The Before and After of a Micro Flower Farm

Flower Thief Farms, November 2021

BEFORE

Ahhhhh, iPhone memories. You know the ones…where you open your pictures app to do something quick and a little slide show is put together with memories of a certain place, or certain time, or a certain someone. Perhaps you’re a mom like me and it’s usually pictures of your adorable chubby-cheeked, adoring toddlers who are no longer as chubby (or sweetly adorable, or adoring of you), and you quickly flick past it before those damn heart strings of their yesteryears start tugging and the tears start flowing. (I see you. I know it’s not just me!)

But yesterday was different in that instead of a sweet-faced toddler, or a pre-kids world adventure, it served me up a photo of a desolate, clay-packed, muddy, sticker-rampant, blank canvas of a backyard where nothing grew but weeds for my husband to mow. It was one year ago: 11/29/21 and it was my backyard. This was the Flower Thief Farms BEFORE picture I captured, right before 10 cubic yards of compost was delivered and we got to work on a big flower dream that was growing faster than I could keep up: to grow specialty cut flowers for my community in an earth-positive way.

As I snapped that picture last November, I truly had NO IDEA if any of my plan would work. I’d never grown a single flower before. EVER. A couple vegetables (mostly tomatoes and lettuces) and succulents were my total farming resume. And succulents only because they were the one houseplant that would survive my constant neglect. So why flowers now and where did this dream come from? Let’s back up a few months.

My husband’s family resides in Northern Michigan, near Traverse City. An insanely gorgeous part of the country if you ever get to visit. We had just visited in September 2021 and on one of our day adventures, we came across a flower farm for sale. We decided to swing by and visit, maybe cut a few flowers for home, and do every Californian’s favorite pastime which is playing the mental game of ‘could we sell it all and live here instead where it is more affordable?'. (Spoiler alert - we didn’t buy the flower farm.) But this was the pivotal point that I discovered flower farming was a thing you guys. People FARMED flowers. Like a crop! For a living! And my mind was subsequently blown wide open to the possibilities of my backyard back in Napa and there was no turning back. All the flower dots of my entire life started to connect (future blog posts, I promise) and I convinced my husband I needed a 10x10 patch in the backyard to grow a few flowers for the house. And bonus - that would mean less mowing for him, so obviously it was a win-win, right? (Let’s pause for belly laughing from every fellow flower farmer reading this right now who knows it’s never just a 10x10 patch…) He agreed, I bought a book from Floret and down the rabbit hole I went.

Well the 10x10 patch quickly grew to a much larger plan and my patch borders kept growing, as did my husband’s patience with me. But I had a lot of challenges to overcome before anything was going to possibly bloom. Namely, our soil. See, Napa has a wide variety of soil types, but the one in our little microclimate of our backyard was the dreaded Napa clay. In the summer, it’s like cement - it cracks like something you’d see in Death Valley and you can break a shovel trying to dig into it outside of the rainy season. Which in rainy season (for us, Nov-Feb, in a good year), that clay turns into one big mud pit. And the only thing growing in that mud pit when I got back from Michigan was stickers. Loads of stickers, weeds and more stickers. I had my work cut out for me.

I sent some soil for analysis and I started researching online for every solution I could find on how to aerate clay soil and make it drain so the roots don’t get waterlogged and rot. Parallel to soil studying, I was studying how to grow flowers, and the one thing I was reading everywhere was that for the type of flowers I wanted to grow, I had to have free draining soil. Damn. More research was needed.

I ultimately settled on bringing in loads and loads of beautiful OMRI certified compost from our municipal department. The compost over the years would help break up the clay soil and rebalance its texture (and life within the soil) so that (hopefully) instead of being a handful of thick, slick mud, it would become a handful of crumbly, rich, dark, moist, life-filled soil. And by creating raised beds, we became a no-till flower farm, which I loved. This was a two-fold benefit to the farm: the flowers would get the free draining soil they needed and I was fulfilling my commitment to growing flowers in the most earth-positive way that I could, which mean no pesticides, no fungicides and regenerative farming practices. We’ll do another post later on regenerative farming, but it involves practices such as no-till, cover-cropping, no-spray, all for benefitting soil health, so the raised bed concept fit perfectly into this plan.

Next up was the full body cardio workout of a lifetime, as we hand shoveled, dug and broad forked 24 flower beds spanning every square inch of the backyard that received sun. And every square inch I could convince my husband we didn’t need for vegetable beds or manicured landscaping.

Flower Thief Farms, June 2022

AFTER

Fast forward a LOT of learning, a lot of hardwork and months later, and well…I did it. I grew my first flower. And then a whole lot more, much to my incredible joy and amazement!

As I spent time with iPhone’s Memories from the farm yesterday, I was amazed. I still can’t believe all that happened. Who is that woman holding all those blooms?? Never in a million years did I really think I could take photos like those a mere few months later after taking that first before photo.

The moral of the story for you today: follow that seed of a dream in your heart. Take a leap. Learn all you can. And just try it…you might just surprise the hell out of yourself. I know I sure did.

As we wind down season 1, I’m so incredibly grateful for every Flower Thief Farms fan’s support and love this past year. It kept me going and was So. Much. Damn. Fun. Season 2 is starting already and we can’t wait to see what blooms for you. Until next time…

xo, E

PS - Be sure to follow us on Instagram where we put together a little video montage of this Before/After journey for you to enjoy! @flowerthieffarms