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Ep. 62: Inside a Family-Run Wedding Flower Farm: How Jennifer Joray Grows Cut Flowers for 40+ Weddings a Season
1.9k Plays8 days ago
What does it take to grow cut flowers for over 40 weddings a season—while running a farm as a family of four?
In Part 2 of our conversation, Jennifer Joray of Eastern River Farm returns to share the details of how her family built a thriving, regenerative flower business in Maine. From crop planning to bouquet-making, and from packing systems to building in family rest, Jennifer walks us through what it really takes to succeed in growing cut flowers for weddings.
You’ll hear:
🌸 How they scaled from 8 to 65 weddings—and why they chose to scale back
💐 The top crops they rely on to meet wedding demand (think delphinium, mountain mint, lisianthus & more)
🪴 How they grow nearly everything from seed—including delphinium!
🧑🤝🧑 Their entire family’s role in floral design, prep, and packing
🌱 What regenerative flower farming means to them—and why protecting family rhythms is part of it
Whether you’re dreaming of your own flower farm or looking to refine your wedding offerings, this episode is packed with inspiration, practical systems, and heartfelt wisdom.
🎧 Missed Part 1? Listen to Ep. 61: Jennifer Joray of Eastern River Farm on Flower Farming, Lyme Disease, & Finding Healing Through Nature
Connect with Jennifer Joray:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/easternriverfarm/
- Website: https://easternriverfarm.com
Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/thefloweringfarmhousenewsletter
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Recap
00:00:56
Jen Joray
Thank you.
00:00:57
Jennifer Gulizia
Hi, flower friends, and welcome back to the Backyard Bouquet podcast. Today, I'm joined once again by Jennifer Joray of Eastern River Farm for part two of our conversation.
00:01:10
Jennifer Gulizia
And if you caught the first episode, you know why we needed more time. In our last chat, we took an unexpected but important detour into ticks, Lyme disease, and the natural herbal path that Jennifer's family has taken towards healing.
00:01:25
Jennifer Gulizia
It was personal, eyeopening and incredibly valuable. But today we're getting back to the blooms.
Shift to Flower Farming
00:01:31
Jennifer Gulizia
We're diving into the world of flower farming, the growth, the weddings, the lessons, and the beauty that Jennifer and her family cultivate on their 20 acre farm in Maine.
00:01:42
Jennifer Gulizia
From building a business rooted in resilience to watching her daughters fall in love with the land. Jennifer's story is one of slow growth, hard work, and the magic of choosing a life in full bloom.
00:01:54
Jennifer Gulizia
So let's pick off where we left off last time. And Jennifer, welcome back to the show.
00:01:59
Jen Joray
Thank you so much, Jennifer. You're just an artist with your words. That was beautiful.
00:02:04
Jennifer Gulizia
and Thank you. Well, thanks for coming back to chat part two, because I know this is such a busy time of year for all of us.
00:02:12
Jen Joray
Yes.
00:02:12
Jennifer Gulizia
So let's dive into your farm. We talked last time about finding your farm, leaving city life. What inspired you to add cut flowers to your flower farm?
00:02:24
Jennifer Gulizia
or to your farm, I should say.
00:02:25
Jen Joray
Oh. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So I think before we bought the place, we had decided flowers would be it, but it was like a long road. I mean, we looked into
Business Decisions and Challenges
00:02:36
Jen Joray
so many different things, meat, animals, food.
00:02:41
Jen Joray
We did hire somebody for two years out here in Maine. He's a ah ah farm CFO, well known in the area, well known throughout the state. A lot of the people we had talked with about loans said, oh, if you get his backing, you're all set. Like, so he seemed like the big dude that we had to really talk to.
00:02:57
Jen Joray
We worked with him for a couple of years. And he made it sound like veg was saturated in Maine. He used those exact words with us. So we thought, all right, well, maybe that's not the best place to to jump in. We don't want market push. we want to be We want to be pulled into markets and feel like there's so much demand we can't keep up. So...
00:03:16
Jen Joray
That's what kind of erased the veg off the list. And then with meat, we decided the bottleneck was processing as it is in many states. We wanted local processor. We didn't necessarily want a lot of hassle with selling over state lines. And because we were currently living in Massachusetts before we moved to Maine, we knew that we would want to sell our our product to some of our community in Massachusetts. So we just decided...
00:03:42
Jen Joray
that meat might be too challenging at this time in our lives because of the way it was set up in the state of Maine. So I'm glad that we didn't start with meat. And then we just, you know, we got the place after three years of searching and we we grew a small flower crop in our basement that we brought up to the farm.
00:04:01
Jen Joray
And it did so well, even with us not living there that first two years. just like did that Hail Mary. I put everything in the ground. My family was in the car. The engine was running. I'm getting yelled at to hurry up because we got beat traffic back to Massachusetts.
Early Success in Flower Farming
00:04:15
Jen Joray
And I was like straddling, you know, one of seven rows trying to throw in the last of the celosia or whatever. And we didn't even water it in. i mean, looking back, it was kind of crazy. It's just I just threw it in and we left for the week.
00:04:29
Jen Joray
But every weekend we would come back, things were growing and looking great. There was no pest pressure because it was the very first year. I think that's pretty typical. Like pests haven't seen that you've started growing in your first year. and Of course they're around, but there wasn't like a magnet to any one crop. So everything did well, even a full row of stock. I grew like hundreds and hundreds of stock plants in all colors.
00:04:53
Jen Joray
And it was the best season we had for stock that first year because there were no flea beetles yet. So like I just had all these gorgeous flowers. And we called some cold called some designers in the area and we're like, come on over. We're considering a business. We want you to your input.
00:05:10
Jen Joray
Come look at what we've done and tell us what you need kind of thing. And that seemed like the right fit. Once we started talking with people, they're like, oh, we need this. We we need these things here. Can you do more of this?
00:05:23
Jen Joray
And so it just rolled from there. and And that's how we decided on flowers kind of. There was a lot of research. It wasn't just on a whim. But like, they inspire me, they bring me joy and stress relief.
00:05:36
Jen Joray
And I see that in other people. So it was kind of a no brainer, you know.
00:05:42
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that. I love that you explored all of your options and that you sought outside advice. You turned to the experts and you asked the floral designers in the area.
00:05:54
Jennifer Gulizia
You didn't just go in and say, I'm going to start a flower farm and create a demand. You did your research and found that there was a demand for what you were growing.
00:06:00
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:06:02
Jen Joray
Yeah. And I should add, like the financial piece, of course, is huge and it's always bubbling under the surface of any business.
00:06:03
Jennifer Gulizia
right.
00:06:09
Jen Joray
And so it wasn't like just like I said, it wasn't on a whim that
Financial Strategies and Market Exploration
00:06:13
Jen Joray
we decided flowers. We looked at the data and the research. We looked at the pricing. We bought a supermarket, a few supermarket bouquets and took them apart and thought about from the grocery angle specifically, like one step above wholesale.
00:06:29
Jen Joray
What could we do to make this work? And it became... obvious quickly after talking with local farmers in maine that we're not in flowers that we should stay in flowers we got responses from our our meat people like you know we would buy regenerative pastured meats and stuff from local local farms and every time they asked oh what are you what are you growing and we said flowers like unanimously they would go, oh, you admit you're making a good move.
00:06:58
Jen Joray
Oh, we wish we'd done that. Oh, that's a better choice than, you know, what we're doing kind of thing. So we surmised by people's reactions too, like, oh, this is the thing to be in.
00:07:10
Jen Joray
But the the price per stem, the price per square foot of growing space is highest with flowers and with any other crop as far as I know.
00:07:19
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes, that's as far as I know too.
00:07:21
Jen Joray
Yeah, so that's another huge reason we decided to just give it a serious go.
00:07:27
Jennifer Gulizia
Now, Dave Dowling was on the podcast recently and he said, you don't make a living growing flowers. You make a living selling flowers. So when we talk about them being profitable, they're only profitable if we're actually selling them.
00:07:36
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:07:41
Jennifer Gulizia
So can you tell us where are you selling your flowers?
00:07:42
Jen Joray
yeah
00:07:45
Jennifer Gulizia
Do you have outlets for them?
00:07:45
Jen Joray
Okay, yes we do. So the first couple years we tried all types of things, local designers, we had a ah ah really nice verbal, I might say, which freaked me out, verbal contract, nothing written from a big grocery chain. Well, they're probably considered small, but they have over 85 stores now So to me, that's big.
00:08:07
Jennifer Gulizia
That is big.
00:08:07
Jen Joray
Grocery, yeah, it it seems big on the East Coast here. And the floral buyer who'd been in business over 50 years with that company, it's a family-owned company. They do not have stockholders.
00:08:18
Jen Joray
They're one of the last entities in the US s like that. like They own all the
Transition to Wedding Flowers
00:08:23
Jen Joray
build the all the places that they're in, all the strip malls that they're a part of. Those other businesses like the cell phone companies, the paper stores, they pay rent to this supermarket, which is rare.
00:08:36
Jen Joray
That's not the way it works across the country. Like most companies have to answer to a board. They have stockholders. This company had a lot has a lot of freedom to pay you what you're worth.
00:08:50
Jen Joray
And so with a verbal contract, they said to us they wanted 2,000 bouquets a week delivered.
00:08:57
Jennifer Gulizia
whoa
00:08:58
Jen Joray
Yeah, that was our second going into our second season. Like we didn't really know how to grow at scale yet. And so we started, but we started smaller than that at 250 a week, which still seemed huge to a brand new grower.
00:09:11
Jen Joray
We set up for that. Our cooler, turns out, wasn't big enough. Our staff wasn't big enough. The amount of flowers we grew weren't enough. So we did pursue from like, if you're looking at price per stem, we pursued from the wholesale.
00:09:26
Jen Joray
i had called several of the Boston wholesalers because our main one had just was going out of business the year we were farming. it was up in Bangor and like main designers are still getting their stems from down in Fall River, Mass.
00:09:40
Jen Joray
So they basically... we went through that chain from like the lowest value up to the weddings. And in our second year, we were doing that grocery account, but we still realized to scale up, we're going to need another cooler.
00:09:56
Jen Joray
We're going to need to use both of our upper level fields. We're going to need more staff. And I said, this is not meant to be hurtful in any way, but that I didn't want to be a Colombian flower farm.
00:10:07
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:10:10
Jen Joray
Because the work felt like I was going to be outside in the full sun the entire day. i was going to be working before the sun up. I was going to be in the barn working when the sun went down. Like it was volume. It's a volume game at those lower price per stems, wholesale and grocery.
00:10:28
Jen Joray
So quickly in that second season, I realized, why don't we go the other end and look at the highest value for our blooms? So we work fewer hours, have a higher quality product, and salt for that highest value. So we did try weddings that second season, and we had about 10 booked.
00:10:49
Jen Joray
And I think about eight came through, which was good.
Balancing Wedding Business and Family Life
00:10:52
Jen Joray
It's like the COVID thing was happening.
00:10:54
Jennifer Gulizia
a
00:10:55
Jen Joray
So not everybody had their weddings, but we did about eight out of that 10, and the others just canceled. they As far as we know, they never rescheduled, at least not with us. Hopefully they got married. And then the following season, we did 45 weddings.
00:11:08
Jennifer Gulizia
wow
00:11:10
Jen Joray
That was a huge jump. We were mostly doing a carte. We did offer some full service. And the following season, which was our fourth year, we did 65 weddings.
00:11:21
Jen Joray
And after that, that was so, so much. We scaled back again to more like the 45 zone. And then in the 30-ish zone last year, and then now we're to zone, we're year seven.
00:11:36
Jen Joray
So we're in again, like, it depends on how much we're potentially going to make for the season because our numbers drive, like our profits drive quantity of weddings. So I think we're actually at like the 40 wedding mark about.
00:11:52
Jen Joray
And it's going to be another really busy season because at this point we're also incorporating full service. But most are most are still all a la carte.
00:12:01
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that you've tried multiple avenues to figure out what works for your lifestyle and your business.
00:12:02
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:12:09
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:12:11
Jennifer Gulizia
It's great that you started with the wholesale and you quickly realized that you didn't want to be doing the volume. I mean, that's a tremendous amount of work and takes up a tremendous amount of space and you're making substantially less when you go that route versus doing a full service wedding. So you're more of a farmer florist these days. Is that correct?
00:12:35
Jen Joray
Absolutely. Yeah, I'd say from that second season on, it just developed into we do weddings. I mean, we still we try to see us say one year, my husband didn't want to, but I wanted to it was really nice to learn about the local community. There's such a desire to like People stop here all the time. They want to be on the farm. They want the flowers. like Right before you and I talked today, I delivered a condolence bouquet because I normally wouldn't do that, but the guy was from New Jersey and his his friend's husband had just passed and she was literally five minutes down the road.
00:12:59
Jennifer Gulizia
Mm-hmm.
00:13:08
Jen Joray
so Much to my family's chagrin with our workflow, I went ahead and delivered that. I made that quickly and delivered that. like The community is important to us, but we we decided right away with that first year of CSA, it's not for us.
00:13:24
Jen Joray
And so, yeah, we were definitely like, From the outside perspective, we are only a wedding farm. We grow everything we style with. We use no harmful chemicals. That's our thing.
00:13:35
Jen Joray
But like behind the scenes, we're trying to develop that other medicinal herb business. We're studying to be herbalists, working with our naturopath and growing our own food. So there's a lot going on on the farm.
00:13:51
Jen Joray
But the business perspective is just weddings. That's what we do.
00:13:55
Jennifer Gulizia
So you really niched down and found your specialty of being wedding flowers.
00:13:56
Jen Joray
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:14:02
Jennifer Gulizia
You said that you started in new year two of doing that.
00:14:05
Jen Joray
yeah
00:14:06
Jennifer Gulizia
Having not had any experience in farming, how did you get into the wedding business? Because it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to put together a wedding bouquet and do full service weddings.
00:14:20
Jennifer Gulizia
How did you learn how to do that?
00:14:22
Jen Joray
Well, I taught myself and I would be lying if I if I didn't share that I was so scared the first two seasons. like, I don't know how to do this. I have to figure out to make a boutonniere. Oh, my God. How do you wrap a boutonniere? Like, but my husband was in the military. He was in the Navy.
00:14:38
Jen Joray
And so he is fabulous with his fingers and knots. So he does this beautiful, we use 100% silk quarter inch ribbon for our boutonnieres. And he does this hidden one where he's, it's tightly wrapped and you don't see any tie, any knot or anything.
00:14:53
Jen Joray
He just goes and does it. He sets his little station, wraps all the boutonnieres and we make them. So I learned by a few YouTube videos, but there really wasn't anything great and nothing that he spoke to me.
00:15:06
Jen Joray
So I took the basics that I found online and I just played with it. I remember it was my third year of weddings. I know people will laugh at this. And I was like, oh my God, there's another way to make a bouquet besides the European spiral.
00:15:21
Jen Joray
There's a woven thing. So I practiced a lot with my loose hands and trying to like feed in the stems in more of a woven pattern. So where the stems support each other and trying to get them all going in the same direction was tricky at first.
00:15:38
Jen Joray
But I just, i had to master it that season because I already had so many wedding bouquets that I was making. I mean, hundreds in a season because people had, you know, 12 to 20 bridesmaids.
00:15:49
Jen Joray
that's That's a little high, but I think that is what happened that that third season I was trying this woven bouquet. So I was doing the European spiral for the bridesmaids and this beautiful like woven brattle bouquet for the bride. And I guess I still am learning every single wedding.
00:16:06
Jen Joray
I just try to be fast and make it look as beautiful as I can. I'm always too big. i always make them too big.
00:16:15
Jennifer Gulizia
I do too.
00:16:17
Jen Joray
You know, you just, you learn. I always have things too high. My husband's like, bring that piece down. Take those things out. but You know.
00:16:26
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that your husband's involved with this. Is he working on the farm full time or
00:16:28
Jen Joray
Yeah.
Pricing Strategy and Learning Curve
00:16:30
Jennifer Gulizia
do you both still have your off farm jobs?
00:16:33
Jen Joray
Well, okay, this is kind of the secret. I feel like I'm spilling the beans that i don't ever like don't ever share it because I know your community is flower growers and flowers plant lovers and probably a lot of wedding stylists.
00:16:36
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh. you
00:16:45
Jen Joray
Okay, so these are the beans. My youngest, Chloe, was nine when she started doing all our boutonnieres.
00:16:52
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh,
00:16:53
Jen Joray
So I'm not about to tell all the clients that my nine-year-old is making their $39 boutonnieres for their wedding, right?
00:17:00
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that.
00:17:00
Jen Joray
Like you don't share that, but she was so good. She was better than me. She's like, mom, that piece is too high or that piece isn't the right color. You hadn't turned this properly. And she would like zhuzh it for me and then give it back to me. And I was like, you make one, you try.
00:17:17
Jen Joray
So she wasn't doing 100% to them at that age, but a lot. And she loved it. So we're like, okay. It became a hangout in the barn with all of us and in the family. And then it became like, well, these are the jobs people are really good at.
00:17:32
Jen Joray
And so, yes, they're all full-time farm. The girls are homeschooled at 16 and almost 13 now. And Scott dumped his job that, what year did he quit?
00:17:44
Jen Joray
I think it was the second year of the farm. I was supposed to be a full-time farm and he was going to drive back and forth to Massachusetts. But it was like, it was so far. I think some evenings were four-hour trips home.
00:17:58
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh my gosh.
00:17:59
Jen Joray
And then, you know, you wake up and do it again. It's like a two, two and a half hour ride on the way there. And then sometimes a four hour ride or more on the way home. And he did that from like April to June.
00:18:11
Jen Joray
And then we swapped. I said, I love teaching music still. I'll i'll be happy to get a job here that's close. I can like seed after work. I can do weddings at my lunch breaks. And I still do that.
00:18:25
Jen Joray
So I've been doing... a crazy amount of work in both places. Like I'm in charge of a lot at school where I still teach music for K to eight, pre-K to eight, but then I do a crazy amount of stuff with like client communications and ordering and farm planning.
00:18:45
Jen Joray
on my prep times at work. Somehow I saw get it all done. it It is a lot and I'm sure there'll be a tipping point where I realize I'm more valuable at at the farm than I am at school, but I'm in that weird place right now where i'm I'm getting a lot done in both places and it's still at a high level so I feel fulfilled.
00:19:04
Jen Joray
I'm useful in both places. ah ah We all want to be useful and feel like we're making an impact. But if it becomes a different shift of balance, then I'm willing to to be here. But at this point, the three of them are full time. So so like a typical styling evening, it looks like this. We're all in the 1840s barn.
00:19:24
Jen Joray
The 80s music is on.
00:19:26
Jennifer Gulizia
Love it.
00:19:28
Jen Joray
We're all drinking juice or you know. whatever some of us might have a beer now and then not so much me i don't really drink I should know it's really relaxed and fun we're singing at the top of our lungs the girls and I are really silly and we love to say make up words to songs so if the music's not on we're making up our own songs and we're We're just like grabbing stems. And usually we do our own kind of, we we'll work together on centerpieces where one of us will be doing the greens, structural elements. One of us will be doing like some of the big focals and then another one will be filling in some filler flowers.
00:20:07
Jen Joray
Then that greens person will switch
Regenerative Farming and Crop Planning
00:20:08
Jen Joray
to the airy accents. Like it's just a really nice flow because we're all family and there's not really any arguing. It's just like, Can I have that stem? No, you have that stem. That'll be perfect for your centerpiece. I'll go grab this one.
00:20:23
Jen Joray
Like it just works. And then we'll be like singing at the top of our lungs and being silly. And Scott's wrapping the bridal bouquet or he preps. Maybe this will be a question later on. So I won't get into our flow of the workstation, but he preps all the boxes before we style.
00:20:41
Jennifer Gulizia
Okay.
00:20:41
Jen Joray
so he's very busy in his packing station, getting everything ready. And that's how it is.
00:20:49
Jennifer Gulizia
I love it that it's a family affair and there's so much fun. i mean, I just, I'm smiling listening because you can tell that you guys are loving what you're doing and you're having fun together. Is there any outside help or is it just the four of you running the farm?
00:21:04
Jen Joray
So we have a part-time seasonal employee who does a lot of the planting with us now because, you know, you got to get plants in fast when the weather turns. So that's where I feel he's super, super useful.
00:21:13
Jennifer Gulizia
Yeah.
00:21:16
Jen Joray
And this is his fifth season with us. He just got his college degree in creative writing, though, and he might go teach and in Germany. He might go do something else next year. So he's kind of given us the heads up. not He's not sure.
00:21:30
Jen Joray
what it's going to be like. So I'm excited for him and we're just going to enjoy this season and see where things go. But he's he's helpful in the field. He does not like styling.
00:21:41
Jen Joray
We've tried that years ago. He'll do it if he has to, if we're really pressed for time and we need a little help, he he'll strip things. But our workflow is better with just the four of us, we've learned.
00:21:55
Jen Joray
We're more efficient, so therefore we make more money. We can take more weddings and have a good time with the flow, just the four of us.
00:22:04
Jennifer Gulizia
Let's talk about that efficiency. Do each of you have your own roles on the farm or how does that work?
00:22:10
Jen Joray
Yes, yes, it's it's been interesting, and that's one of my... Happiest times when I think about what we've built over the last seven seasons is just having watched each of us take like the have the connections to different parts of the farm and the things that we we love just watching people kind of find what excites them and the jobs that they that speak to them the most.
00:22:37
Jen Joray
So. We tried to make a list before we started the business of what each of us would do, and the girls were too young to be included in that list at that point. And looking back at the list, it's almost exactly what we thought. I'm the communicator with any clients. I do the sales piece, which is a surprise to me.
00:22:55
Jen Joray
I thought that was going to be my husband, but I'm better with the sales. I just, I sell a lot of flowers. Because I'm passionate and it's easy for me. It still makes me laugh how how easily that comes to me because I never thought of myself that way. I'm so, like, I don't know, shy about everything else in my life. Like, I would never say, oh, I'm such a great flute player, but I am.
00:23:20
Jen Joray
But I don't talk about that. But yet with the flowers, it's so easy to sell them. So that became my role. And I'm also a terrible, terrible planner and organizer, yet that's my role.
00:23:35
Jen Joray
So i guess my husband tells me all the time, but you... you put your heart and soul into it so it comes out great. I have all these excel files, I track data, I and don't feel like I'm good at that piece but the three of them remind me I drive the success on the farm and I tell them you drive the success, you're physically doing the labor most of it but they're like we couldn't do that without you selling the flowers and and giving us the field plan And they remind me I know everything about every flower. I know exactly how they're supposed to come out when they start germinating. And it's like a baby, right? It's a lot like taking care of a baby.
00:24:13
Jen Joray
I feel like I just connect with how to grow the the young plants. And then when they get older, Scott's better at the field care and the big picture. He's really good at big picture.
00:24:25
Jen Joray
So our roles are like he's the ma he wants to be the maintenance guy in the long run. But right now he's doing a lot of jobs. Greenhouse manager. farm maintenance organizer extraordinaire he's building all of the things we need he just built another beautiful flower processing bench on rolling casters that lock which has space for mason jars they're perfectly spaced apart because he knows all the flowers we put in them how much space they need he's got like a mag and it's so beautiful right
00:24:54
Jennifer Gulizia
Amazing.
00:24:57
Jen Joray
So, like, he just sneaked a couple days of time here and there and put that together with, like, a giant trash barrel section and a a hole cut out of the top of the wood and the stem chopper nearby so we can transition from, like, tulip bouquets and early spring bouquets, which we do.
00:25:10
Jennifer Gulizia
oh
00:25:15
Jen Joray
For my friends at work, we sell, like, 30 Mother's Day bouquets and then another 20 at our local store. it's It's not big volume, but he made that – stem chopper and that waste barrel so we can do the odd bouquet without stressing about finding the snips and making them all even. like Those are the things he does. he makes He looks at the big picture and makes all of our lives easier.
00:25:40
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that.
00:25:41
Jen Joray
Yeah, so we do have jobs and my girls are still young. My oldest, we're hoping she can kind
Family Involvement and Work-Life Balance
00:25:46
Jen Joray
of take over the bridesmaids bouquets, which will speed up wedding prep so fast, so much. While I do the bridal, my youngest loves the boutonnieres, the wrist corsages. She helps me a lot with those.
00:26:00
Jen Joray
I still do the flower crowns. The three of us girls do the statement pieces and the and all the centerpieces. And my husband's pretty busy doing all the prep and packing.
00:26:12
Jen Joray
We have a tape system where we'll do like three to five weddings on a weekend, which is a lot.
00:26:18
Jennifer Gulizia
wow
00:26:22
Jen Joray
So he's the organizer. We have three giant whiteboards in the barn. One is for harvest, one's for things going out, and one's like a repetition of our calendar, which we have in another place as well.
00:26:33
Jen Joray
it It sounds like a bit overkill, but it really helps with the flow. So he'll make sure all the boxes are ready. Like while we're hes doing centerpiece styling, he'll be cleaning out spots in the cooler where this specific client's wedding is going to go. And that's going to be the blue tape.
00:26:48
Jen Joray
All the boxes get blue tape, a little one inch piece of blue tape with the last name on that on that box or on that tape. Then like he has another section in the cooler for the second wedding. And that's going to be the yellow tape.
00:27:03
Jen Joray
So it takes like a couple hours to to prep the boxes. We use a standardized system. Do you want me talk about this system?
00:27:12
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes, please.
00:27:13
Jen Joray
Okay, cool. We decided years ago not to use our like recycled boxes, which we have a whole barn level of recycled boxes. I'm sure that's a fire hazard. We've recently gutted it ah and and taken a lot out, just keeping the ones we really use and need.
00:27:28
Jen Joray
So we've decided to purchase, spend a little money on standardized packing. So we use Uline. They're more expensive. But if you need something, and we are not being paid by Uline to say this, they will deliver like literally the next day.
00:27:46
Jennifer Gulizia
Isn't it amazing?
00:27:46
Jen Joray
And you're paying. It's so helpful. Yes. Yes. So we try to have like one big order ah season. So we don't like one one big order a year.
00:27:56
Jen Joray
so we're not paying tons and tons on shipping.
00:27:59
Jen Joray
But like we've gotten our white harvest buckets from them in various sizes. Sometimes we get our five gallon buckets for not just the animals and the the milk I buy, but also our larger stems like snaps and delphinium and stuff.
00:28:12
Jen Joray
Not delphinium. that's That's a whole other challenge, harvesting delphinium. But like the tall flowers, you know, celosia and stuff. And our boxes. So for our our packing system is all standardized. We buy specific U-line sizes that fit with our glassware that we also remain consistent with. We use like a four-inch cylinder for our full gardens, a four-inch taper for our lush gardens, a three-inch cylinder for our petite posies.
00:28:41
Jen Joray
A nine inch dollar tree cylinder for all bouquets. The stems don't hit the bottom. I don't put anything else in them. They just kind of float gently on the surface and it's fine because that is an amazing price point. It's a dollar.
00:28:56
Jennifer Gulizia
Right.
00:28:57
Jen Joray
I can't find a cheaper, a less expensive cylinder. There are shorter ones I'd prefer to use, but they're like two and a half times the price or more. per piece So we go through 200 those in a season. I'm not going to buy, I'm not going to triple that cost to us.
00:29:13
Jennifer Gulizia
right
00:29:14
Jen Joray
So that works great. And then his boxes, we buy craft paper, we no longer use recycled paper and junky stuff because like our brand is built on beauty, right?
00:29:27
Jen Joray
This was Scott's thing early on. He said, we're selling beauty. I'm not going to use a recycled box to deliver a but a bridal bouquet. So all our boxes are brand new, clean. We've got a beautiful farm sticker that goes on them without a UPC code that we don't need for a wedding.
00:29:43
Jennifer Gulizia
with
00:29:44
Jen Joray
use the UPC code stickers for like the odd store sale um and the craft paper is clean and nice so he'll just ball it up he has one blank of each glassware piece on us on his little packing station it's got chips in it but it's not going to fall apart you know And he uses that to make, to prep the boxes.
00:30:13
Jen Joray
So we put like, I think it's five to six full gardens. He would know the number. I can't remember at this moment. i I think it's five, six full gardens.
00:30:25
Jen Joray
in the box size he uses so he'll like prep the box with six holes and he's used one blank to create those holes and he tightly balls up the craft paper so all we have to do is when we finish styling the centerpieces we just take one at a time and carefully slip them into that that hole that he's made with craft paper around it.
00:30:47
Jen Joray
And we just, you know, one box at a time, somebody will hold the cooler door open and somebody else carefully puts it in the area he's designated. it It sounds like a lot, but that flow goes so fast. We can do an entire wedding in, in like just four hours. And I'm
Reflection and Advice
00:31:03
Jen Joray
talking one bridal, six to eight bridesmaids, 10 to 12 boutonnieres,
00:31:11
Jen Joray
A couple wrist corsages, two statement pieces, 360 design. So that's like a $500 piece on our farm. It takes 80 stems or so. A focal arrangement and maybe a dozen centerpieces. So we could probably do that in four hours with the four of us.
00:31:31
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:31:33
Jen Joray
it's It may be, so I've never actually done how much time an entire wedding takes, but we have little, here, this is my file folder for people that can watch the video.
00:31:45
Jen Joray
So each tab is a different month of weddings. And then in each tab, there's an invoice that gives, I pull it out of this sheath.
00:31:56
Jen Joray
The top of it has a blue post-it, which you can see there. And Scott has done the times for us. So it says delivery circle. This is for August 30th. It says one bridal, seven petite bridesmaids, one boot.
00:32:09
Jen Joray
You know, it lists what we have. And then he puts down the amount of time it's going to take.
00:32:14
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh wow.
00:32:14
Jen Joray
to do each one. And I have like a ah ah styling sheet in one of these file folders that lists all the pieces we make for a la carte and how many minutes each piece takes.
00:32:27
Jennifer Gulizia
Amazing.
00:32:29
Jen Joray
So then we do that for each wedding. So when that fourth wedding request comes in and the other three happen to be small to medium weddings, he'll sit down on the couch with those three booked weddings.
00:32:41
Jen Joray
Look at the times. don't do all of them ahead, but that's the moment he'll be like, all right, let me map it out. Okay, you have 14 hours of styling that week. Do you want to take another one?
00:32:52
Jen Joray
This one's going to be another six hours. And I'll be like, yeah, yeah, because... Chloe can do the boutonnieres during the day and I can come home from school and start the bridal at 6 p.m. and then they'll pick up in the morning. that's That's the conversation that we have when we're booking multiple weddings.
00:33:11
Jen Joray
And it works. This is season seven. We've been doing this for six seasons. It works because we know our time.
00:33:18
Jennifer Gulizia
That's amazing.
00:33:20
Jen Joray
Yeah. Knowing your style times is really great. And we're not like 100% accurate with those. Sometimes I'll take a little longer, but it becomes a personal competition for me to make a gorgeous bridal bouquet in less time than I did the previous one.
00:33:35
Jennifer Gulizia
Can I ask how long it takes you to make a bridal bouquet?
00:33:36
Jen Joray
Yeah. 45 minutes.
00:33:39
Jennifer Gulizia
Okay. And that's about how many stems.
00:33:40
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:33:43
Jen Joray
It really depends on the season. I find springtime is harder for me. stems are different a lot of stems are hollow like narcissus and tulips sometimes I break I really don't appreciate spring bridles they're so gorgeous but they're they're the hardest ones for me to make so those will take longer they'll probably be more like an hour and but the end of the season August through October i can whip those out with maybe 60 stems in in that 45 minute time frame
00:33:57
Jennifer Gulizia
yeah
00:34:14
Jennifer Gulizia
Amazing.
00:34:15
Jen Joray
Yeah. And you know, when I get stuck and there are moments where I get stuck and I'm like, I'm not really happy with this. I don't know. I don't, I don't feel like this is exactly what I want it to be. This is the smartest thing.
00:34:26
Jen Joray
Scott reminds me, he's like, well, throw a rubber band around it and put it in the cooler and move on to something else. And then I'll be like, you're right. Okay. I'm just going to clear my head. and most of the time I'll take it back out later that evening and be like, it's fine.
00:34:40
Jen Joray
I don't know what I was worrying about. It looks great. And then he'll wrap it.
00:34:45
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that. That's such a great mindset too, to take a pause, walk away and come back and then realize that so often we're so overly critical of our own work. I remember my first bridal bouquet I made, I made it five times over and I took a picture each time.
00:34:59
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:35:01
Jennifer Gulizia
And last year I went back and I looked at it, some pictures of it, and I thought it actually looked just fine the first time I made it, but I overanalyzed it and I questioned myself.
00:35:12
Jennifer Gulizia
And it took three hours to get a bouquet together instead of the 45 minutes for the first round.
00:35:14
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:35:17
Jen Joray
Yeah, yeah.
00:35:17
Jennifer Gulizia
So.
00:35:18
Jen Joray
It's not easy. And, you know, we're so critical. But Scott reminds me all the time, like, the client is not seeing what you see. They're just seeing these beautiful flowers.
00:35:28
Jennifer Gulizia
Totally.
00:35:29
Jen Joray
That being said, there have been some horrid pictures that have come back to me, especially in the early early days. And I'm, like, embarrassed. But they were happy. Yeah.
00:35:39
Jennifer Gulizia
I think that just goes back to us being overly critical. I mean, the customers, they see beauty. I mean, people go to the supermarket and they see dyed flowers that they think are beautiful.
00:35:45
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:35:49
Jennifer Gulizia
So we're changing their mindset of, ah ah we're redefining what beauty is with these locally grown flowers.
00:35:56
Jen Joray
Yeah. And there's also that whole movement. I know you know it, where the brides, the Pinterest photos, they're like, I don't know what to call them because I don't want to be rude, but they're not my style.
00:36:07
Jen Joray
It really looks to me like somebody did throw stuff together intentionally to look like way high and way low and this droopy piece of amaranth and then this orchid. And I'm like, that is not what I would want for my wedding.
00:36:22
Jen Joray
But that's got to be, i don't know, that's a whole other like aesthetic that I am not in tune with. so I would never offer to make a bouquet if that was something that a bride wanted. I'd say that is not my style.
00:36:35
Jen Joray
I'm not able to do that for you properly, like hire somebody who can connect with that style. But i always laugh because I'm like, there are five flowers in that thing, you know,
00:36:46
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes. i I love what you just said, though, about not being afraid to tell brides when the style doesn't match.
00:36:52
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:36:54
Jennifer Gulizia
Like people are hiring you because you create something specific and everyone has a different style. So I love that you recognize that your style is a specific kind and you're not trying to please everyone.
00:37:03
Jen Joray
yeah
00:37:11
Jen Joray
Yeah, we get into trouble when we try to please. And I'm such a people pleaser. That's my nemesis for sure. So that's why I delivered that condolence bouquet right before we talked.
00:37:22
Jennifer Gulizia
yes
00:37:22
Jen Joray
My husband's like, this is not supposed to happen. You know that. this is We've talked about this, honey. Stop being a people pleaser. We've had a couple really bad wedding experiences. And both of them were because I tried to please the client.
00:37:36
Jen Joray
And so we all I'll spare you all the details, but it was me trying to get this color palette that this bride changed her mind and wanted this specific color palette. But on the invoice, we never changed it.
00:37:48
Jen Joray
And so my takeaway was, and this is my husband's reminding us as a team, we style what's on the invoice. So if there's no official change in color palette, we will not at the last minute be like, oh, she really said she wanted red.
00:38:04
Jen Joray
so we're going to do more red. Like, that's where I've gotten into trouble in the past, so we so we style what's on the invoice, and i'm very careful with the communication to say, you know, we have these set color palettes for our a la carte.
00:38:20
Jen Joray
If they want something different, it's called a custom color palette request that is in huge bold writing on the color section of our invoice. There's a star. I charge for that in the notes section. I put, like,
00:38:33
Jen Joray
you know, $400 custom color request for these flowers that are not part of our a la carte choices. So in other podcasts and some recent presentations we've done, i have come out and said, don't do that. But yet I do that, but I charge for it.
00:38:53
Jen Joray
We charge for it. Sometimes it's 15% if it's a big order, but if it's a small order, and for us that'll be $2,000 to $3,000 range, it would be considered a small, small wedding.
00:39:05
Jen Joray
So we will charge $400 to $500 on a to $3,000 request, depending on the colors. And what that allows for is if that week of the wedding, we don't have enough of that color, we can buy it.
00:39:21
Jennifer Gulizia
I was going to ask you about that.
00:39:23
Jen Joray
Yeah, we don't typically buy stems, but we still charge the way we would need to charge just in case because that's a smart business move. Like Jenny Love says this in her wedding process course. What if some giant tornado comes through? What if the field gets decimated and you'd like have to buy all your flowers from somewhere?
00:39:44
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes.
00:39:45
Jen Joray
You don't want to leave yourself no room for that financially because you can tank your business. So we try to charge enough per stem that we can buy if we have to.
00:39:57
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that. That's really sound advice. So typically you grow every stem for your weddings.
00:40:00
Jen Joray
Yeah.
00:40:03
Jennifer Gulizia
You don't have to bring in any.
00:40:03
Jen Joray
Yeah. No, it's very rare that we buy anything.
00:40:08
Jennifer Gulizia
So talk to us about what you're planting then so that you and ensure you have enough flowers for these weddings.
00:40:08
Jen Joray
Yeah. Yeah.
00:40:15
Jen Joray
Oh, this is so exciting, Jennifer. I just get all like tingly when I think about planning. So I guess I love I do love planning, I guess. Well, now in you season seven, like you, you've been growing so many years, you know, you have your staple crops, right?
00:40:32
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:40:32
Jen Joray
So here in Maine, it's a short season. We have to grow overwintered flowers for our June brides. So we start with that planning a year and a half in advance. We seed in July, which is next month.
00:40:44
Jen Joray
Almost. It's crazy, right?
00:40:45
Jennifer Gulizia
wow
00:40:46
Jen Joray
Next month, I have to start seeding for my 2026 June bride Or planning whatever corms, you know, ranunculus corms. We dig our out our own corms. We have our own corms ready right now in my closet, but I have to take them out August 1st, pre-sprout them.
00:41:03
Jen Joray
So we start with our overwinter tunnel and that'll give us some support stems. So that's Iceland poppies. We grow up, we grow actually... small-ish amounts of things, but like with the spring favorites, Iceland Poppy Sweet Peas, Feverfew Aurelia Nigella, a nice big eight-foot patch of specialty pansies,
00:41:28
Jen Joray
They're a pain, but they really give such a beautiful little transition with all their multiple tones. So I use that as a transition flower a lot. We did a little lupine trial this year because Maine's the lupine state.
00:41:44
Jen Joray
So...
00:41:44
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh,
00:41:45
Jen Joray
People ask for it, and I don't have any on the farm. We have like one plant that I started years ago. It's big purple lupin. I sometimes can park in my neighbor's driveway and walk to this little city-owned lot and pick some, but I also don't like to do that because I feel like it doesn't belong to me. It belongs to nature. so I finally decided to just trial it in the overwinter tunnel so it's a little earlier than the the field lupin would come out and it's beautiful it was so strong all winter so that's probably going to add to our rotation uh russell's hybrid i did just the white this year but i'm going to add like the candy pink the bright pink and the butter yellow for next season yeah no what's javelin
00:42:27
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh, nice. What about, have you tried javelin?
00:42:31
Jennifer Gulizia
I bought the seeds from Marin at the Farmhouse Flower Farm this year at her seed sale. And it's like this blushy white, it hasn't bloomed yet for me. I just got it planted now that we have irrigation at our farm. And I'm so anxious to see it because it fits right in with my wedding palette colors for the gorge.
00:42:48
Jen Joray
Oh, I can't wait to see. Thank you for that.
00:42:51
Jennifer Gulizia
I think I said it right. Yeah. had never seen it anywhere else other than her seed sale.
00:42:56
Jen Joray
I'm going to check it out. Yeah.
00:42:58
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes.
00:42:59
Jen Joray
So I think that's like the majority of what we grow. Snapdragons in that tunnel. And this year we have Campanula. We didn't do any last year. We did it the year before. it's kind of depending on what we've got for brides.
00:43:13
Jen Joray
And then another, so that's 1600 square foot farmer's friend tunnel. That's our overwinter tunnel. And then in another 1600 square foot tunnel, we early spring plant ranunculus, a little bit of anemones for the purples, but mostly ranunculus. We do 100 feet of ranunx.
00:43:30
Jen Joray
We've done 300 feet, but that's too much for our needs. So we only need 100 feet for our whole huge wedding season. that's It works great. We have scoops gabiosa in that tunnel.
00:43:42
Jen Joray
We have tulips that rotate in and out of that tunnel. And the center this year is 100 feet of lisianthus. It's like 3,000 plants we fit in.
00:43:52
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:43:52
Jen Joray
Actually more, 3,600 renanx 100 foot.
00:43:59
Jen Joray
It's insane how well our daughters, they wanted to plant the Lizzie because they're very good at that. And Scott made this little like bed thing. You can pull down the bed that keeps, I don't know what it does, but it has something to do with spacing.
00:44:13
Jen Joray
And oh my gosh, they put nine drip lines on a single bed with 10 rows of Lizzie in a single bed. 100 feet so like it's beautiful i' have never seen any plantings like this i've taken a million pictures i'll have to share a picture with you
00:44:25
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:44:31
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes, we can include it in the show notes.
00:44:33
Jen Joray
Yes, it's just beautifully done. And that is like the star location for Lizzie in the center of one of our farmer's friends. We kind of rotate where it goes, but it's so easy to tend that we're going to put cattle panel on it like we did last year. so it's nice and straight and sturdy.
00:44:50
Jen Joray
And it'll just be like tens of thousands of blooms in August. So that's that tunnel. That second tunnel is... It's a huge amount of high-value blooms, right? You've got your ranunculus. You've got the lysianthus. That alone is huge. And it's the tulips for the beginning of the season and and also the scoops gaviosa.
00:45:12
Jen Joray
So Dave Dowling said you can, in his course, perennials, bulbs, woodies, and more, which I i highly recommend, and i I loved that. I loved Jenny's wedding process course, too.
00:45:23
Jen Joray
I do highly recommend both of those if you're doing weddings or and if you're planting woodies. But in Dave's course, he says you cannot share a tunnel space between tulips and renunks because you've got to leave your tulip tunnel open so they chill enough to have long enough stems.
00:45:40
Jennifer Gulizia
Awesome.
00:45:41
Jen Joray
But somehow we worked out the timing to make it work for us. We have accidentally overwintered renunks and anemones the last couple seasons. Like we we dug stuff out, but I guess we missed some and then we get a plant and it's like, oh my gosh, that's a nice surprise. Leave that.
00:46:00
Jen Joray
So I think we're going to start next season trialing a bed of renunks in the overwinter tunnel and cutting back.
00:46:06
Jennifer Gulizia
awesome
00:46:07
Jen Joray
Yeah, I would love that. And I have extra quorums. I had like 4,000 quorums this year. We didn't need that many. So we talked with Hank Onnings a couple years ago on a one and one to one and a half hour like FaceTime group for for fall blooming ranunculus.
00:46:25
Jen Joray
Maybe some of the people listening were on that with me. It was just a handful of growers.
00:46:30
Jennifer Gulizia
Interesting.
00:46:30
Jen Joray
And he was. Yeah, it was so cool because Hank was saying, you know, there's only one professional grower on the East Coast and he's in Canada. And it's like a million dollar multimillion dollar operation.
00:46:42
Jen Joray
And it's the ideal time with light, so day length and temperature to get fall blooming ranunculus crop. So we played around with the ideas, but ah So we would pre-sprout August 1st, but then they wouldn't bloom before we'd have to add heat.
00:46:59
Jennifer Gulizia
Mm-hmm.
00:47:00
Jen Joray
And we couldn't find a market for them the last two seasons. We've tried. People are still doing weddings, but in Maine, it seems to be this huge seasonal flush of weddings.
00:47:12
Jen Joray
And then they taper off in October, November, December. So like the end of October, the whole month of November, And then forget December. we We rarely get requests, although we still do.
00:47:25
Jen Joray
and I think that right now we just can't find a market for those fall blooming renunks. it It might be there. i just haven't found it yet. So I'm not sure how I got on that tangent, but that's how I had like way too many corms left. So I'm going to use that to my advantage.
00:47:43
Jen Joray
One of the things Hank talked about was you can't dig out your corms and then dry them and then replant them for ah for a fall bloom in the same season.
00:47:52
Jennifer Gulizia
Okay, they need a full rest period.
00:47:54
Jen Joray
Yes, they need that full year rest. So it's better to plant a second season corm or a two-year corm if you want fall blooms.
00:48:03
Jennifer Gulizia
Okay, interesting.
00:48:05
Jen Joray
So I have thousands of extra quorums that I had planned on trialing and then we decided not to. so I'm going to like I use those for this spring and then I'm going to use the remainder from last year for the for the overwinter tunnel. And I think it's going to be good.
00:48:22
Jen Joray
So back to planning. that That's how we work it So that one overwinter tunnel is all of our June. That second spring slash summer tunnel is all of our renunks and lizies and a few supporting stems.
00:48:36
Jen Joray
And then our final tunnel is another 1600 square feet for all our dahlias. This year we did Protect Net. The girls and Scott spent about two weeks like building out some side pieces, putting up track.
00:48:54
Jen Joray
They did just the curtains on the sides. You know what I mean?
00:48:57
Jennifer Gulizia
No, what do you mean?
00:48:59
Jen Joray
You know where you do like a roll-up side greenhouse? There's like a track.
00:49:01
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh, on the greenhouse. Yes.
00:49:04
Jen Joray
Yeah, there's like a track along the sides. Yeah.
00:49:06
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes.
00:49:08
Jen Joray
I wanted to protect that around the entire thing. I'm like, screw those tarnished plant bugs and leafhoppers. But he was like, no, that's so much money and protect that. All we need is the curtains. All we need is the sides and the doors.
00:49:22
Jen Joray
So he like built this awesome track for our farmer's friend, which previously was one of those push up. And like there was like a V-shaped piece of metal that you would just bunch the fabric up and over.
00:49:35
Jen Joray
So he took that system out. we We took off the plastic. He built the track. We decided to replace greenhouse plastic at the same time. So we got it. We had a new piece of plastic ready.
00:49:46
Jen Joray
But he and I and the girls like put the protect net in that track. And then he made a board on the bottom of each side. and put a second track on the bottom and put the protect netting wiggle wired in to both tracks.
00:50:03
Jen Joray
So one on the ground level on a piece of 12 inch board and one on the the top where you'd roll up your greenhouse side to. So that eliminated the that eliminated the rope across the top of the tunnel.
00:50:12
Jennifer Gulizia
Uh-huh.
00:50:18
Jen Joray
So it's just a smooth piece of plastic up on top, wiggle wired in, and then, you know, the protect netting with plastic over the top of it And then he added roll-up sides.
00:50:30
Jen Joray
He did a whole bunch of research. He ended up with some big green plastic contraption that he installed himself, and he's really happy with it. So we can roll up the plastic, the protect that stays in that track, and he built out some pretty doors for both front and back of all of our tunnels.
00:50:48
Jen Joray
And you can open those doors wide. Those have plastic, greenhouse plastic on them for heat control. And then there'll be a curtain of protect net, which we have to still add before we plant next week, all our dahlias.
00:51:02
Jen Joray
I hope it works because that's a huge part of our plan. That's like late July through the rest of the season.
00:51:12
Jen Joray
So then with the other critical points to planning are crops in the field, fever, f sorry, foxglove and delphinium. I know they're spikes, but we lean so heavily on those colors, as that light blue delphinium especially, white.
00:51:28
Jennifer Gulizia
ah
00:51:30
Jen Joray
So we have so much. We have 70-foot rose as our standard in the field. So we've got 70 feet of light blue giants, 70 feet of galahad white giants, 70 feet of a mix of astolat rose for that soft rosy lavender,
00:51:48
Jen Joray
And then a little bit, like maybe 30 feet at the end of that row. So like 40 feet of astolette and 30 feet of guinevere, like a lavender giant. Then we have 70 feet of belladonna cleved in beauty, light blues.
00:52:04
Jen Joray
And then last year, our awesome, last year, our surprise was our whole belladonna row and our Chinese butterfly at Delphinium all came back.
00:52:18
Jen Joray
And it's a huge hedge right now, so I couldn't be happier. So we're going to have two 70-foot rows of mostly light blue.
00:52:26
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:52:26
Jen Joray
Belladonna. There's a good chunk of white in there, maybe 20 feet of white, which is helpful. And then the last like 10 feet is is that blushy pink Chinese delphinium.
00:52:38
Jen Joray
I love that stuff. It's
00:52:39
Jennifer Gulizia
That's a ton of delphinium.
00:52:41
Jen Joray
it's ridiculous right and our foxglove we have to harvest that foxglove every two to three days and we we have buckets and buckets and buckets so my concern and it is every year we're like foxglove rich delphinium cells every stem cells every stem goes into weddings we almost never composted delphinium stem but the foxglove it's tough because like here's one of the planning pieces we struggle with and i know other farmers can feel this pain who do weddings
00:53:01
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:53:09
Jen Joray
If you have a wedding with a huge amount of material and you know you're going to use like 200, 300 foxgloves peach, you have to plant enough for that one week. But like all those other weeks, you're not using nearly that amount of foxglove, but you're still harvesting it. You're still cutting and holding it. You're still putting in the cooler.
00:53:29
Jen Joray
so We have to find a way to sell bulk amounts of Foxglove better. it always comes down nobody has the time to make the drive to the wholesaler.
00:53:41
Jen Joray
Because we're like, well, we're going to make like 500 bucks off of this.
00:53:41
Jennifer Gulizia
Mm-hmm.
00:53:45
Jen Joray
It's worth it to just focus on this wedding booking for next season that's going to make us 20 grand. So like it's right now it's time. We'll be Foxglove rich for sure. So that all those crops I named are like the staple flowers for the whole season.
00:54:00
Jen Joray
They're big swaths of months that they cover. That takes a huge amount of pressure off of me for styling. I got my big focals. I have my supporting stems. I have that light blue I need.
00:54:12
Jen Joray
Another huge piece to the planning is just a few perennials that are huge staples. And for us, that's mountain mint, which goes the entire season from May to October.
00:54:24
Jen Joray
We use it the entire season. We have 300 feet of it
00:54:27
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
00:54:28
Jen Joray
It's a lot, but it's beautiful. ideally The only stage I don't like is when the flowers die and they're brown. I'm like, shaking does not work, so I actually pick off as many of the little flowers as I can. It's just very time consuming.
00:54:42
Jen Joray
Or for bigger pieces, I don't bother. if it's a very visible piece on a boot or in a bouquet, I will take the time to pick off those brown flowers. That's the only time in the crop cycle. I don't appreciate Mountain Mint as much, but I still use it.
00:54:59
Jen Joray
So Mountain Mint Hydrangea is the second giant moneymaker on our farm. Neither of us liked it going into farming. We're like, we don't need hydrangea. but we need it.
00:55:12
Jen Joray
It's a huge space filler. It's a huge supporting stem for statement pieces. You can use just the blooms for petal pails. You can use little little bits to make a little sparkly addition to boutonnieres.
00:55:26
Jen Joray
I use at least one in all of my fall bridal bouquets. Actually, bridal, I'll probably use three. A bridesmaid's bouquet, I might use one or two. Even a petite, I'll use one.
00:55:37
Jen Joray
And it just really it fills up the whole space quickly. So that's a huge, that's like our second favorite crop on the farm. And then the third one is nine bark.
00:55:49
Jen Joray
God, it's so pretty.
00:55:50
Jennifer Gulizia
Love Nainberg.
00:55:52
Jen Joray
We don't have any green, which is a real downfall. I got to get some some green at some point. But we just have Coppertina and Diablo and they're such giant, it's of giant importance to us in the in the fall.
00:56:05
Jen Joray
So that's like a huge backbone of the farm. And then the other backbone crops that are annuals, we do shiso for greens, basil for greens,
00:56:17
Jen Joray
I know basil is a wilter, but when you let it go to seed, it's totally fine. And I love it that way. So I will use a lot of lemon basil and aromato. And eucalyptus. So that's about it for greens. We we do scent to geranium.
00:56:34
Jen Joray
It doesn't work always with the droopy effect, but we do a lot of that. i do not like Dusty Miller, so we don't tend to do much just for the basis of wrist corsages, and I decided to grow those in pots in the greenhouse and just overwinter them.
00:56:48
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh. Awesome.
00:56:49
Jen Joray
So it's made a lot life a lot easier to have easy access to the base for wrist corsages right outside the barn door and the greenhouse and pots. We keep it trimmed.
00:57:01
Jen Joray
This spring I went through and I pulled out the old flowers and I like i ripped out some of the side shoots and I potted them up and now they're beautiful new plants already just a couple months later.
00:57:11
Jennifer Gulizia
awesome
00:57:12
Jen Joray
Yeah, so that's that's the way I use Dusty Miller. It's not in a ground anywhere. It's just in pots, and it's only what I need. And then, like, I'd say the last and most important piece for planning is zinnias and the littles. I call them the littles, things like Crespidia, Nigella, Feverfew.
00:57:34
Jen Joray
I still use strawflower. use a lot of overwintered yarrow, but I tend to... I tend to fill a lot of of the color palettes flexibly with zinnias.
00:57:47
Jen Joray
So it's always an issue on our farm. and We talk about how many rows we can handle because they take cutting every three days. we We do three 70-foot rows, and that's a lot.
00:57:58
Jen Joray
Because we care for them properly, along with the foxglove and the delphinium and the dahlias and the greens. But we always come back to three. My husband's like, no, we've really, we cut the beep out of them. Yeah.
00:58:14
Jen Joray
Three rows. Don't go down to two, honey, because I'm always like, I think we can get by with two rows. He's like, no, no, no, no. no They're our most useful filler on the farm from summer to fall. Do three.
00:58:24
Jen Joray
So I carefully plan out the colors for the weddings. But like if you took out the challenge of color with those crops I mentioned, yeah, it's a lot, but you can do a whole wedding season from...
00:58:39
Jen Joray
June to October here in Maine with those, what did I name, like 12 to 15 crops, 20 crops with the greens included.
00:58:51
Jen Joray
It's so much.
00:58:51
Jennifer Gulizia
That's amazing.
00:58:53
Jen Joray
It's so much material. you know We do grow other stuff. We grow pin cushion. i do specialty sages like the lighthouse purple this year for a dark purple wedding. But like I don't need to grow that stuff.
00:59:04
Jen Joray
But I do need to grow dahlias. I do need to grow zinnias. zio I do need to grow at least one filler. So for me, my favorite is Fever Few, but I like to double down. And just in case, I also have Nigella.
00:59:20
Jen Joray
I'm a very flower forward designer. I don't use a lot of greenery. Maybe in the fall a little bit more. So that' that gets us by.
00:59:32
Jen Joray
Yeah, so that's it's not really hard to plan that stuff, right? It's not hard. Oh, marigold. Marigold is good, too, because it's great out of water. So we do that, especially for arbors and stuff.
00:59:43
Jennifer Gulizia
Okay.
00:59:44
Jen Joray
But yeah, thats that's the majority of our crops. We do a little bit amaranth. We do a rove celosia. I probably could not get by without celosia, so add that to the list.
00:59:53
Jennifer Gulizia
and love Celosia.
00:59:55
Jen Joray
Hmm. And gomphrena I was like ready to kick it to the curb this year. And my husband said, are you crazy? We harvest buckets and buckets of gomphrena You're always asking for that as an accent and in boutonnieres and stuff. So in everything we make. So he he twisted my arm and made me grow my like five to six colors of gonfrena again.
01:00:16
Jen Joray
don't know.
01:00:18
Jennifer Gulizia
Do you start all of these from seed or do you order in plugs?
01:00:23
Jen Joray
We start everything from seed except,
01:00:29
Jen Joray
no, this year I started everything from seed.
01:00:32
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow.
01:00:32
Jen Joray
Yeah. Yeah. I'm really good at delphinium now. That took me a while to get, but I seed it in a tray and I heavily water it in. Like I soak it, I saturate it, and then we stick it in the cooler in the barn in very end of January.
01:00:47
Jen Joray
And I just leave it in there. And last year I did this and i we forgot about it because we have two coolers and we don't use the big one over the winter. We used to use it for grain storage, but the mice got in there. So we don't use it for anything. We just put like our our harvest carts in there and leave it till the season starts up.
01:01:03
Jen Joray
And I forgot about all these trays. There were like 21 trays of delphinium in there.
01:01:07
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh my gosh.
01:01:07
Jen Joray
Yeah. So they all dried out.
01:01:10
Jennifer Gulizia
Oh no!
01:01:11
Jen Joray
It was supposed to be my husband's job. And I think I put it in the calendar, but I didn't remind him and we didn't talk about it. We were just enjoying our, I guess we were enjoying our slow start to the season.
01:01:22
Jennifer Gulizia
for
01:01:22
Jen Joray
And I freaked out. I'm like, oh my God, honey, you forgot to check the delphinium It's all dried out. It's all going to die. Oh no. And he's like, no, it's not. It's going to be fine. I said, no, you can't let flowers, you can't let seeds dry out during germination. Like I was in a panic and he goes, trust me, they'll be fine in his typical calm way.
01:01:42
Jen Joray
He moved them all to the floor of the greenhouse, watered them for three weeks and they were almost 100% germination.
01:01:50
Jennifer Gulizia
Wow. Amazing.
01:01:53
Jen Joray
So I will never get upset about that again. They can dry out.
01:01:56
Jennifer Gulizia
i love that.
01:01:58
Jen Joray
you know and Maybe it was just the right stage where the seed coat hadn't quite cracked yet or something, but they all it was the most beautiful delphinium crop, and that's what came back this year. The belladonna's did.
01:02:09
Jen Joray
ah ripped out the giants. They they came back too. We found chunks of delphinium giants all throughout where they had been planted in the field, even though... he tilled.
01:02:21
Jen Joray
like he He chopped with the heck out of those rows and we found these giant chunks of beautiful green and it leaves. So I dug as many out as I could and I was delivering crates to my neighbor who's in love with delphinium.
01:02:35
Jen Joray
potted some up, but the majority went to the compost. Don't tell anybody.
01:02:40
Jennifer Gulizia
You were feeding your soil.
01:02:42
Jen Joray
Yes. But next year we will definitely overwinter the giants. yeah
01:02:48
Jennifer Gulizia
and love it.
01:02:48
Jen Joray
I know they overwinter. I know they like the cold here, but in the past we've tried and they've rotted out.
01:02:54
Jennifer Gulizia
Okay.
01:02:55
Jen Joray
So three seasons we tried that and three seasons we lost the crop. So we had decided we'll use them as annuals only. But this year, don't know. They all came back.
01:03:07
Jennifer Gulizia
Interesting. and Thank you so much for sharing about the different flowers you grow and your wedding business. I know we're at about an hour right now. Is it okay if I ask you another question?
01:03:18
Jen Joray
Oh, Jennifer, go for it. I know you'll chop stuff out. So absolutely.
01:03:23
Jennifer Gulizia
No, it's all too good. if This is all staying in here.
01:03:26
Jen Joray
okay
01:03:27
Jennifer Gulizia
On your website, it says that you are a regenerative flower farm. Is that correct?
01:03:32
Jen Joray
Yes, yes, we are.
01:03:32
Jennifer Gulizia
What does regenerative flower farming mean to you?
01:03:36
Jen Joray
For us, regen means we're adding more than we're taking away. We're pasturing our animals and feeding the soil on the farm, not just the crops we take. We are using only organic certified amendments or making our own brews like compost tea and mycorrhizal fungi, is something we focus on a lot.
01:03:56
Jen Joray
Soil health, but also plant health, because there's a whole other vision of instead of you thinking just soil health, There are some scholars that focus on plant health, which, of course, then feeds the soil and it is a loop.
01:04:11
Jen Joray
But if you focus on the plant health and you see your plants are thriving, then the soil is probably also thriving. So we think of it more like plant health.
01:04:18
Jennifer Gulizia
Mm-hmm.
01:04:21
Jen Joray
And the moment something gets ah ah past, those especially those lower down on the rung past like aphids, the moment that happens, we're looking at what did we do wrong? What ah ah what is the plant missing?
01:04:32
Jen Joray
nutrient wise. So we do our soil tests and all that too, but, region part of it for us is, is mostly the health of the land. Now I know there is a new label above organic called regenerative organic certified, and that's coming that you can already get that.
01:04:51
Jennifer Gulizia
Interesting.
01:04:53
Jen Joray
And we've seen that with the medicine through some of our suppliers, regenerative organic certified also takes into account the health of the people on the farm, yeah the the people who run the farm, the employees who come onto the farm to work.
01:05:10
Jen Joray
And if to get, I shouldn't really talk about this because I am not well versed in it yet, but I do understand that there's a piece of that certification that involves private conversations with employees. In other words, the the landowner or the farm owners not present when they're getting interviewed and the questions are focused I think on the health of their job like if their working conditions are truly satisfying their needs so that's part of the regenerative piece as well so we think about that my husband's far better at that than us he stops work at about three o'clock every day
01:05:49
Jen Joray
make sure he's got his dinner plans usually from the morning, but make sure like he's putting meat in pot to thaw from the freezer if that's the plan to do like steak on the grill or something.
01:06:02
Jen Joray
So he stops at three. He buttons up whatever major projects going on. Of course, there are rare exceptions. Like if we're tilling and we absolutely have to make beds because the weather's right, we're not going to stop till the beds are done.
01:06:14
Jen Joray
But 99% of our days end at three for him. He comes in, gets the dinner plans ready, buttons up the field. If there's dishes out, we'll be cleaning those. If there's stuff we have to tend to inside the house, we'll do that.
01:06:29
Jen Joray
And then when the rest of us come in much later than him, we have dinner ready, which is, oh, my God, right? Like that is huge.
01:06:40
Jen Joray
And it's a lot of work for him. And he talks about that. He's like, please don't take this for granted. you said food was the most important thing when we bought this farm. His focus is on the health of our family first.
01:06:51
Jen Joray
He has to remind me of that because I'll be like, can you just do this one more thing out in the field? And he's like, no, no, because the first thing you asked me for was healthy food. So like he is so good at putting the brakes on so that we survive as family as a family.
01:07:08
Jen Joray
Without that, I just, I'm like so ADHD, I'd go till nine at night and not even eat.
01:07:13
Jennifer Gulizia
Me too.
01:07:14
Jen Joray
Yeah. So it's really, really critical, I think, to have like somebody in our lives that'll do that, whether it's us or somebody we're married to or maybe even an off farm person that calls you every day. I'm like, hey, did you do your yoga?
01:07:28
Jen Joray
Like whatever it is. And then we'll so in the summertime, we'll go outside and sit. The girls will jump in the pool. I'll sit with him with a cold drink. We'll have we'll put our feet up outside. And then we'll come in and we still have chores to do We'll do the animal chores for the last couple hours of the day. And when the day length is really long, we have to go out the last thing before we go to sleep and yeah close the greenhouse up if it needs that or do those last few things. But that that few hour stretch in the early afternoon is our family time, our food time.
01:08:02
Jen Joray
Put your feet up, talk. It's easy to keep going, but that's, I guess, the last of the regenerative piece is that we take time for ourselves and for each other to connect about why we're doing this.
01:08:14
Jen Joray
This is pretty crazy.
01:08:18
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that so much because it's so easy, like you said, to stay out. Last night, our farm is still off site. And it was six o'clock and I looked at the watch and I go, oh, no, we have nothing for dinner right now.
01:08:27
Jen Joray
yeah.
01:08:32
Jennifer Gulizia
I got to get back home. Thankfully, I got home and my husband was making dinner. He's like your husband, where he values the health of our
01:08:36
Jen Joray
Yay!
01:08:41
Jennifer Gulizia
feeding our nourishing our bodies. And so thankfully he was there, but it's like, it's so easy to get caught up on it, especially when the days are so long. i mean, it's light till nine o'clock here.
01:08:50
Jen Joray
Yeah.
01:08:51
Jennifer Gulizia
So I didn't, eat I thought it was like four o'clock in the afternoon, not six o'clock at night. Cause you just get lost in the moment.
01:08:57
Jen Joray
Yes.
01:08:59
Jennifer Gulizia
So I love that you take the time to end your day with intention and then intentionally spend it with your family doing meaningful activities.
01:09:05
Jen Joray
Mm-hmm.
01:09:08
Jen Joray
yeah
01:09:09
Jennifer Gulizia
That's beautiful.
01:09:10
Jen Joray
Yeah, it's important.
01:09:13
Jennifer Gulizia
Jennifer, we've talked a lot in this episode and the last episode. Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you want to share with our listeners?
01:09:25
Jen Joray
I could talk forever with you about this stuff. So no, go forth and conquer and do it yourself, right? everything you've
01:09:32
Jennifer Gulizia
Yes.
01:09:32
Jen Joray
Enjoy everything you've built enjoy it all. and Like my husband always says, we only have today. We do.
01:09:40
Jennifer Gulizia
Hmm.
01:09:40
Jen Joray
we We only have today. There's no promise of tomorrow. There's no promise of anything. We only have today. So it's not so much advice, but just like that's what rings in my ears as we're doing all this running around and stressful work is enjoy it.
01:09:57
Jen Joray
The balance is hard to achieve and that's the challenge, I think. But I just try to enjoy moment I'm in, whether I'm working off the farm and I'm with other other people's kids. I'm like,
01:10:08
Jen Joray
I'll be back on the farm soon. I'm trying to enjoy them for who they are right now. And that has made me so much happier and my life. Yeah.
01:10:18
Jennifer Gulizia
I love that. That's great advice. Just being present in the moment and enjoying that time.
01:10:23
Jen Joray
Yeah, because the farm teaches you that. Nature's going to do its thing. We've got a plant on the windowsill that's going to make little babies. It's like that life plant, you know, and it's making its little babies on the leaf. Like, it's not getting everything it needs. It's not getting enough sun. It's trying to set roots out the sides and it can't reach the soil in some places. But I made the comment last night. I'm like, honey, look at this.
01:10:47
Jen Joray
This plant knows the cycle. Regardless of everything else going on. and if the rest of us humans were outside more and looking at nature and observing those simple things, we would be constantly reminded that no matter what we're doing, that whole cycle is going to repeat itself. There'll be another shot at the growing that crop. There'll be another wedding to try your hand at.
01:11:12
Jen Joray
Like there's just this bigger cycle and it's kind of calming to know.
01:11:19
Jennifer Gulizia
Absolutely. i agree. Well, thank you.
01:11:21
Jen Joray
Yeah.
01:11:21
Jennifer Gulizia
This has been such a fun conversation. i know you shared last time, but if you could share again, where can our listeners find you?
01:11:29
Jen Joray
Oh, thanks. Our website, Eastern River Farm, has a link to my email. And my email is my name at Eastern River Farm. So Jennifer Jure at Eastern River Farm.
01:11:40
Jen Joray
And Joray is J-O-R-A-Y, like Joe Ray. And I'm very responsive over email. So I'm happy to answer any questions.
01:11:50
Jennifer Gulizia
Are you also on Instagram?
01:11:52
Jen Joray
Yeah, we have an Instagram too. I check it every day. Yes.
01:11:56
Jennifer Gulizia
And that is also Eastern River Farm. Is that right?
01:11:59
Jen Joray
Yep, at Eastern River Farm. Yes.
01:12:02
Jennifer Gulizia
Perfect. We'll put links to all of that in the show notes. It's been so fun talking to you again.
01:12:05
Jen Joray
Cool.
01:12:07
Jennifer Gulizia
Thanks for carving out two different days to chat on the podcast. I wasn't expecting the first one to detour. So it was really fun to learn more about your farm today.
01:12:18
Jennifer Gulizia
And I wish you and your family a lovely season ahead. So thanks so much for joining us today. And I'm sure you'll be back again someday. The door is always open here on the podcast for you.
01:12:29
Jen Joray
Oh, was so nice to chat chat with you. I'd love to learn more about your farm, and I'm going to start licking you up more, as I have been.
01:12:36
Jennifer Gulizia
Well, thank you. We'll chat soon, Jennifer.
01:12:38
Jen Joray
Yeah.
01:12:38
Jennifer Gulizia
Thank you.
01:12:39
Jen Joray
Thank you so much, Jennifer. Bye.
01:12:41
Jennifer Gulizia
Bye-bye.