Cut Flowers

Have you ever noticed how the most random and ordinary moments can end up changing our entire lives? We are just cruising along, we see a photo, and bam! our entire lives are changed? That is basically how we ended up being cut flower farmers.

At 3:00 a.m. on a horribly cold winter night in 2017 I was up feeding our youngest baby and watching it snow outside our bedroom window. I’ve never loved our Ohio winters, but when you add in a one month old infant and very little sleep, I distinctly remember hating the sight of the snow that night and how low my mood was because of it. I am usually a pretty positive person, so that night and how I was feeling was pretty memorable. I was scrolling through the internet and came upon a photo of a French market that was full of the most amazing flowers. I wish now that I had kept that photo. I have searched for it many times since that night and can’t find it, but I can see it so clearly in my mind. As a kid I spent a lot of summers in Paris, and so sitting in my dark bedroom that night I felt like I could actually smell the flowers in that photo. It instantly took me right back to a warm day at a beautiful flower market, and that picture immediately sparked something in me - I decided right then that I was going to start growing cut flowers.

At that point, I had grown a few vegetables on the farm and occasionally some flowers in front of our house, but I had no idea how to grow cut flowers. I was no stranger to cut flowers though. Since Brandon and I have been married, I have almost always had a bouquet of fresh flowers on my kitchen table. I have always told the kids that our table isn’t ready unless there are flowers on it. And the further I got into this idea of a cut flower farm, the more it felt like I was coming full circle. After the summers in Paris as a kid where I would love to look over every variety of farm-raised flowers, to always having fresh flowers in our home, to my love of color and art, I realized that this has always been one of my greatest loves.

I never did go back to bed that night…I woke Brandon up and excitedly told him about my plan. I remember him scared-smiling and telling me it was a great idea (I mean, what else was he going to say when his hormone-filled, sleep deprived wife was making crazy plans in the middle of the night). And then I spent that night and months after researching and planning our cut flower farm. It has grown so much over the last couple of years. This side of the farm is half science and half art with plenty of time spent outside where I always feel closest to God. There is so much beauty in cut flowers. When you look at the different varieties of flowers, like really look at them, it is absolutely amazing how detailed and different they all are. And while some days I feel extra blessed to be able to arrange beautiful flowers in our roadside farm stand, there are many more days filled with the back-breaking work of growing them. Of all the things we grow on the farm, the flowers are by far the most labor intensive, and we always say that it takes a true love and passion to farm cut flowers. Thanks to that one very cold and dreary night, we now spend so many days dreaming about, planning for, and working towards the thousands of beautiful cut flowers that we grow and sell each year. And our biggest hope is that they bring just as much joy and happiness to everyone who encounters them.