What’s Easy & Different?
It’s a simple question. And the answer can lead you to focus on your strengths, reduce the stress of farming, and help you establish yourself as an expert. As you’ve heard me say here before, “you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”
For us, taking a moment now— when the pressures of summer pests, drought, and high temps feel like a burden is a nice way to take stock of what is going really well. A few years ago, we lost a bunch of annuals and it was a big gift in disguise. It forced us to confront a question that we’d been wondering: could we maintain and/or grow our summer flower sales without using any annuals? The answer was yes.
In my 8 years of flower farming, I’ve spent plenty of time testing the trends of our industry and “keeping up with the Joneses” by growing all the things I “thought” I should grow. For me, those things were dahlias, lisianthus, zinnias, cosmos, and many other annuals.
But ultimately, its been our observations of the meadows and forests outside our farm, experiments and questions, and that large scale failure of annual seedlings that have defined us.
Now, we’re ready to focus on the things we do really well — which also happen to be different then other growers in our area. That’s both reassuring and invigorating.
For us, those “easy” products are:
year-round bulb crops (tulips, daffodils, allium, lilies, etc.)
herbaceous perennials (peonies, astilbe, alstroemeria, mums, iris, sedum, heliopsis, sea holly, etc.)
woody perennials (roses, winterberry, snowberry, hydrangea, willow, viburnum, etc.)
Embracing specialization is a step in my farm’s business that I’ve looked forward to for a long time.