and basically eradicating the rabbits and the squirrels and things like that. And I really don't have much problem with them anymore. And I feel bad for people that have bought my seeds and they plant out 50 seeds and 45 of them get eaten by a chick monk. And they're like, how can I stop that? I don't have that issue.
00:38:55
Speaker
I do have some other issues, but like you said, the crows. Now what I did for my crow issue, I did two things. One, I just took a 50 pound bag of sunflower seeds and about 400 yards away from my field, I just poured them out there. So the crows had a place they could go and eat and they didn't have to get all my sunflower seeds because
00:39:16
Speaker
A lot of times as they come up on the ground and they got the seeds still stuck on the leaves, they would come and, you know, same thing with me, they'd be plucking out. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Well, yeah, as they're all pulling, they also, they see thousands of little seeds lined up in a buffet and they're like, cool. And they start plucking them. And for me, they weren't eating them. But I think, oh, the next one, the next one, the next one, you think after a thousand and they'd say there's nothing here, but they would just keep doing it. So I would just pour a bag of sunflower seeds off, you know, in the corner for them to eat. Other critters got them too. But
00:39:43
Speaker
But crows are kind of curious, so they would still come. And I only needed to keep them away for about the first three or four days when they were coming up out of the gun. So I would literally pay one of the kids and sit out there in a hunting blind. And when they'd show up just to shoot the gun, not to kill them, just to shoot the gun to scare them away for a couple of days. And that usually did the trick for the crows. But as far as rodents, I've got the hawk patrol. All my daughters have flown birds of prey. They all know how to handle birds. So it's a little unique situation that I have.
00:40:12
Speaker
But again, I feel bad. I did see a lady, she sent me pictures the other day of my seeds. She took cement cinder blocks and started them there so nothing could tunnel in or nothing could eat them. And then she put chicken wire over the top so nothing could pluck them out. I was like, that's pretty ingenious. She has Fort Knox for my sunflowers. Wow. Well, that's why I reached out to you because the first year when you sent me some of your packets of seeds, I had three come up and the crows ate all the rest of the packet.
00:40:39
Speaker
Thankfully, I'd only planted one of the packets you'd sent me when I did that. Then I went out and bought, I think it was a 12-pound bag of sunflowers because I don't grow on the same scale as you. I don't have the same size space, but I dumped them about 100 to 200 feet away and made them very easily accessible and the crows left my sunflowers alone. But I also direct soap because I only need enough for my CSA, so I'll do about 200.
00:41:06
Speaker
in soil, not soil blocks. Well, soil blocks or seed trays, but I'll do them each week. And my nine-year-old daughter has gotten really good at sowing the seeds. And then once they've germinated and the seeds have fallen off, they go out in the field. Do you recommend that for gardeners also? Yeah, I started doing them. You can protect them a little more then. At least they get out of the ground when you know where they're at and you're not guessing where you planted them. But
00:41:30
Speaker
I said I do 95% direct. So the ones I'm doing in my friend's greenhouse right now, those are ones where I might only add, well, the one I only have three that came up. I had 30 some seeds and I had three that came up. So the newer ones I'm doing where I can't afford to lose one, I germinate them same thing. They come up as soon as they're up, I grabbed those first two leaves, I put them in a flat and I'll grow them for two to three weeks before I put them out in the field. I want them nice and big and strong. So yeah, if you
00:41:57
Speaker
have the ability of the space, I would suggest growing if it's a smaller amount just for yourself. I would suggest doing that. Or even if you are planting several hundred, come up with just some sort of temporary chicken wire thing over them. Everybody's situations are different on what they have for critters that want to take care of them. I said that about flower farming.
00:42:16
Speaker
from day one. The second you put that seed in the ground, everything wants to kill it. It wants to either get drowned or drought, or some bug wants to eat, or some disease wants to eat, or the wind wants to eat. Then they get big enough and you got the bugs that won't eat the petals. It's like this constant battle. But you wouldn't do it if there wasn't a payoff at the end, but sometimes it gets frustrating.
00:42:37
Speaker
It can be challenging. So sticking with the planting of sunflowers real fast. So if someone's growing sunflowers for cut flowers, what do you recommend spacing? You know, um, my recommendation is very kind of set by my, my buyers. Um, they had one as much smaller heads. So the tighter you plant them, uh, the smaller the heads will be because they're chasing, they're racing each other for the sky for competition. So by the time it gets time to throw that flower out, they burned up a lot of the resources, just trying to chase each other to the sky.
00:43:07
Speaker
And so when I planned out my big fields, um, I usually went through between five and six seeds per foot when I was planting. So, you know, two to three inches per plant. If you want a smaller head, the more space you give them, the bigger they're going to get, depending on, depending on the variety, but that can vary even with your soil moisture and the nutrients out there. I showed that a couple of years ago. Cause some people were saying, see some of the sunflowers I got from you or this, you know, the size of a basketball on it. Well, how did you plant them? Well,
00:43:37
Speaker
They planted them in really rich soil, gave them tons of water and no competition. So I went down to my field in the back where I've had about two acres of, I guess it was two years ago, about two acres of sun-rich orange. And on the one end of the field, the flowers were this big, three to four inches. On the other end of the field, the exact same field, same day length, same flowers, same nutrients, they were inside the paper plates. It was strictly because the low end of the field got more water all the time.
00:44:03
Speaker
So even within the hybrids, you can get a different size based on all those different things. But generally, if you want a smaller head, plan them tighter together.
00:44:11
Speaker
The crappier the soil, the smaller they'll be. I had some sandy soil last year where some of my mix I was growing. Sorry, something just blew across. We had 30 mile an hour winds and something just blew across my deck there. Oh no. But some of my sunflowers, I showed pictures, they were minis. I mean, they're two to three inches across. They look like these cute little pom poms. They're really cool looking. And that was strictly because they're in soil. I'm sorry, soil.
00:44:37
Speaker
Sandy soil and they actually only got about a half a day of Sun too So lack of Sun and crappy soil got these three foot tall, you know, two to three inch blossoms on it Which could be really great to accompany a large sunflower and be the accent Right. I actually had that in my head several years. I wanted to plant two rows next to each other like a taller one Or plant a row and then a week later plant the row right next to it So this one would shade this one out for half a day. That was an experiment. I never got around to it
00:45:06
Speaker
Thank you, Steve, for going over some growing instructions with us. Let's dive back into your story. Tell me, at what point did you decide to go all in on breeding sunflowers? All in from the standpoint of thinking I was going to be doing cup flowers? 2016. 2020 rolls around. Well, 2019, I had talked to
00:45:35
Speaker
Nicole a little bit about it. And I was like, Oh, maybe I'd have a side business doing, you know, seeds or whatever, but not seriously. This is Nicole at Flower Hill Farm, right? Yeah, yeah, Nicole Pitt. And so I it was in my head a little bit. And so in 2020 rolled around a COVID hit and you couldn't get I called up. Was it Johnny's? Yeah, I think I called up Johnny's. Yeah. And I said, um, I needed 500,000 of the sun rich gold or oranges.
00:46:02
Speaker
And he said, well, I could ship you 50,000. I said, when will the rest be coming? And he said, we don't know if we're getting any more. That was, I need those. That's my bread and butter. When I say 500, we would plant 500,000 hoping to harvest between 250 and 300,000. Wow. That's so many. And again, couldn't have done it without my wife, kids, and a couple of guys that worked for me. But when he told me he couldn't get it,
00:46:29
Speaker
I reached out to a ball seed company out of Chicago and I said, I used to have an account with you in 2012. I know I haven't used you for eight years. Can I still buy from you? And she said, she checked and said, well, you can, but we can't get you a discount. I said, that's fine. I just need them. So I think I'd literally pay like $4,000 more, but I need them. That was my bread and butter. And before I hung up the phone, something in my head clicked and I said, do you guys buy seeds? And she said, what do you mean?
00:46:56
Speaker
I said, well, I have this flower I've been kind of working on. I really haven't thought about it selling as a seed too much, but I think it's kind of cool. Can I send pictures to your sales rep or something? And she got me guys name and I sent the pictures and the first guy really wasn't. He's like, yeah, whatever. And that's one thing I thought about flowers early on. They're so subjective.
00:47:15
Speaker
I remember going to one of the first flower shops I went to. Early on, actually, I had seven small flower shops I sold to as well before we picked up all the farmer's markets. But I'd go to one flower shop with a big bucket full of stuff, and she would buy everything. Anna's, well, cool. Went to the next one. She's like, meh. And so going back to the sales rep, he wasn't too turned on about it. And then about a month later, I got a text from him saying, hey, I just had lunch with a guy who was at a different part of our company, and she opened your pictures.
00:47:43
Speaker
he's interested and he was super interested. He came up here and he ran around the farm and took pictures. Super nice guy. I gave them some seeds. They trialed him in California and at that point, they decided that it really wasn't refined enough to be able to do anything with it and because I think he was still thinking cut flowers and excuse me. He he said, well, let me let me see if I can get another chance and they want to say no and so but that was a little disappointing and then
00:48:14
Speaker
I reached out to another company. He gave me the name of a guy at another company since his company was going to do it. And that guy was super interested as well. And I mean, like, I thought, Katie, by the authority to buy everything I can make. And then they sent me the contract and I was reading through the contract and I got to the very end of it. And the amount of money they were going to give me was a pittance. I mean, literally a pittance. And we had talked earlier about social media that
00:48:41
Speaker
If it wasn't for social media, little guys like me, they're only recourse they would have would be go to a big company. And the big companies will say, well, we have advertising. We have distributors. We do all this stuff. You're just giving us the seed. So we're going to do all the rest of the work for you. So we should get 95% or 98% of the money. And this is what we pay you. But you'll get it every year. It's going to come in. You don't have to do anything. OK, when I saw that, I thought, no. At that point, I already had like 12 years into it. And I thought, there's got to be more than this. But I was a little disgruntled.
00:49:11
Speaker
I woke up at two in the morning, which is kind of my time to get up anyway, and I just had this thing in my head, a florette. Why do I know this florette thing? Nicole had mentioned it a couple of times during her YouTube thing, and once when we talked,
00:49:31
Speaker
And I saw another gal, I'm losing her name off top of my head, North Lawn Flower Farm, Danielle, she had mentioned it too.
Partnerships and Business Shifts
00:49:39
Speaker
So two different people had mentioned this. So I Googled Florrath and I saw Erin's story and I read through it and it was kind of, you know, kind of like us. We started, I was a little flower farm and she went, you know, a little bigger and then she got a big account. And then she started down the thing of teaching and writing books. So, you know, that was a different direction, but I saw that she was starting to breed some of her own flowers.
00:49:59
Speaker
So I sent an email at somewhere between two and three in the morning and just said, I had this really cool flower. I spotted one of the best pictures I had at the time. I don't really know how to market her. Could you help me with it? And Angela got back to me right away and said, Nicole, or not Nicole. Erin wants to talk to you. Can you speak with her today? So I spoke with her. She called me up and
00:50:20
Speaker
And we spoke for like two and a half, three hours. And there's this immediate connection. We're both doing something the little guy didn't do. You don't do it on your own. We both had nobody bounce things off of like, we're just guessing. So for the first time since I started doing this, I had somebody else that I could say, what do you think about this? And she had been there. Oh, no, this didn't work or whatever, you know, growing a greenhouse or bumblebees work in greenhouses and honeybees don't saw all these different things we were talking about. So I finally felt like I had somebody that knew, kind of knew what I was going through. And, um,
00:50:49
Speaker
She asked me the question, what do you want to do with it? And I kind of thought, I don't really know. And then I hung up and I thought, well, I think I want her to market it for me. And we sat down and watched Growing Fluoret with my wife and daughter. And I saw it and I said, I think I'd like to go meet these guys and see if, you know, if they would be interested in doing it. And so I flew out there and I met Aaron and the crew. And my whole thing was I was, I had, I told him, my, my plan was I had this brand new shiny plane.
00:51:19
Speaker
And she had a really good runway already set up. So I'm going to give her my new plane to let her sell the flights out of it. Basically, that was my analogy. And so she started growing things for me that summer. And then she reached out to me in July. And she said, we need to talk. And that never ends well when I talk to any of my daughters or my wife. But she just said that her and Eric, her seed guy, were walking around looking at the flowers. And they just said, you know what? You've got something there. You don't need us. You can do this on your own.
00:51:49
Speaker
And at that time I was, I was still all in a couple hours and I said, no, I don't know, do seeds. And she said, no, you can do this. And so she encouraged me to think about it and work on it and stuff. And then, so she trialed them for me the rest of that year.
00:52:03
Speaker
During the rest of that fall, I started to think, well, maybe I could do this myself. So she really gave me the push to do it. And then I just made this decision to, I was going to go all in 2021. And the hard thing at the end of 2020, the hard thing is taking your foot off of third base to go home.
00:52:23
Speaker
because I already had great clients. I can already sell tons and tons of flowers, but I couldn't do both. I kind of tried to that first year. I still had my cup flowers thing going and started doing that. And I finally decided, you got to pull the plug on the one, but it's hard to pull the plug on something where you've got an income coming in already and it's coming in and you built those relationships with those people over 20 years now. And suddenly you're going to cut that off and try this new thing. That was a hard, really, really hard thing to do.
00:52:52
Speaker
Um, cause once you leave those big customers, that void gets, they need flowers. So that void gets filled by somebody else and it's hard to go back. So I made the big jump and, uh, it was scary, but once I did it, I was like, if I'm in now, I, we're just going to make the best of it.
00:53:09
Speaker
I really love that you explored so many options for your seeds, and that people were really kind and honest, telling you that, especially Erin, saying that you have something really special. Because some people, it'd be really easy for them to say, oh, you have something really great. I'm going to capitalize on it. But instead, Erin gave you that push and that encouragement you needed to really launch
00:53:37
Speaker
your own product and make a name for yourself for something that you have poured. We're in 2021 here, correct? Is when you talk to Aaron. So 21 years of growing flowers, especially sunflowers and putting your heart and soul into them and all of this time with your family to be able to be told you have something really special. Now go do it yourself. How did you go do it yourself? A lot of soul searching.
00:54:07
Speaker
And honestly, looking at where I am in my life, I knew even though I had this successful business and successful flower farm, it was the right time. It was the right thing at the right time because again, getting labor and getting people to work was getting harder and harder.
00:54:23
Speaker
So even if I wanted to scale up, it was going to be really hard and just my age, you know, when I'm 58 now, but you know, my forties, I could do this, no problem. But I hurt more than I used to. And do I want to keep doing this? And I thought, well, I'm kind of playing the back nine now, the second half of my life, but it's still within the flowers. Let's do it. So as hard as it was to leave all that stuff, I had Aaron's encouragement. Um, I did.
00:54:50
Speaker
I reached out to a YouTuber in 2020 after Erin told me to go ahead and do this on my own. I reached out to a gal named Jess from Roots of Refuge. She's a homesteader and she had over half a million subscribers on her YouTube channel. I knew she liked sunflowers because I'd seen a couple of her things.
00:55:10
Speaker
And I reached out to her and said, hey, I have these sunflowers. I have this idea. I'd like to, you know, maybe partner with you or something. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about it. She was also very strong in her faith, which is a whole nother story we can get into. But she agreed to have me on her podcast. And we went on and she interviewed me basically to hold, you know, how this whole flower come about. The side part of that is in, excuse me, in 2019, my wife and I had purchased a Christian Ewe summer camp.
00:55:40
Speaker
to prevent it from closing forever. And 2020 hit and we had no campers. And so for the first time in 20 plus years, my wife and I had a mortgage on this place and nothing to pay for it. And the campers are supposed to pay for it. So we found ourselves in this pickle. And there's a whole story about all the stars lining up to buy that thing too. And our daughter's urging us to buy this camp so that it wouldn't close forever.
00:56:03
Speaker
And so we bought it, went really good that first year, now we had no campers. So I went on Justice Podcast and said, hey, I don't have a lot of these seeds. I have enough to do like a thousand packets. And I want to do like a fundraiser thing to help us keep our heads above water, do some maintenance things, just keep this camp alive enough where we can get through this whole thing that's going on and hopefully have a good year the next year. So she agreed, I went in a podcast and I sold, I did them for a hundred hours a packet.
00:56:32
Speaker
But I did, if you bought one this year, I would send you a second packet the next year. It would just show up at your door.
00:56:37
Speaker
When I did that sale and it sold out in a couple of days, I was like, wow, there really is. That was like proof of life. That was the validation that there's people willing to spend that kind of money, two things. One, because of something new and unique. And also that they're willing there to help me out, help us out with this, our ministry, our camp and stuff. So it was a dual thing there. I knew buying the camp was the right thing and I knew going towards the seeds was a good thing. Now, how can I combine all that together? So
00:57:05
Speaker
Fast forward to my first sale. So we did that sale. Fast forward to my first actual sale. I had another fundraiser sale to buy a defibrillator for our camp where I sold some seeds in a hat. And that one went well too. So then it was in April, on April 1st, terrible day to have a sale. That's a joke. At that time I had 7,000 packets of seeds now because I still hadn't scaled up. I still was growing smaller fields. I had tons of seed.
00:57:33
Speaker
But I still hadn't scaled up because I was still doing a couple of our thing the year prior. So 2023 last year, the first year I could really scale up. So I went into the sale with 7,000 packets of seeds. Two days before the sale, Erin and I had done a blog. And so she introduced me on her blog. We did a Q&A and I picked up 10,000 followers overnight. Wow. So I was like, holy cow.
00:57:59
Speaker
Anyway, I had the sale, it opened at noon. I figured that other sale took about a couple of days to sell a thousand packets of seeds, granted they were much higher priced. And I figured it might take a day or so to sell this many, because at that time, that first sale, I had like 6,000 followers. Now that sale had about 40,000. And I sold 7,000 packets of seeds in six minutes.
00:58:23
Speaker
Oh my goodness. I remember that selling out because I went online and you were sold out before I had a chance to buy any. It was six minutes. It was crazy. And there are a lot of people angry because they had stuff in their cart. And then when they went to check out, it wasn't there and they're getting mad at me. And I was like, I, it protects me from having somebody come in and order, you know, 500 packets for your cart, not buy it. And then they're not there for anybody else. So anyway, um, so, and then I, I texted Erin and said, I sold out and she says, do you have any left? I was like,
00:58:52
Speaker
I probably have enough for a thousand more packets because I saved enough seed to put back in the ground. So it was going to cut into what I could plant in the ground. But at the same time, we needed some revenue. So I threw another thousand packets up. But what on Instagram said, I just put a thousand more packets up. If there's anybody out there that still wants them and they sold out in five minutes.
00:59:11
Speaker
Again, that was validation. Then this last year, we really ramped up. We had a big drought and we had some storms. I didn't get as much seed as I wanted to, but I had a pre-order sale in December and that one sold out and then had another sale in January that sold out. Everybody at that time got all the seeds they wanted. I didn't lose the sale because of not having seeds.
00:59:34
Speaker
Amazing. So you're three years into the breeding or selling your, two years, I would say into selling, like, you know, we're actually, the first year was kind of like, we'll try this and it worked. And then last year was the first big sale I had. And then, um, in the spring and then I had the winter and January sale this year. So yeah, so this would be my third actual year of selling seeds and it's, it's going really, really well. And like, say it is farming. I was, I lost probably 60% of my crop last year due to drought.
01:00:04
Speaker
Oh my goodness. I planned it so much that I had enough to cover it.
01:00:08
Speaker
That goes back to the over-planting that you have advised. Climate change is definitely making things more challenging as we're battling everything. I lost over a thousand dahlias last year. I planted my dahlias and it was on Mother's Day and we went from 60 degree temperatures to 100 degree temperatures. I was finishing my planting at 100 degrees. In hindsight, I should have waited till it cooled back down because I think what happened is I put them in the ground, they fried,
01:00:38
Speaker
I also had wireworm and garden symphylens, which most people have never heard of. I've heard more than I ever want to know about them. I finally went into the vegetable industry to learn about garden symphylens. They really only exist in Oregon and Washington. There's a few cases elsewhere, but basically the advice I was given was burn your field, which wasn't an option. So I did a bunch of potato trapping and mustard seed cropping, which anyways, I'm diverging. But
01:01:06
Speaker
You just never know when you're going to have a crop loss and how climate and pests are going to affect things. I'm not going to get into a big thing. For me, I've been doing this 24 years now and I've seen
01:01:22
Speaker
In the early 2000s, I saw a huge drought. 2007, like I say, I lost a lot to 2007. I had just planted, oh geez, it was Annabelle hydrangeas. I lost like 500 of those because we had no rain. I remember that year we had 45 days above 90 and 21 of those were over 95 straight in a row without any rain. And then we've had other years where we had, I mean, over time it'll average out, but it's still all farming.
01:01:51
Speaker
It's nice some years when you have a huge, bountiful spring and you made up so much money that if you haven't fallen, it doesn't hurt as bad. And that's what happened the year that I started doing the big flower murals. You've seen some of those that we've done. Those are amazing. And we had a storm come through 70 mile an hour straight line winds in a matter of a minute, minute and a half. I had 150,000 sunflowers laid flat.
01:02:11
Speaker
and fortunately we sold every single lilac that year, every single peony. There was something I think that might have been the year the sunflower was like the
01:02:22
Speaker
Some flowers were in Super Bowl that year and we were even going onto our next fields and my growers or my buyers were saying, do you have more? And I was like, well, they're not the greatest quality. Oh, I think a hurricane, something happened in the port down in Florida and they couldn't get flowers. And they said, we'll take anything, we have no options. So we sold so much that year by the time that storm hit, as much as it hurt, I'd already done really well. So I was in the mindset.
01:02:48
Speaker
Well, how often you get, and they were 150,000 laying on the ground, but they weren't all blooming at the same time. So for three weeks, we'd have all these sunflowers coming in and we started making these giant flower murals on the ground and put the drone up and taking, you know, a 16 foot pack man or the, um, the giant, the great white shark and all these fun things. We got to do a flower. That was a blast. So even though it was devastating, we had to have fun with it. Those were really fun to see. And you still have those pictures up online for people to see. Yeah.
01:03:14
Speaker
So at what point, or are you still a cut flower farmer? Have you transitioned fully? Last year, the first year I took my coat off a third base and ran home and said, I'm not looking back. And it was really hard to look at all that really nice stuff out there and not cut it and go sell it. I donated a lot last year. There's a contemporary Christian radio station in Twin Cities that
01:03:37
Speaker
once a month, they do the sticker stop thing. And where the people drive by and they put a window clink sticker on their window. And we listened to them in the barn all the time. And I always wanted to go down and help the people doing the, you know, when people are answering phone calls for the donations. And I never had a chance to during my regular, because we were so, my regular cut flower career. So I drove down and offered them. And so we did like three of those. Actually, we just showed up and people were just giving away free sunflowers for the first time since probably
01:04:04
Speaker
was it 2012? Yeah, 2012 was when we stopped doing farmer's markets. And from 2012 until the year before last, all I did was drop flowers off at warehouses and stuff. So I never got to see the end result. The buyers and the people at the warehouses were happy to see them because I was able to fill their POs, but I never got to see that connection with one
Philanthropy through Sunflower Sales
01:04:22
Speaker
-on-one. And so these people would pull up and they'd be getting a window cling sticker on a free t-shirt and I'd give them flowers. And what is this for? So it's just flowers for you to
01:04:30
Speaker
I had that connection I hadn't had in so long, and it was a blast. So after we did the first one, and I just showed up unannounced either, I just asked, I got a bamful, I got 200 bunches of flowers in here, I like to give them to your people coming in, and they're like, what's the catch? I'm like, nothing. I had so much fun. I talked to the station manager and said, can I do this again next month and the month after? And they said, sure. So I've actually had a pretty good relationship with them. And then
01:04:52
Speaker
Um, in our town, our small volunteer fire department, they're always doing fundraisers and all that. So I, uh, I think we did three of them last year and we raised over $10,000 to buy some new fire equipment for like, um, I think. Infrared goggles and things like that. And then, uh, when Winterberry came around the Ilex, um,
01:05:09
Speaker
I was half tempted to go cut it and sell it, but I had other things to do. So I donated that also to the fire department stuff and they raised a bunch of money there to buy some new hoses or something there too. So I'm still growing them and not selling them. I'll probably plant under 30 or 40,000 this year. Same thing, give them away. And we made a couple of flower murals with them last year. I was fortunate enough to be
01:05:30
Speaker
Contacted by CBS Sunday Morning News kind of out. Well, it wasn't kind of was out of the blue and when I first first saw the first email I thought it was somebody fishing so I blew it off. I didn't think it was legit London story shared. I wanted to do a story on a story on CBS Sunday Morning News It was about a five and a half six minute long story on sunflowers in general but the whole last two and a half minutes was all about me and my flower and
01:05:52
Speaker
And I was thinking I was going to get maybe a plug and show my flowers, but they were here for two days filming. And I before or after they left, I actually made them. They didn't know, but I want to make in their big CBS Sunday morning logo, a big 16 foot son. Oh, how cool. And if you watch the show, it's at the very end of the show. That's how they pull out to be sitting below their big son. So, yeah, so I'll still do flower mirrors with them. I'll still do give them away for charity and stuff. But you're primarily growing for seed now.
Future Plans for Sunflower Steve
01:06:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:06:22
Speaker
And so what's next for you? Are you going to continue growing it or are you going to keep it at the size it is now? What are your plans for Sunflower Steve? There are so many things in the pipeline. It's, it's crazy. I was talking to Erin about a month ago and she's has over, she has over 120 news and issues working on it. And she just released all those ones. And I, I honestly, um, I would say I probably have about
01:06:51
Speaker
12 to 15 double flowering ones I'm working on that are really cool. And I say I have another 50 to 60 of the variegated ones. So variegation is a new thing I started working on. Showed up in the exact same field as the double flowering one did. 12 years later, basically.
01:07:11
Speaker
And the amount of things I can do on there is pretty astonishing because when you're breeding for foliage, you know when the plant's this tall, six inches tall, if it's going to have the right foliage or not. So the culling process becomes much quicker. So you can get to market a lot quicker as far as if that's what you're shooting for its foliage. That being said, I'm also shooting for size and some colors on them. So the variegated ones, that's, and I have a purple foliage one.
01:07:39
Speaker
several new things, excuse me, that I'm thinking of. Going down, it's just which battle do I want to choose? I have so many in the pipe, but probably in a concentrate of a dozen different double flowering colors, and then I don't know how many of the other ones.
01:07:56
Speaker
So something else I like to be more involved with our camp my wife and daughters run it and there's several things we want to do there's some things we have to do there and so I found that the seed these flowers are a great way to do a limited sale like a fundraiser sale. So I'm actually releasing some seeds. I'm releasing some seeds this next week as a fundraiser sale to help with some things at our camp so for me it's I can do
01:08:23
Speaker
a sale two years ahead of when I'm gonna do a mass release and people can get involved in they'll be the first ones ever to get them to grow in the country and they can help us out if it's in their heart to help us out with our ministry with our camp it's a it's a win-win situation so I'm seeing a way that I can take this little flower and actually benefit the other part of our life which is so important that's awesome I love that now are you growing some of your sunflowers at the camp
01:08:45
Speaker
You know, it's really crappy, sandy soil up there. Um, I thought we thought about putting a raised bed in up there and we might, um, fact, actually I was talking to Kevin at, um, not by gardening, but maybe get some raised beds from him and maybe have that to be part of the thing the campers do. We could start a bunch of veggies early. So by the time the campers are getting there, they can actually go and harvest their own veggies and bring them in to the staff who can then clean them up and use them in salads and stuff. So, um, that's, that's, I have so many, so many irons on the fire sometimes.
01:09:15
Speaker
Oh, I love that idea. I feel like you have to have some of your sunflowers there though. You could be literally sowing the seeds with those kids, those campers. I love camp. I grew up going to a summer camp and I think what you're doing is just absolutely amazing and pouring your heart into those kids. I really love what you're doing combining sunflower seed, sunflower seeds with your camp.
Sunflower Varieties and Gardening Tips
01:09:42
Speaker
What's the name of your camp?
01:09:44
Speaker
It's www.crosswoods.camp. So it's crosswoods, but it's .camp and .net. So it's, um, it's not denominational. Anybody can come. Um, it's groups from churches, not individuals. Um, but it's, we call it an adventure camp because kids do rock climbing and high ropes course and canoeing and kayaking. And it's in 240 acres in Northern Wisconsin, surrounded by 50,000 acres of national forest.
01:10:06
Speaker
Wow. It sounds really amazing. We'll include a link in today's show notes. One thing I haven't asked you today of all of the varieties that you have or how many varieties, I guess I should say, do you currently have available for people to purchase? Um, right now I just have the mix and what the mix is every new unicorn. That's a, that's a thing about on Instagram. People see the super pretty, the super cool. I'm still working on most of those.
01:10:33
Speaker
But every one of those has come from something I call the mix field. I plant a field every year of everything that's ever grown here. Signal pedal, double pedal, and a semi-double pedal to get them all to mix together, looking for the next new one off. So right now I'm selling what I call the mix. And it's kind of like, I said it's like a Forrest Gump thing. It's like a box of chocolates. You don't know what you're going to get.
01:10:52
Speaker
And some people actually sent me pictures last year and I'm like, oh gosh, I wish I had that one back. But so that's what they're getting right now is the mix. I have something called the Marley mix, which I'm doing a pre-release. It'll actually be before your show airs. But so within the next two years, I expect to have about three to four different ones I'll be able to release. And basically, it's from the mix of extracted certain colors and certain traits. And I'm refining those down so I can sell you something that's probably 90 percent what that is.
01:11:22
Speaker
The same way when Erin sells a lot of her zinnias, you're going to get, hopefully, 95% are going to be like that. You're still going to get some of the genetics from something else come out. At this point, just a mix. I may do another limited release. I had a limited release on a year ago. I had a terrible harvest last year called the Lemon Drop mix. That's where Big Bird comes from, if you've seen Big Bird.
01:11:46
Speaker
And it's a double flowering, lemon-colored, not branching signal. It gets five to six feet tall. It's about five to six inches across, but that one came from the lemon drop field, which is singles, semi-doubles, and doubles, and it's all lemon-colored. That one I may be doing another release on too. So possibly two this next fall. And within the next five years, I hope to have, you know, half a dozen that I'd be able to sell at once. That's really exciting. Of all of the ones that you're working on right now, do you have a favorite?
01:12:16
Speaker
That might be like asking, do you have a favorite child? They're all my favorites just at different times. I did until the variegated one showed up because now I've got some of those really cool double flowering ones with variegated foliage. But the one I really would have loved to have was a unicorn one that didn't repeat. And now I actually have one seed left that Germany this year. I'm hoping her mother comes back. But I would say the one I really like right now the most is Maleficent. It's a really
01:12:45
Speaker
dark burgundy, semi-double and double, single stem. It blooms really quick, 55 to 60 days. The foliage is beautiful and the veining is dark purple. That's probably my favorite right now. Probably because she's so close too. She actually might be able to be released next spring. That's exciting. That's a pretty one. I've seen some of your pictures online of that one.
01:13:06
Speaker
Yeah, and people don't know the process. I have one flower, I collect all the seeds from it. I grow them out the next year, hoping to get those to repeat. If they do, I take the few that do and I start isolating them, putting bags on, hand pollinating them, hoping to... So you take them from one seed to hopefully getting similar traits and then scale up a little bit and then culling out whatever doesn't belong and then scaling up even bigger and still culling out. So it takes roughly seven years
01:13:32
Speaker
i am what is it i think what is actually your number seven issue i don't think should be ready the chocolate ones there on your like your number nine but i had a good exponential growth on that last year too.
01:13:47
Speaker
It's weird. Sometimes that one I thought was going to go to scale quicker. That one took a huge step backwards. That one, I had like so many that showed up in there that were not supposed to be in there. I don't know what happened there. So, um, it's, I'm still learning. I went from cup flowers to being a seed, seed breeder. And, um, it's fun. Every day is, I say, every day is like a treasure hunt. When I walk out there, I'm like,
01:14:06
Speaker
Wow, where did that come from? But I would have to say in Maleficent or this other one they had that was a branching, variegated, dark burgundy one, had 18 flowers on it. It looks like you just splashed it with whitewashed paint all over. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. It's just gorgeous.
01:14:26
Speaker
So throughout our conversation, you were mentioning that you initially were trying to breed for cut flowers. Your sunflowers that are available now, are they more of a garden flower or are they intended to be a cut flower? You know, that's a good question. When I showed them to Erin first, she had opened my eyes up that
01:14:49
Speaker
90% of her customers are gardeners. They're just growing them for their own enjoyment. And that literally never dawned on me. As stupid as that sounds, I'd never dawned on me. People are just growing, never let them sit there. Because that's not how I made a living. So I would say at this point, there's still mostly a garden type flower. Strictly from the fact they have a lot of pollen, the singles especially. Now when you get to the double flowering ones, the pollen so far down in there, they don't shed at all. So they can be used for both.
01:15:17
Speaker
They haven't been bred specifically for that. Some of the darker ones, for some reason, as they start to get bigger, they start to get heavier. So I've said, if you're going to put them in a bouquet, just give it support of things around it. But the semi doubles and the doubles can be used in bouquets. For yourself and your host, it doesn't matter. If somebody gets worried about getting pollen on their table and stuff, they'll have to decide, is that worth putting in a bouquet for somebody to buy or at least educating about that?
01:15:46
Speaker
to your question at this point, mostly for the gardener. I have had a lot of cup flower growers buy them last year and said they used a lot of them and it didn't bother me. The colors are phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, they kind of go all the way. And even some of the single ones sometimes don't end up much pollen. So
01:16:03
Speaker
I was growing for the garden thing, but as I'm refining like a Marley one, I'm trying to get all the singles out of there. I was going to grow a whole single line of those colors. So I'm trying to cull that field down where it only has semi-doubles and doubles in it. So maybe three years from now, that'll be like 90% of people will be buying for a cut flower versus 10% for the garden flower. So that's, I almost started to go two different ways. I haven't, the mix is for everybody. And then I'll have a single pet, I'll have a single petaled one, which won't be pollen. So before a gardener and I'm a double petaled one, there'll be more for a couple of our growers.
01:16:33
Speaker
So when you talk about the pollen, it's not that it's going to affect the vase life, it's more of a matter of it dropping the pollen on someone's table if they use it as a cut flower. Right, shedding, yep.
01:16:45
Speaker
Perfect. Thank you for answering that for me. I was wondering because like I know with breeding Dahlias single flowers typically don't have the same face life as a double. So it's a less desirable trait, not because it doesn't look great out in the garden, but because it's not going to last in the face. So that's good to know. Actually, you know, that may be that I never used them for like that. I just assume that people don't want to get pollen. And so I actually have never tested that. That being said, um, last year, uh, Laura from
01:17:16
Speaker
excuse me, garden dancer, she grew some and she, she didn't show them, but she said they sat on her porch and like a hundred, you guys must have had crazy hot weather last year, but we did. She, she said they, they sat on her porch in a base for five days and a hundred plus weather and they still look great. The foley double ones. Uh, and that's what you actually see out in the field because your regular sunflower, you start to see the center fill out on it and the pedals on the side start to, well, these pedals are so short and they, they'll look good in the field for almost three weeks. So.
01:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I think they probably would have a longer looking base life. They actually may be dead down below. You could probably squeeze. But the ones I did sell, one year I actually did sell a couple hundred bunches to my wholesale or he wanted as many as I could get. That's what I was thinking, cut flowers. But I think the double petal ones, as far as what people told me, they hold up really well.
01:18:06
Speaker
Excellent. Thank you. Well, wow. We have covered so much in this conversation. We're just getting started. And we're just getting started. I guess that means that what I need to do is invite you back on the show to be a guest again. We would love to have you come back and chat more things, sunflowers with us.
01:18:24
Speaker
and especially give us an update on your breeding perhaps next year before your next release. You could come give us a sneak peek. Yeah. If I do decide to release something early, if something looks like I'm going to have a good harvest, maybe I'll come back on and so I can give your viewers or your listeners a heads up. Yeah, we would love that. We'd love to have you back. Before we say goodbye today, I do have two more questions for you. The first question is an important one. For those who are not already following you, how can they find you?
01:18:54
Speaker
I am on Instagram and it's son underscore flower underscore Steve.
01:19:00
Speaker
Um, they can find me on there or my website is www.someflowersteveseedco.com. Excellent. Thank you. We'll include links to both of those in today's show notes. And the last question I have for you. You got me scared. What parting, don't be scared. What parting advice would you give to our listeners today? Um,
01:19:29
Speaker
I would say if it's a cut flower grower, keep it simple at first. If you're going to try a bunch of different varieties, try a smaller amount of them to find out what works in your zone.
01:19:43
Speaker
because something that works two hours from you might not work for me. So that was something I told Nicole from the get-go. Try not to grow everything. Grow a certain amount of things that are going to work for you and do a good job at it. The other thing, again, for a couple of our growers is put some perennials in.
01:20:01
Speaker
But set yourself apart from your competition. Maybe that maybe that's it. Just try to look for something that's different than your competition, whether it's growing something differently or just doing marketing something differently. Setting yourself apart from other people is the key there. Now, if it's just a garden grower.
01:20:19
Speaker
carte blanche, do whatever you want. But I would say the best advice, because now that my seeds are shipped all over, well, it's supposed to only be shipped over the country and in Canada, but I actually got pictures from some seeds overseas in Australian places. No idea how they got there. No idea how they got there. But I would say as far as, excuse me, being a gardener and, sorry, I totally lost my train of thought. Could you edit this? Yeah. Oh, darn it. Where is it going?
01:20:51
Speaker
I shouldn't have gone, oh, I got it. So the advice I would give now that my seeds are in all these different places is my zone, even here is different than somebody has a saving zone 100 miles from me. Go to your local garden center or find your local master gardeners group or at the county fair. There's always people competing with their flowers at the county fair. Find somebody in your climate or your microclimate that does well there and ask them questions because
01:21:15
Speaker
That's what I found for myself when I was having failures and successes. I met a gentleman who actually worked for the University of Minnesota and the agricultural thing and he was very helpful with me. So find somebody locally to find out what does the best in your areas and how, why it does the best in your areas to do it. So that would be my advice to our gardeners, you know, before you go to the time and energy and planting these things and then fail, get some information about it first. So somebody's already done it there.
01:21:43
Speaker
That's great advice. Well, thank you so much. So if you're a flower farmer, focus on doing one or two or a couple things really well. And if you're a backyard gardener, I think that same principle could apply to them also. But if they're getting started and don't know what does well in their growing zone, find someone, find that support in your area. Don't look on social media to someone in a different growing zone, but find someone in your backyard.
01:22:10
Speaker
that can help you grow that backyard bouquet. So thank you, Steve. It's been such a delight, and we'll chat with you again soon. Thank you. Great to meet you. Good luck this year.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:22:19
Speaker
You too. Thank you. Thank you, Flower Friends, for joining us on another episode of the Backyard Bouquet. I hope you've enjoyed the inspiring stories and valuable gardening insights we've shared today. Whether you're cultivating your own backyard blooms or supporting your local flower farmer,
01:22:38
Speaker
you're contributing to the local flower movement, and we're so happy to have you growing with us.
01:22:43
Speaker
If you'd like to stay connected and continue this blossoming journey with local flowers, don't forget to subscribe to the Backyard Bouquet podcast. I'd be so grateful if you would take a moment to leave us a review of this episode. And finally, please share this episode with your garden friends. Until next time, keep growing, keep blooming, and remember that every bouquet starts right here in the backyard.