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Ep. 42: Growing A Successful & Profitable Cut Flower Farm With Lennie Larkin
2.6k Plays2 months ago
Have you ever wondered how you can run a profitable cut flower farm? In this episode, Lennie Larkin, a business leader in the flower farming industry and founder of B-Side Farm, shares her inspiring journey from teaching to sustainable farming. Starting her career in Boston, Lennie transitioned to California, where she enrolled and then taught at UCSC Center for Agroecology, eventually establishing her own flower farm in 2014.
Throughout this episode, Lennie candidly shares the challenges she faced, including rapid growth and personal burnout. These experiences led her to seek advanced training in small business management, which dramatically transformed her farm into a model of profitability and sustainability. She emphasizes that while many flower farmers are passionate about growing flowers, they often lack the business acumen necessary to thrive. Lennie aims to bridge this gap by providing coaching and resources to flower farmers nationwide.
Lennie discusses the importance of setting realistic sales goals and understanding the financial aspects of running a flower farm. She encourages aspiring farmers to think strategically about their business models, emphasizing that while it is possible to be profitable in the first year, it is often more realistic to aim for profitability in the second or third year.
Tune in to hear the full conversation, filled with practical advice, personal anecdotes, and a wealth of knowledge that can inspire anyone interested in profitable cut flower farming.
In This Episode You’ll Hear About:
01:37: From Passion to Profession: A Journey from Education to Flower Farming
10:43: Bridging Agriculture and Business in Flower Farming
15:09: Lessons from Early Flower Farming Experiences
17:22: Achieving Profitability as a First-Year Flower Farmer
19:21: Strategies for Farm Profitability: Setting Realistic Goals and Efficient Practices
27:29: Optimal Farm Size for Beginners and Strategies for Efficiency
29:02: Small-Scale Farming for Profitability
32:04: Scaling A Wedding Business
35:58: Embracing Collaboration: The Value of Sourcing Flowers from Other Farms
42:52: Transitioning to Oregon: Challenges and New Beginnings in Flower Farming
49:23: Empowering Flower Farmers Through Coaching and Community
57:02: Embracing Marketing and Sales in Flower Farming
Learn More About Lennie Larkins & Flower Farming For Profit:
- https://www.flowerfarmingforprofit.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/flowerfarming.forprofit/
- Better Boundaries Free Guide: https://mailchi.mp/flowerfarmingforprofit/backyard-bouquet-podcast
- Flower Farming For Profit Book: https://amzn.to/4fyNh1u
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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 Galizia 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.
Heartwarming Tales and Expert Advice
00:00:28
Speaker
From growing your own backyard garden to supporting your local flower farmer, 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.
Join the Dahlia Patch Community
00:00:55
Speaker
Hey fellow dahlia growers, as the seasons start to change, it's almost time to put our dahlias to bed for the winter and start planning next year's gardens. Interested in joining a community of supportive dahlia enthusiasts? Be sure to check out the Dahlia Patch. To thank my podcast listeners, I'm offering a one-month free trial. Just click the link in the show notes to join. The Dahlia Patch is an interactive online community focused on hands-on learning, featuring monthly live trainings, interactive Q and&A sessions, and regular monthly live chats to keep our green thumbs busy all year round. Whether you're new to dahlias or a seasoned grower, you'll always find new techniques to master and planning tips for the season ahead. Join the Dahlia Patch today by following the link in our show notes and grow your Dahlia gardening network. Hope to see you in the Dahlia Patch.
Lenny Larkin's Journey to Flower Farming
00:01:53
Speaker
Today we are excited to have Lenny Larkin from Beeside Farm joining us. Lenny is a pioneer in the flower farming industry. She began her career in Boston as a teacher and mentor before moving to California to delve deeper into agroecology and sustainable farming. This educational foundation has paved the way for the founding of B-Side Farms in 2014, where she passionately combines floral design and innovative business practices. Facing rapid growth and a personal burnout, Lenny sought advanced training in small business management, dramatically transforming her farm into a model of profitability and sustainability. Beyond her successful farming, Lenny now coaches flower farmers nationwide and has recently published her book, Flower Farming for Profit, a definitive guide for thriving in the floral business. Lenny, welcome to today's show. To start out, can you begin by telling us what drew you into flower farming? Yeah, hello, and thank you for having me today. Really happy to be here. I'm looking forward to chatting with you. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as you mentioned, I've always been a teacher. So I'll talk about that real quick and tell you how that translated into flower farming and what I do now, which is teaching flower farmers and working with flower farmers full time, finally. So, you know, I've always been a teacher. Adult education has been my thing. So every few years, I almost went back to get a master's in adult education. And then I just kept getting new jobs that I was excited about. And I never did it. And now I'm like, that ship has sailed. But here I am, an adult educator specializing in small businesses, specifically flower farms. So it's been kind of a winding path. But I used to work in refugee resettlement. So that was one of my first jobs out of college. Yeah, I was back in Boston working in refugee resettlement, so being a mentor to teenagers. And at the time, I was also teaching ESL, you know English as a second language in the city of Cambridge at night. So by day, I was working with this caseload of teenagers who had just arrived from all these other countries, getting them settled into their foster homes, working with them on vocational training. A lot of them had come from, you know, agricultural backgrounds or different countries where that was kind of the norm. So helping them find appropriate training post high school, which is interesting because my work now is kind of around vocational training as well, to some extent, and teaching myself. So I've always been a teacher. So that's how I've approached any other, you know, anything else I've done. And I really, really, I was just such a hippie when I was a teenager and I worked on farms here and there. And, you know, I had this nagging feeling like I was meant to be a farmer, but I went down a different path for a number of years, was doing all this education stuff, this social service stuff. But then when I was, I don't know, I'd say late 20s, maybe like 30, I realized that that calling to be in the agricultural space was never going to
From Social Services to Agriculture
00:04:52
Speaker
go away. And it's in fact what I was meant to be doing. So I moved out to California and enrolled in the farm apprenticeship at UC Santa Cruz, which is like a really intensive certificate program. And so you stay there and live and work on the farm and learn everything about kind of how to how to run a farm, how to manage a farm. And I then got hired on there for an additional year to teach. So I was like, you know, they call it a second year apprentice or like a TA for the next cohort that came in the next year. And at the time, I was really focused on vegetables. you know Part of the journey back into agriculture had been from a kind of a social service perspective, food access, all that kind of stuff. So that's what drew me back into farming. But I also knew that I was, you know, I've always been kind of more of a people person than a plant person. So I went into it thinking, how am I going to use this training to keep teaching and keep interacting with people and making you know in translating complex concepts into bite-sized, actionable stuff? How am I going to bring that into this realm of agriculture? So you know it made sense for me to then, I got a job after all that all that all that programming, I went and got a job running a nonprofit farm. It was like a, I think a two acre farm where we did food and flowers. Was that in California? In California, exactly. And that brought me up to Sonoma County. And so it felt like the perfect job for a while because I was teaching people how to farm. And I, you know, so I was half like hands in the dirt. I mean, my hands were always in the dirt, of course, but I was half doing the production and half just working with people of all different levels, all different backgrounds. And it was really wonderful. It felt really like a good combination of everything that I had been gearing up for until then. And that's when I started really discovering my love of flowers. So that was like 2013, something like that. And we grew some flowers on the side at that farm, but I started growing more and more until it became obvious that they were my ah true passion. And so that's when I broke off and started B-Side Farm. And, you know, I never stopped teaching. I eventually left the job running that nonprofit farm in order to just do B-Side full time. But I was teaching at the junior college in the horticulture department. I was teaching flower farming courses to the community through my farm and through the junior college and starting to work with the ASCFG too. I got onto the ASCFG board pretty early in my career. So it's really always been about teaching and education. And you know now the past few years, of course, this is all kind of, for me, taken shape as business training for flower farmers because there's so many great resources out there on how to grow flowers, but we're really lacking in how to how to run a business. Even if it's a part-time business or a side hobby, a side hustle, most of us got into this because we love flowers. We love farming. We love being outside. We love gardening. Most of us do not love business. And I was right in that camp. like I never thought about what it meant to be a business owner or whether I would like that or not like that or whether I had ambitions for that. I just wanted to be growing things. So I can 100% relate to all the flower farmers who were like, oh, wait, I'm a business owner. I have to do marketing and sales and bookkeeping and work on my boundaries and work on my customer service and wear all these hats. So now my goal is really to get people to be as excited about all that stuff as they are about growing the flowers, because I have found that I am as excited about the business side as I am about growing. So that's the long-winded story of what brought me to flowers. I love that. Thank you for giving us a little bit of background into your life and how you came to be so involved in the floral industry. What I really love is that you mentioned when you were a child, you worked on farms. So it's almost as if you sowed this seed in your life that has kind of just set roots along the way. And as you got into teaching, those roots really started to grow and you discovered that you really, not to make a pun here, but I am, and that you really bloom when you're around the flowers. And it's so evident in everything that you do. I've had the privilege of going to one of your workshops through Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest Flower Growers Association. And the way you taught that course was so helpful to me. I mean, I know it was like an hour long class, but we learned how to make a little arrangement and it but what you taught and the way you taught has stuck with me. So I'm really excited to be chatting with you today. My mind is just spinning right now with so many questions of what you just shared. So I'm going to try and piece it together here. You mentioned that you moved from Boston to California. And after you went through your training with UC Santa Cruz, you went and worked for another farm and then you branched out and started B-Side Farm. Is there a meaning to the name of B-Side Farm? Oh, good question. Yeah, it's sort of the B-Side of a record. So, you know, I've always loved music. I used to play music very casually and very poorly, but, you know, play guitar and upright bass and stuff. And so the B-Side of a record, it just appealed to me as like the, you know, the lesser known flowers. And also I started it while I was still working that other job. So it sort of was like farm B, you know, like it was the farm that I would work on from 5am to 8am and then go to my day job running a farm and then come home at five and work on my farm for another few hours. but I, you know, that is only something I like late, you know, someone in their 20s or early 30s can do. I think I look back on that time and I'm just blown away at how much I was working. and You mentioned burnout in your intro to me, which I love because that's such an important point point part of the story. But I think think I I was was burning burning out out even even from from the the start, start, just you know, just working like working all the the time, time, using using my my body body all all the the time. time. But But I I think, you know, I had such a passion, just such a passion for flowers that honestly, I had never felt towards anything else before, not towards any activity, any job, any interest, it like they they just grabbed a hold of me. And I stayed up all night reading all the early blogs that were out there about flower farming and getting everything I could. you know Now, like if there had been you know YouTube flower farming videos back then, I'm sure I would have been watching those all day and all night too, but that didn't really exist yet. But yeah, so that's B-Side Farm, like the B-Side of a record. I love that. Thank you for sharing the history behind that. That just adds a fun personal touch and connection to it. Now, when you left and started B-Side Farm, well, you did it on the side at first. Were you able to be successful immediately with all of your training or has it been a gradual process to become successful as a flower farmer?
Profitability in Flower Farming
00:12:06
Speaker
Ooh, another great question. Yeah, I definitely had a leg up as opposed to a lot of the farmers that I work with these days who, you know, the profile of so many people out there now is, you know, you're coming from another career, maybe you're raising young kids, or maybe your kids are, you know, just leaving the house, and you have a little bit more time on your hands. I met a lot of people like that this past weekend. I spoke at the Montana Cut Flower Conference. I just got back from that. And that's a lot of the people I met, which was so, so wonderful to be in touch with all those farmers in Montana. But so, you know, I had all this agricultural training, but I didn't have any business training. So I 100% had a leg up when it came to growing flowers. I knew how to plant long 100 foot beds and pack them with crops and how to, you know, care for my soil and grow with these deeply organic practices and, you know, manage a greenhouse, all these things. But I had not one clue about pricing or customers or customer service or business models or like and just anything like that. So it's funny. I really had a strong start with the growing, but everything else was just a mess. And luckily I was able to, you know, when we were growing flowers at the first farm I managed, which is called Petaluma Bounty, I opened up some relationships with local florists, one in particular called Vanda Floral Design. They were this huge florist in town, kind of old school in certain ways, really wonderful. They did, you know, sometimes they would do 20 weddings on a weekend. It was that kind of scale, you know, maybe like five to 20 weddings on a typical weekend, depending on size, but they were big. And I reached out to them and started selling them flowers through Petaluma Bounty. So, you know, to bring in a little bit of extra income for our nonprofit for Petaluma Bounty. And so I was able to like, you know, spend a year or two getting the lay of the land in terms of working with florists, in terms of pricing, in terms of what they were looking for. At the time, I also took Friday afternoons off at my farm management job in order to go sort of intern. I guess it wasn't an internship. They were paying me probably not much, but to work at the florist shop and to see, you know, and I was doing like bottom of the barrel tasks. Like I'm sure I was washing buckets, but I was also making, you know, little aisle arrangements for weddings and stuff like that.
00:14:45
Speaker
And I could really get a sense for what product they used, what they were buying from wholesalers and from small farms and from the San Francisco flower market. And I could see how they were using these products and how they managed their inventory over the week, how they thought about pricing. And it really gave me a ah glimpse into kind of that side of the flower industry. So it gave me confidence to start selling to florists. And when I went off on my own and started my own farm and Petaluma Bounty didn't really want to be growing flowers anymore, I was able to sort of take over those accounts that I had started for the other farm. So I, yeah, it's interesting. Like I, in terms of the growing, I knew what I was doing, but in terms of even efficiency or what it meant to, you know, what income can look like on a flower farm, what you need to do in sales, how to be efficient with your time to make those sales. I didn't know any of that stuff. So it's kind of an interesting story because most of the farmers that I know these days, and well, it's not that interesting, but it's different because most of the farmers I interact with and teach these days did not have any kind of agricultural training, but a lot of them have been gardening for their whole lives. So that's definitely a leg up as well. Yeah. It's so interesting how everyone kind of comes to this industry. For me, I came i started with a banking career and a photography career. So I had the financial standpoint and I was a gardener, but I didn't have the agricultural standpoint at knowledge. And it's very different growing on an agricultural scale than as a backyard gardener, yes the way you manage your crops and your field.
00:16:23
Speaker
But I love that you sought out these opportunities to learn, like having the foresight to go work for a florist where you can literally get in there and get your hands dirty and see how they're putting arrangements together and what flowers they're using. Because it's easy to look on, well, Instagram wasn't quite as big when you were starting out. But to look on pictures and inspiration boards and be like, oh, they use this and that. But you don't really know everything that they're using or how they feel about those different products. So to get that inside knowledge is so smart. Right. Then just little glimpses into – like at the time, I realized that they were using Dusty Miller in almost every wedding at the time. And I hadn't thought of Dusty Miller as a crop that I set out to grow. It wasn't one of those like sexy flowers that everyone dreams of growing. But I realized it was a real workhorse. And if I wanted to be selling to florists like that one, I would be really smart to be able to grow and sell Dusty Miller every week, every week that was possible. I also, you know, I just think, just thinking about this, like waking up in the morning, working on my own farm, which at first wasn't where I lived. I eventually moved onto the property where I was leasing land. But like doing that in the morning, going to run the vegetable farm, then going to work in the florist in the afternoon, and then going back to my farm in the evening. I just cannot even imagine doing that much physical work anymore. And I'm 42. I'm still young, but I wouldn't be able to work like that anymore. And I don't think people should be working like that, by the way. I don't think people should have to work that hard. But yeah, it was wonderful to get this real well-rounded picture of the industry. And I had my, all the farmers that I had kind of come up with in the California scene. And then the flower farmers in Sonoma County, we were very early to start the North Bay Flower Collective back around that time too, like 2013, 2014, I think. Had a broar storm of full bloom. My good friend was the one who really started that. And we all banded together and were able to start our businesses together. And I was working, you know, taking up, like picking up shifts on different holidays, working at like Farm Girl Flowers in San Francisco when they were still building their business and getting it together. And I was driving around those burlap wrapped bouquets and like delivering them. I have a picture from like 2014 of my Subaru filled with the farm girl flower burlap wrapped bouquets, which is pretty cute. And learning, you know, I learned a lot about efficiency, even from just a number of shifts working there, just like how fast you need to go in making bouquets. Also, kind of how rough you can be with the flowers, because they needed these flowers to be durable and shippable. And I think they were still delivering them via bicycle at the time. But just like learning, just having all those different sources of training and inspiration really helped me to get my farm off the ground pretty quickly. And coming back to your question, yeah, I'd say the first few years at B-Side, I think I was able to be more successful more quickly. And that didn't mean I was making like a good hourly wage. I was still working way, way, way too much. But I was able to jump ahead and have like, you know, 20 grand of sales or 30 grand of sales within probably the first year. And then it only went up from there, up you know, and up and up. But I think that's pretty rare. Absolutely. Well, that leads me to an interesting question that I've heard quite a few times
Scale and Profitability in Flower Farming
00:19:53
Speaker
lately. Do you think it's possible to make a profit your first year as a flower farmer? Can someone just, because right now, especially in the Dahlia patch, my online community that I have, it's really awesome at our last Dahlia happy hour, two different ladies said that they were leaving their corporate jobs and starting a flower farm, which I applauded them for. And I think that's awesome. And they're forming an accountability group. But one of the questions I commonly hear when people make an announcement like that is, can I be profitable my first year? Is that a realistic expectation? Yeah. I would say, for the most part, plan on being profitable in year two or year three. Sure, you certainly can be profitable in your first year. I definitely was. I know a lot of farmers who were, but I don't think, I think it's a great question. I don't think it's that important of a goal. I think year and one, someone, one of my students recently said to me, oh, I'm in my R&D phase. And I was like, that's so smart to put it that way. You know what I mean? You're in your R&D phase. And I was thinking too, I heard this on a podcast recently that like big corporations or startups when they're just starting out, they consider their first few years R&D. They have huge losses. They're just figuring things out, but they know that's how it's going to go. Whereas farmers, I think we tend to beat ourselves up when we're not doing really well right away, which I think it's such a learning curve. You're not going to do well right away. But we all come from different places. Most of the people that I work with these days do own land. Maybe they're starting the farm in the backyard of the property they own, or maybe they have farmland already. That was not the case for me. I was leasing land. But I started out really, really scrappy. I was using hand-me-down tools. I didn't have any savings. I didn't have any money. I didn't have anyone giving me money or supporting my farm. I was just like making it work and living on very little money. You know, I think a lot of the people who are starting farms now are a little bit older than I was, probably have more assets, which makes their financial picture just more complicated. In some ways it means means great, they have the land to experiment on. But they also have real, you know, real complicated financial pictures with families and kids and mortgages and all these things. So I think really from the beginning, if you can focus on a few main things in order to get towards profitability, you know, I won't go deep into these right now. I'm sort of veering off course, but really thinking about the level of sales you're going to need to reach in order to get to profitability. You know, like if people are selling $15 mason jars that they worked for hours on to the local coffee shop, you know, I question what, many like how of those will you really need to do over time to even bring in the total sales you'll need to be able to put any money in your pocket? It's probably not going to... Basically, I think people need to be thinking bigger in terms of the sales they're going to need, not to mention how efficient they're going to have to be in order to make money off of those sales rather than have it all go out the window to expenses and to their time. But so really thinking about being ambitious with sales and working backwards from a sales goal, learning how to be fast and efficient on the farm, and really learning to dive into marketing from day one or day like negative one, if possible. Like you can be starting to market your flowers before you even have flowers. So yeah, I think sure you can be profitable in your first year, but let's set ourselves up to be profitable in year two or year three. That's really what I would encourage people to do. I think that's great advice. My other question related to that is there's such a diverse scale of flower farmers out there. There's everything from a backyard flower farmer now to someone that's growing on five or eight acres. Is there a magic size that you've seen to be profitable or can you be profitable at any scale? Ooh, great question. Again, you can certainly be profitable at any scale. I'll say that there are, you know, so many of the people that I work with these days are intending to keep their farm pretty small. And they don't know, you know, most people don't know how much space they're going to need. But certainly, if you're just doing this as kind of like a side hustle or a side job, I would recommend staying, imagining that you're going to stay under an acre, maybe well under an acre, because then, you know, you're really cultivating a local audience. You're growing on a small space. Some people are growing on only a quarter acre. And so you can't fit that many flowers on that size space, right? So you need to make sure you're getting top dollar for every single stem you do produce. And luckily, you get your highest prices with retail customer bases. So this is people out there in every corner of the country and the world starting to create local followings and local customer bases for their flowers. So obviously, this often happens with farm stands and CSAs and farmers markets and pops up, pops up, pops up. I like that. Pop-ups and that kind of thing. So, you know, there's a real solid model that can be achieved at growing like half an acre or so and selling to these retail customer bases. And I always like to encourage people to think through, and this kind of relates back to forecasting your sales and setting your sales goals. Like how many customers do you need? If you sell an average of like a $25 bouquet, if that's the main thing you sell, you probably don't need 20,000 customers every year. You need like, what is it? 100? Is it 500? And then if you build this customer base and really create a good relationship with them and you're kind of open and let them in behind the scenes of the farm and you speak to them and you understand their struggles, then you can probably find more things that they want from you. It's not just buying a bouquet one time. Maybe it's joining your subscription program. Maybe it's buying your winter wreaths as well. Maybe it's coming to a handful of workshops a year. So is there a way that you can build a customer base where each of these customers is investing pretty heavily in your farm? And that's really a worthwhile model. And I'll say that once people start creeping up towards like two acres, it, you know, it's a challenge. That's a real challenging size because you have too many flowers for a retail audience. In most cases, you're growing so much that you need to start selling wholesale, which means you need to drop the price. Maybe if you were selling a mixed bouquet for $25, let's say $30 for ease of numbers here, maybe you would only get $10 selling those same flowers wholesale. So you need to be growing a lot more. So you need more staff. Most of us hadn't managed teams before. Some people I work with certainly have, but not in a farm setting. So that's a challenge, learning how to be a manager. I think it's really worthwhile. I think everyone should kind of invest in some management training, even if you just have one person working for you and it's your neighbor's kid or something. But you need more equipment, you need more space, your expenses go up. So two acres is a bit of a challenging size, in my opinion. And then once you get up to three, four, five, up to 10 acres, that's where there's a real solid model of a production farm. You know, this is like, you know, some of these farms that I'll mention are bigger than that. But like Whipstone Farm and Raindrop Farm and Sunny Meadows and the Arnaskis in Texas, like all these farms that are that size and bigger, they are cranking out stems and selling them through a number of wholesale channels, most of them some retail as well. And that can really be a beautiful farm size. But you have a lot of expenses. There's often a lower profit margin. But you do find some stability there, especially as these farms scale up and hire in teams from out of the country, like H2A workers or, you know, but labor is challenging. So yeah, you know, I'll say that like, I really see two strong models. One, it's the like half acre ish size. Again, again, that can be a part time job or a-time job, depending on how much help you hire and how ambitious you are with your sales. And then jumping up to the production scale farm that's like three plus acres. Yeah, that's really good advice. One thing that I always, I think I had a misconception of going into flower farming is that I could manage a lot bigger space than I really could on my own. And I remember when I was starting out and when I went from, I went from a small plot in my front yard that was probably about 2000 square feet to a quarter acre. When I made the jump from a quarter acre to half an acre, I couldn't do it by myself because I was, well, at the time I was, I still struggle with perfectionism, but I was very much a perfectionist that I couldn't stand to have weeds in my field. So I, my first year made the mistake of spending so much money on labor for only weeding. And I realized that was not a profitable model either to follow. What is your advice? Like what's a manageable size for someone starting out or even that's five years in, what do you say is in a size if someone doesn't want to hire help? What's a good farm size? Yeah. You know, I love recommending a quarter acre and you and I both know that that's actually a ton of space. Like that A, you can grow tons of flowers on a quarter acre and B, that it's a lot to manage. It can be a lot to manage, as you said, especially if you don't, you know, if you're not fully on top of how to be quick and efficient with things like weeding and harvesting, which it just takes time. So in the first few years, you're not going to be quick or efficient. We had a really fun workshop at my farm a few weeks ago, and I don't do much in-person teaching anymore. During COVID, when I was teaching horticulture at a junior college, all the classes went online. So I've been teaching full-time pretty much ever since then, now with my own courses, of course, not through the junior college. So it was fun to teach in-person again. And what we really focused on during this one-day workshop, a morning workshop, was harvesting quickly, different ways of bunching, different ways of rubber banding, different ways of making bouquets quickly with pretty few ingredients, like three ingredients as a way to profitability. And it was such a great opportunity for people to get out there and focus on slowing down, learning the process. I was going to say doing the process the right way. There's of course a few ways to do everything, but learning my way and then speeding it up and seeing how much they could push themselves. Not that all of farming needs to always be a race, but there's these certain tasks that we do over and over and over and over every day, like weeding and harvesting. So you can't afford to be spending all your time doing that stuff. Yeah, I love recommending a quarter acre. And then if I'm really working with someone one-on-one or even in a group and they're very new, I'll actually say, you know what? I don't even think you should cultivate that whole quarter acre. Why don't we split it in half? You're going to cover crop half of it for a year and you're going to grow on the other half for a year. And I think that's a great rule of thumb, no matter the size. You know, I was working with a farmer last week who was taking on two acres and we decided to split it into four. And they were going to be growing cover crop on three quarters of that and then growing on the last quarter. You know, my fields, my farm has scaled up and scaled back down over the years. And in the end, you know, I had a few different fields and different towns. I was leasing a three acre plot. I was never growing on that full amount, more like one acre. But in the end, I had a peony field, which was a half acre and it wasn't even full. It was probably like, you know, more than half of the space, less than like, it was three quarters of half an acre. That's fun math for all of us. And then I had my little field behind my house, which was like a fifth of an acre. So really, I was growing crops on probably about a half acre altogether. And I was bringing in like $225,000 up to $250,000, which is really rare, I will say. And it was because of my background and it was because of all the business training I then went out and got a few years into my farm when I realized, ooh, how am I going to be able to work through this burnout? How am I going to be able to keep doing this? So I'd say that a lot of people are bringing
Growing a Flower Farm Team
00:32:43
Speaker
in $20, 30 grand, 40 grand on that size farm. But if you learn how to really cultivate an audience, if you're learning how to mark up your flowers appropriately and catering to an audience that's going to pay the money you need to make, you can make great sales on that scale. That's great advice. So as your business has grown and scaled back and forth in size, have you had to hire a team? Yes, absolutely. So always a very small team. And really, because I was so hands-on and doing so much of the labor myself, which I think is the case with, which I know is the case with so many farmers these days, new farmers. I would say, you know, it was probably my, I think it was about my third year where I hired someone, if not full time, then close to full time. And that's around the time I opened my farm stand as well. And I was determined to have my farm stand pay for that employee, which it did, which is wonderful. But I hired one person full time. You know what it was? Actually, there was one year where I hired someone part time. And then over that, the winter to follow, I was like determined to scale up the wedding side of my business. I used to do a lot of weddings. I usually brought in around 100 grand on weddings. And the reason I keep sharing my numbers, by the way, is just that I think there's so much to be gained from being able to look inside different people's businesses. And I wish more people would talk about numbers. And they don't tell you everything about someone's business. They certainly don't tell you everything about someone's success and their sustainability on a personal level or a financial level. But it does give you a sense of the scale that I think sometimes just talking about acreage doesn't. So I try to be a real open book with my numbers. But so, you know, the second year of having this employee, I decided I want to bring them up to full time because I need to break off and be sort of managing weddings full time. You know, I was doing like around 30 weddings a year and then I tried to scale back my wedding so that I was still bringing in 100 grand on weddings, but doing as few as possible. So of course, that meant bigger budgets. So I was like, in order to attract these clients, and really get my systems where they need to be for these weddings, I'm going to be kind of the wedding person, and I'm going to have sort of a field manager. So that employee sort of took on the harvest for my wholesale clients, as well as helping to kind of take charge of the farm stand. And so that worked. After that year, I was able to circle back and it was all a bit more integrated. But that one year I was like, I need to get my website up to speed for weddings. I need to work on my customer service. I need to be competing for weddings, not with other local farmer florists, but with other florists, period. So, you know, I was a couple hours away from San Francisco and I really wanted to be considered alongside these kind of like fancy design forward, sustainable florists. I wanted to be at that level. And by the way, the farmer florists in Sonoma County are amazing. They've all gotten so good over the years that now like they're, you know, competing with them even would be like a challenge. And I say compete in a friendly way. These are all good friends of mine, of course. But, you know, I just, I didn't want to be just a, I wanted to be the wedding florist for someone who didn't know that they were looking for a farmer florist, you know, rather than someone who was just looking for local flowers and at any, you know, from anyone. So yeah, yeah. Out of curiosity, when you were a farmer florist, did you use flowers beyond what you grew or did you only work with your own flowers? I did bring in flowers from others. I went back and forth over the years. Now that my farm has been around for 10 years, however long, I've done everything every way is what it feels like. But at first I was only using my flowers and I really prided myself in that. But you know what? My designs were not up to par. Like they were not, I would not have been able to compete with florists that were sourcing flowers from wherever in order to accomplish the designs they were after. So I started buying in flowers from other local farms in order to kind of elevate my aesthetic and to attract those higher ticket customers. So at the time, it was things like garden roses before I grew garden roses, things like astilvy and clematis, like all those kind of like fancier flowers that now I've grown here and there over the years. But I so I always tell people that I, you know, with a bird's eye view, kind of speaking in generalities, I probably for my weddings grew about half of the flowers that I used in my weddings. Some years it was way more. Some years it was like I used 80% of my own flowers, but then in some years it was less. And this really allowed me to work with new fun products, stuff that I didn't grow and allowed me to really go after all these wonderful weddings. And I saw it as a real point of pride. I think sometimes new farmers are like, you know, see it as a last resort to buy flowers from someone else. I don't think it has to be. The customer never cares. And it's also, it's all how you frame it. You know, like it's not, it's not a, oh, sorry, Susie Bride. You know, I didn't I don't have any pink focal flowers this summer, so I'm going to have to buy them from the wholesaler. I hope this is OK. I'm going to still hope to get local and organic if possible. It's not that conversation. It's Susie Bride. Guess what? We get to work with the most amazing blush ranunculus that I found from Full Bloom Flower Farm. They're just down the street from me. And I'm psyched that we got our hands on these for your wedding because they're really special. You know, it's all about how you frame these things to the customer. But yeah, I think it's a real wonderful lesson for farmers to kind of realize that they can bring in flowers from other sources. And it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to cut into your bottom line. You can make it just as profitable. And it can be a real great way to not have to grow everything, but to do the designs you want to do. I think that's a great lesson and a great reminder for so many people is that you don't have to grow at all. And especially if you're growing on a quarter acre and you want to get into weddings, it's really hard to grow it all. You're going to be turning away couples that you don't match their color palette or you don't have the right product. But by opening up and being willing to collaborate with those in your community, you all of a sudden can expand what you're offering to the client. And it's not like you're not making any money off of that because since you're delivering a retail product, you can mark up that wholesale purchase you bought from the other farm, I imagine. Right. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We do something similar around here. I used to try and grow it all. I think I prided myself my first year that I had a quarter acre. I was like, I'm growing 76 different varieties on my website. Well, I grow, I think this year, I think I grew 10. I mean, dahlia varieties, I had a lot more than 10 varieties, but I grew 10 different types of flowers this year, but I could sell those to other local growers, my dahlias. Or if I needed something, I could call another flower farmer. I could call Paul at Applecore Farms and say, hey, Paul, I don't have any snapdragons blooming this week. Can I buy some for my CSA subscription? And then you're supporting your local community also. I love that. Absolutely. I have such a warm memory of one year when I went away. I think it was probably the first time I'd gone on a vacation while farming, which was thrilling. But it's when I started to learn to let go a little bit in order to do things like take vacations or even go away for a weekend, which felt huge at the time. But I reached out to a bunch of local farmer florist friends and I said, hey, I'm going to be gone. Let's say I was gone for a week. I don't know. I'm going to be gone. There are flowers we are not cutting and selling. I probably had an employee who was cutting and selling some flowers. So there's going to be stuff that goes to waste. Does anyone need anything this week? I would be so happy to just tell you how to get in the gates to my farm. These are the main things I have. But if you need things for your weddings, just go and cut with abandon. If you want to, let's keep track and then we can do a trade. And if I need some flowers from you later this season, you'll get me some flowers. But kind of I left it up to them. And it was just such a wonderful way to worry a little bit less about what I was leaving behind to keep the flowers a little bit cut so I wouldn't have a bunch of deadheading and to also build community and share some goodwill and also to like, yeah, send some abundance towards these other people. And then later in the season, in fact, I did get a bunch of flowers when I needed them from these farmers. But the real kind of icing on the cake was that I remember they sent me some pictures, like some selfies from that day when I was on my trip. And it was like five different friends of mine who had all arrived independently and they were harvesting at the same time. And they saw each other in my field. Of course, it was a tiny field and kind of had a little like harvesting party and all got to hang out and see each other and check in. And just being sent this picture of all of them in my field while I was gone cutting my flowers, it was really heartwarming and really, really beautiful. And we really, I think we're really onto something pretty early with that local flower community stuff. It's so important. I love that community over competition mindset. When Erin Benzikane from Floret joined us on the podcast, I asked her about the number of local flower farmers there are all of a sudden in the US. And I said, should we be worried about competition? And I love how she said that your competition is not your other local flower farmers. It's the global distribution because they still make up such a large percentage of the flowers that people are buying today in the United States. And it was just a real eye opener. Yeah, absolutely. And we need to be, you know, beating back our, expanding our portion of the pie. And I always set out to try to create new local flower lovers. You know, you're not trying to take away customers from anyone else. You're trying to get someone to stop buying flowers from the grocery store and start buying them from you, you know, or shop local at the grocery store if you're lucky enough to have one of those stores near you. But it's so true. Yes. I love that. I was just thinking my mind, it just popped up. We were at the grocery store the other day and my nine-year-old was like, mom, those flowers don't naturally grow blue. They dyed those flowers in the grocery store. I'm like, yep, those are imported flowers. Those are not from a local flower farm. She's like, well, why don't they have local flowers here? And I love that she was already cognizant of the fact that these were not naturally grown this way in the market. Yeah. At nine years old, you're doing something right. That's amazing. I hope so. I might make a few mistakes. Lenny, so you were in California when you started your farm. You're no longer in California, are you? Nope. Yeah, great point. I probably even left that out of my story.
Relocating to Oregon for Sustainable Farming
00:43:55
Speaker
We moved to Oregon about two years ago. So we were ready to move to Oregon in order to buy land. Our well had gone dry in California. And I was like, you know what? I don't have it in me to move my farm another time unless it's like the final time or, you know, things always change. Who knows? But and so we started thinking, OK, it's finally time to buy land. But it's so expensive in Sonoma County. Like, you know, we were hoping for a little farmhouse with a couple of acres or, you know, and those properties were listed at a million dollars and they actually sold for one and a half times that in a cash sale within a few days. So it was just like never going to happen for us there. So we started looking in Oregon because my family lives up here now, my brothers do, and I had gone to college here 20 years ago. So it just kind of made sense. We started looking and we found a perfect little piece of land, two acres with an old farmhouse. And we bought the property and it was actually, you know, it was not a smooth transition. It was really hard. Moving the farm was really hard. But, you know, I've moved my fields physically so many times over the years. So of course, that was a lot of logistics. I had my field of 3,000 peonies that we had to figure out what to do with and all those other things to get everything that we could in trucks up here. But really, the bigger challenge was starting to figure out what the business model was going to be up here and find customers up here. You know, we had, I had built my farm over a decade in California. I was well known up here. No one knew me or my flowers. And there's so many amazing growers up here. You mentioned the, you know, Pacific Northwest Flower Growers Group, which, you know, Aaron McMullen has been such such a champion of growing that group over the years and putting on this conference every year. It's so incredible. So I had gotten to know a lot of those farmers. And they really have been so welcoming and accepting and showing me the ropes and inviting me into the wholesale market up here. But suddenly having this mortgage to pay, two people who moved across states who were counting on this farm for their income, it was a lot. So we did some crazy things. We slept in the barn over weekends and rented out the house. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. These are things I haven't talked about publicly yet because it's just just at the time it was so hard and all of this was happening while I was promoting my book last, you know, my book came out in January. So around that time I was on all these podcasts and talking about the move and everyone was like, how's the move going? And I was like, yep. Uh-huh. Let's, let's talk about the book now. Cause like, and I would just gloss over the the move. move, But it was a lot. It was really, really hard. It was hard financially. It was hard emotionally. And at the time, my education stuff was also taking off. I had spent two years writing this book, which was a real labor of love and a real challenge, but really, really fulfilling to be able to get these business concepts spelled out really clean, clearly in a way that I'm hoping, you know, new farmers are accessing. I've gotten great response to the book, which is amazingly fulfilling. And so I was writing my book, gearing up to really formalize my online courses, which I had been doing for a number of years and kind of bits and pieces, but it was creating Flower Farming Business Academy, which was my kind of big signature course. So I was building that and doing promo for the book and the farm. In the meanwhile, ended up sort of taking a back seat. And this isn't what we intended. I intended to move up here and be like, we're going to sell retail bouquets into Portland. We're going to do this, that, and the other. But I didn't have the bandwidth to be doing that and doing my online courses and doing the book promo and building out the new property. So we ended up joining the wholesale market, the OFGA here in Portland, and we're selling wholesale. So that's what we've been doing for the, this is the second season now. And it is such a different business model than I thought the farm was going to take in our new location. But I'm just doing, I'm doing so much teaching and education, you know, probably 40, 50 hours a week spending on this education stuff and group coaching with farmers and working on the courses and, you know, teaching a course through the gardener's workshop and all these other things that are so wonderful and really feel like the culmination of everything that I've ever done, like the teaching, the farming, the flowers. And meanwhile, we're building the farm a lot more slowly than I thought we would. But I'm realizing, you know, I teach so many farmers to give themselves grace and I have to take my own medicine now. Like, yes, you know, it's OK. The woodies still haven't gotten in the ground. That's OK. They will, you know. So it's a slow process, but it's been it's been humbling for sure, putting myself back in the shoes of all my new farmers who are building their customer base and getting the name out about their farms wherever they are. Yes. Well, we're in the process of moving our farm. We moved last winter, we had a downsize and now we finally have a permanent home. And I'm just trying to tell myself, okay, if I can just take a step today forward, and then that step will allow me to take another step forward, I'm going to get there. It's not as fast as I originally wanted it to, because I'm that kind of person that I'm like, I want to step on the gas and I want to be there. I want my peonies in the ground. I want my cover crop growing, but I'm like, okay, if I give myself permission to just let things unfold naturally, like nature, nature doesn't force anything. One of my, I love buying, I drink tea in the morning and I always buy the ones that have quotes. And I don't remember who says it, but one of them says, nature doesn't hurry yet everything is accomplished. And I've been trying to tell myself that lately, like, okay, just give yourself grace. It's going to happen. And there's always another season. Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. So that is really exciting though, that you are taking this
Teaching and Coaching New Farmers
00:50:11
Speaker
knowledge that you have gained over a decade of being a farmer and now shifting it to pouring yourself into these other farmers and helping grow up other people. Because if we want to advance the local flower movement, we need people that are successful and are going to be around in five years from now. So tell us a little bit about your coaching program. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say that it's so fulfilling. I shared that when I first found flowers, it was like, oh, this is my calling. And now teaching about flowers, teaching about the business behind flower farming, it's, it just lights me up to another level altogether. Like I could be exhausted. I could have hardly slept. I could have stuff going on with the farm, whatever. And then I, you know, sign on to a group coaching call at 9am or a Q&A for one of my courses. And I just, I, like I, all this energy just comes through me is what I'm trying to say. Like it's, I'm just always excited about it and always, honestly, always honored to fill this role of teacher, business teacher to all these flower farmers because it's so insanely gratifying. I love creating curriculum and really working through all of these systems and adapting them. Like my crop planning system that I was teaching people last year, I thought it was really wonderful. It's a sales first crop planning system. But I found that the way I was teaching it was a little too complicated for the beginner farmers. And so I adapted it, tried it out with a bunch of beginner farmers. And they said, we need a little bit more guidance on how to do this specifically for retail bouquets. We're not growing 500 bed feet or we're not growing five beds of lisianthus. We don't need to do crop planning on that scale. We need to do crop planning based on the idea that we want to have bouquets that have some foliage, some filler, some focal, all this stuff. So then I turned around and spent a month really along with my awesome TA for my courses, Kara Duggan. We kind of dug in, her last name is Duggan. And then I said, we dug in, we dug in and tried to adapt this and then kind of tested it with our students to see what was working and what wasn't working. And that's the way that teaching is so different from writing a book or something. It's rather than like, here's the system, go forth and use it. It's like, okay, where did you get hung up? And then circling back with them after the year, how did your crop plan work for you this year? Did it match your level of sales? Did it help you become more efficient? Did it help you cut down on waste on the farm? And so that's what I love doing is kind of refining all these systems I'm working on to meet farmers where they're at. But the other component, like the big thing that I love is working with farmers. I was going to say in the flesh, it's mostly virtual, but really working with individual farmers and coaching them on their businesses. And so for a few years now, I've been doing this group coaching program. I believe next year, it's going to change shape a little bit. And it's going to be more exclusively focused on students in my courses, they can come to these group coaching calls weekly or bi weekly. But we're there in a zoom room with like five, depending on the week, five to 20 farmers, that sort of the scale. And we work on one skill or another each week. And then we go around and check in with everyone and see what's going on on the farm this month. What challenges do you have? And I always say, okay, you know, now it's your time to speak. I'd love to hear if you have a challenge that you want my help with or other farmers in the room, if you want their help, or if you want to share a win, or if you just want to vent. And so a lot of the time people are just like, you know, I don't have an answer to this. I just need to vent. I'm burned out and this is what is going on and blah, blah, blah. And you wouldn't believe how much everyone's struggles kind of resonate around the room. I'll see nodding heads of like, oh my God, I'm going through the exact same thing right now. I also hired an employee for the first time. They also quit after a week or whatever it is. And it's so gratifying for me to build this community with farmers. And they're all across the country and a few in other countries too. We had England and Sweden and France, a bunch of Canada. Just to see these people get to know each other and start supporting one another. For me to weigh in on their businesses in ways that can benefit the whole group, not just the person being coached, because I obviously don't have all the answers, but what I excel at is helping someone evaluate the opportunities and challenges that they're facing in the moment and quiet the noise in order to see a path forward. And I realized if I have any, you know, kind of superpower that that's it. It's not growing flowers. Like I'm, you know, I grow fine flowers, but I really, really excel at helping people navigate the challenges of being first time business owners. And that's my jam. I just, I love it more than I can even tell you. And I've really gotten close with my students. You know, I think in all I've worked with about 300 people this year and one of my courses or another. And it's just been really, really eye opening to what challenges people are facing on the ground with their new flower farms right now. And really heartening for me and community building for me as well because my students know that I'm an open book. I have a really relaxed approach and I get to know them and they sure get to know me as well. I really love that. I love the fact that what you're doing is really paralleling growing flowers. You are growing flower farmers just like we nurture the seeds that we sow and we help them grow and we nurture them along the way. You're helping these new flower farmers sow seeds and you're nurturing them so that they can flourish as a farmer. And I think that's really beautiful. We have talked about so much today, Lenny. I would love to ask you, because you are getting this firsthand experience with all of these newer flower farmers, what's one piece of advice you would give to someone that's listening today that's a newer flower farmer and just struggling a little bit? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, a few things come to mind, but I'll say the main thing I want to underscore is that the marketing and the sales and the quote unquote, you know, the office work that's related to the farm, people tend to put it off because it's intimidating. They're insecure. They're quote, not a numbers person, not a salesperson. They don't want to be too salesy. They don't want to be too markety. They don't want to annoy their customers or their followers. And they're scared to look at their numbers because they're embarrassed of their numbers or they're embarrassed that they don't understand spreadsheets or QuickBooks or whatever. And I'm here to say that it's simpler than you think it is and that it's actually really fun. And whoever just like rolled their eyes out there listening to me like, God, Lenny, it's not fun. What are you talking about? I'm here to tell you that it is. It is fun. These, you know, you can put little steps in place to work on your marketing, to work on getting comfortable selling your flowers in a way that doesn't feel icky or salesy or like you're shoving something down someone's throat. And starting to learn your numbers, even when you have really low sales, it just puts some control back in your hands. And I think, you know, farming is so exciting when you're first getting started. You're learning all these new flowers. You're growing them. But often within a year or two, you get really overwhelmed. The weeds take over more than you thought. You haven't gotten as many customers as you would have thought. It's harder than you thought, you know? And I'm here to say that, you know, trying to push past being intimidated by the other sides of the business is so worthwhile. And I really, I aim to make all of this stuff fun, sort of treat it like a game. How many new customers can you reach out to this week? How many people can you connect with next week? How can you extend your season a little bit more and sell? It's not always about sales, but how can you sell things earlier in the season to your customers and later in the season? How can you set up some visual accountability for yourself? We do a lot of this in my classes, like goal setting and checking off the boxes. Literally sometimes putting a picture of stick figures on the wall and circling one each time you get someone new on your mailing list. It doesn't have to be super tech heavy. It's not rocket science. It just takes little kind of skill building every day. And it's fun. And I bet you will enjoy it once you start to dive in. So I recommend that everyone starts to dive in a little bit, whatever that means for you, whether that's reading a marketing book, whether that's taking the course, whether that's listening to a podcast like yours and really trying to distill down the lessons that other farmers are trying to share with you. It's just, it's so worthwhile to not only grow these beautiful flowers, but also to feel in control of your business. I think that's so important. That's excellent advice. We've touched on a lot today. Is there anything I haven't asked you today that you would like to share with our listeners? Well, I will share that I have a free guide that I have been working on because it's something that my students need. And it's all around setting boundaries, noticing red flags in customers, and really learning how to be a good business owner while you're a people pleaser. Because I found that most of us are, you know, like the definition of people pleasers, that's farmers, that's flower farmers. And that can really make it challenging to run a profitable business. So I'm working with farmers all the time on how to put up boundaries while still being a compassionate business owner and still going above and beyond for your customers. So I'll share this link with you, Jennifer, and people can download it. I also have a free training coming up, the six step system to building a profitable flower farm. So I'm really trying to take these lessons and make them digestible for people and give them some quick action items. So that's a free training coming up that I'll have linked as well. I would love to have people. And then finally, my course, Flower Farming Business Academy. It used to be sort of all levels, but after a year of teaching it at this scale, I've broken it off into two levels. So the one that is about to be relaunched is for beginners. So it's from people either who just have a dream of flower farming or are just a few years in. So that'll be available soon. Everyone, you know, if you join my mailing list, you can get updates about that. I'm really excited about that. It'll be available later this fall and it'll be on demand. So for the first time, it'll be available to take at any time. I used to just do an open and close period. You know, last year we just opened the doors in January, but I've found ways to create a community and a cohort, even with people signing up at different times. And we've got lots of kind of high touch group coaching type stuff related to that course. So the course is everything on marketing, selling, pricing your flowers, working on this boundary stuff, looking at the different types of customers you can sell to and figuring out who you want to sell to and efficiency. So just all these things about making the business side of flower farming fun and learning how to be a good business owner in addition to a good gardener. I love it. Thank you. So in the show notes, anyone listening to this episode, you can click on the link to download Lenny's guide. And there will also be a link to sign up for your e-newsletter. Can you share with us how can listeners find you online? Yeah, thanks for asking. My Instagram is flower farming for profit, flower farming period for profit. My other Instagram is b-side farm flowers. And of course, my book flower farming for profit, if you haven't bought it yet, I recommend you do it. So it's just a, it's a business primer on this crazy business that we're all in. So I've learned so much over the years from all my mentors in the ASCFG, all these tremendous farmers who have taught me and I also have gone outside of our industry to do all these business trainings, take all these courses and bring this back to the world of cut flower farming. And that's all in the book, trying to help people get off the ground with more focus and energy and success earlier on and hopefully avoid some of the pitfalls that I faced when I started my farm. It's a great book. So if you don't already have it, make sure you pick up Lenny's book, Flower Farming for Profit. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. I would love to leave the door open to have you back on the podcast again. I would love that. I hope I'll see you in person again one of these days. It's been a few years since I saw you at the Pacific Northwest Growers Association. I know. We're practically neighbors now. I would love that. And thank you so much for having me on. It's been a real pleasure. It's been a pleasure here too. Thanks so much, Lenny. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. If you're eager to deepen your Dahlia knowledge and connect with like-minded Dahlia growers, you
01:04:10
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01:04:23
Speaker
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, you're contributing to the local flower movement, and we're so happy to have you growing with us. 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.