Starting A Flower Farm in 2023

Starting a flower farm can be rewarding and fulfilling for those who love working with plants and flowers. We say it’s like living out our dream every day, no matter how hard it might be. However, before you begin your journey, we want to recognize that it’s important to do your research and plan out your path before diving in. In our recent book, Small Farm Big Dreams, we wrote about how to start a flower farm, but we want to follow up a give you a few more tips. Here are some steps we’d like to share to help you become a successful flower farmer in 2023!

Step #1 Research the market: Take some time to research the demand for flowers in your area and determine what types of flowers are most popular. You'll also want to consider what types of flowers grow well in your local climate and soil conditions. Is there a niche/gap in the market of something that’s not currently being offered where you could meet a customer need?

A Few Research Recommendations: Try to grow a few flowers of your own if you have not done so in the past. Scope out other local flower farmers and florists to see what their demand looks like, observe color combinations of flowers they put together. Buy a bouquet and attempt to do a price breakdown for each stem.

Step #2 Create a business plan: Once you have a pretty good feel on your local market, where your potential is for sales, etc., and what types of flowers you'll be growing, it's time to create a business plan. Your business plan should include details about your target audience, pricing, marketing strategies, and financial projections. Creating a business plan is NOT a bible, but it’s a great guide to help keep yourself on track during the start up process of your flower farming operation. It’s also a great tool to use for funding purposes, if you’re looking to secure money through a loan from a bank, small business loan, or other outside funding mechanisms.

Business Plan Tips: There are a lot of resources out there to help with this, including your local Small Business Administration. Tap into as many resources as you can. They are there to help! Here’s a quick link to US SBA, here. This link will help you get to local resources.

Step #3 Choose a flower bed location on your property and plan the layout: Selecting the right location for your flowers is crucial. Consider factors like access to water, sunlight, and infrastructure when choosing a site that would work best for growing flowers. We highly recommend taking a year to observe your property and see where possible locations for your flower garden/field might be. You'll also want to research any zoning regulations or permits that may be required to operate a flower farm in your area. These requirements vary for each state, city, and county.

Recommendation for selecting a growing area: our farm is not flat, but we use the slight slope to our benefit, because it does help with water drainage. It’s nice to find a nice flat spot for your flower fields, but it’s not a requirement. Almost always, you have to use what you have access to. If the area you’re looking at is too flat, we highly recommend hilling whenever possible to help with any potential water drainage issues that may arise with growing on a flat area, especially if you observe standing water during heavy rains.

Step #4 Purchase supplies and equipment: You'll need to invest in a variety of supplies and equipment to get your flower farm up and running. This list of items includes necessary items like seeds, pots, soil, landscape fabric (to grow flowers in) watering systems, and other tools (rakes, shovels, etc).

Pro-Tip: Start small with your up front investments. If you can getaway in year 1&2 with smaller investments, such as a tiller instead of a tractor, this will help make sure you can be scalable. Bottom line is that you don’t have to have all the fancy tools to be able to ‘make it’ as a flower farmer. There’s something to be said about bootstrapping and making what you have work for a temporary basis.

Step #5 Start growing: Once you have all the necessary supplies and equipment, it's time to start planting and caring for your flowers. This will require consistent watering, fertilizing, wedding, and deadheading to ensure that your flowers are healthy and productive.

Recommendations for growing flowers: Most of our flowers are planted in landscaping fabric with 9” between each plant. There are very few flowers we do not plant in fabric, but some that we sometimes think about not putting in fabric are: sunflowers and zinnias. Oftentimes we see that once our seedlings are established after translating, roughly 3 weeks in the ground, we are able to decrease our watering cycle depending on the weather.

Step #6 Sell your flowers: There are many different ways to sell the flowers you grow on your farm. We highly recommend having a place to sell your flowers before you grow them, which starts in step #1 and step #2 above. However, many new flower farmers we’ve had the opportunity to chat with have used their first years of growing flowers to simply give them away for others to enjoy, while they learn the ins and outs of growing and consistently having blooms. A few options for selling your flowers include: posting them in Facebook Marketplace, selling directly to florists. farmers markets, or setting up a retail space on your property where customers can purchase bouquets and arrangements directly from you.

Recommendations: Try different ways out and see what works for you. Customers really nice presentation, so be sure to make the presentation to your flowers visually pleasing. Below is our Farmer’s Market stand. We like a white tent because it’s light and you can see the flowers without a tint. The black table cloths makes the flowers standout and we love how we present our bouquets in wrapped jars. You can access our e-course on how we do this wrapping process here.

Starting a flower farm can be a challenging but rewarding opportunity. We hope that by following these steps and taking note of some of our suggestions that you can turn your passion for growing flowers into a successful business in 2023!

XX Jenn and Adam