happy new year!
This update is much overdue! I apologize for the lapse in blogging. As you all know— 2020 was—— well--special. But my mind hasn’t stop turning— instead its been in overdrive. Constantly dreaming up ideas and improvements. I know I’m not the only one who has reached a point of exhaustion from all of the thinking and worrying and planning, let alone the physical labor of farming!
All in all, I consider us pretty lucky. Due to our farm/agriculture designation, we were able to keep on moving along through the pandemic— caring for our plants and land, and moving our own-farmed products through a variety of “no-touch” transactions.
Losing nearly all of the event work that we thought we were dependent on turned out better than the disaster it seemed at first. We're all tired of the word “pivot” by this point, but that is exactly what we needed to do to make sure that we’d still be standing at the end of a very long season. A part of our pivot involved tightening our staffing. While shrinking my team was difficult— downright heartbreaking if I’m honest, I knew it was necessary in order to insure we’d be around to hire folks back one day. It shrunk all the way down to just me for quite a while.
My biggest lesson: I CAN do this. I CAN do a LOT of work. Does the amount of work feel sustainable at the end of the season? No. Definitely not. Would I much prefer to have a group of people helping me out? Absolutely. But when push comes to shove, you find a way. I’m sure many of you reading this feel the same. If you’re determined and hungry to make it happen, you find a way.
What were our ways? Generally speaking, we made our flowers available to all the parties of people who we’d had to deny flowers to in the past. We couldn’t provide flowers to them before because the big events were taking up all of our time, efforts, and…well…flowers! These parties included people looking for small orders, people wanting flowers delivered to their homes, people asking about shipped flowers, etc.
Cut Flowers are available for shipping nationwide in our web shop.
So, I joined a national shipping collaborative of flower growers that enabled me to ship fresh product overnight at low rates. This move was instrumental in helping me move flowers in the early spring when many areas were in a full lockdown. To have our flowers shipped to you or a loved one, click here.
I offered bouquets for pick-up at the farm from the side of the studio where folks could walk up and get their orders without interacting with me and added an option for donating flowers to essential workers. The gifted flowers helped in so many ways— and filled our proverbial buckets, too. Flowers for pick-up are available here.
I developed a “Flower Club” with a delivery service for weekly bouquets. Customers loved receiving bright, fresh flowers. The service was offered in 6-week blocks from early May all the way through mid-October. And it reached more and different clients than we’d seen at our farmer’s market stand in the past. I did nearly all this work on my own, including the delivery route, for most of the season. The first of our 2021 Flower Clubs begins January 6th with tulips from our hydroponic tulip trial! (A proper re-cap of our hydroponic trial is coming soon to the blog). 6-week Flower Club subscriptions are available for the entire 2021 season. See our offerings. There is a bundle discount for those who’d like to purchase all “seasons” of flowers.
When small weddings were allowed again I started serving them with an “easy for us and easy for you” ordering system in my web shop. I listed bridal bouquets, boutonnieres, centerpieces, large arrangements, and loose flowers (there are a few more options now)— all for pick-up on a date and at a time indicated by clients at checkout. No consultation. No lengthy proposal writing. No contract. No endless email chain and sharing of Pinterest wormholes. Just a simple product offered for sale. It was exactly what I needed after seeing all the big events and planning wash away, and it was exactly what many of our customers needed when faced with the prospect of having to go through a long “process” all over again for a small event/elopement. We heard “thank you for making this easy!” a lot. (Our thoughts exactly!) Elopement flower listing.
I continued to provide weekly wholesale flowers to our local independent grocer, Nori’s Village Market in Saranac Lake, NY.
When things got rough in the world, we decided not to “stay out of it.” Instead we jumped in. We offered our entire income (profits and expenses) from a weekend sale to support the Adirondack Diversity Initiative, and have since become local business partners with the .org. To share in our support of local diversity work, please consider a donation and visit: https://www.diversityadk.org. We also joined the ACLU as a member with regular monthly donations, and we prioritized an inclusivity statement — front and center at the top of our homepage. In short, we knew and saw that standing up for diversity and inclusivity is both right and GOOD FOR BUSINESS.
On the farming front, I side-lined our big construction project (phase 2 of a multipurpose barn/garage with a large walk-in cooler, woodworking/machine shop, and open bay for big projects), and re-invested what I could in smaller projects that would help us keep moving forward (2 new greenhouse tunnels, that we largely built on our own instead of hiring a crew). We hooked up one of these greenhouse spaces with heat and LED lighting for winter growing. Despite the many changes in the world, there is still (thankfully) a demand for fresh, local flowers and we’re still working to grow our supply of them for you— especially during the coming cold months.
Thanks for tuning in. For more information on the infrastructure of the farm and our future plans, see the post: “Growing a Flower Farm in the Adirondacks.”.
Best wishes to you in the coming weeks and months. Stay healthy and safe, friends!
All photos: Due West Photography