Creating Wildflower Meadows For Pollinators and Profit | PepperHarrow | Episode 10

[Music] we thought today would be cool to show y'all some of our wildflower installations that we've created for photographers it's a great way to value add to your farm and here is a great example of the bachelor's buttons that have reseeded we just had a dinner on the farm so i mow these kind of little nooks i put tables in there and for people to eat yeah they can dine among the flowers they were really beautiful little tucked away spots and it also makes a little tuck away spot for photographers as well bachelor's buttons are one of the greatest spaces that we have that really provides a beautiful backdrop for photographers they can get pictures of their clients in the bachelor's buttons we actually took the drone out and got lots of beautiful drone footage of me like laying in the bachelor's buttons they're really dreamy really really gorgeous and they're an easy one to sprout and affordable to buy in bulk they're another one it self seeds too year after year and they just come up wild now yeah and that's what we have definitely found with our bachelor's buttons is once they seed they reseed prolifically so we don't have to do as much over seeding with the bachelor's buttons which is really nice so good although they're not blooming yet cosmos are another fantastic one they're just starting to peek out just starting to have a trickle of a few they're absolutely gorgeous and the reason why we love cosmo so much is because they're those romantic like they danced in the wind we've shown other footage of them before but they're so beautiful i don't know what it is also about the the pink pastel tones photographers often like a really neutral background to shoot in and this provides that perfect opportunity just a big field of pink cosmos is is super cool super cool we got tons of questions about what was growing here at our dinner over the weekend and here let me pan over here there's another little nook that i mowed out for uh guests to have dinner in the flowers and these were really fun because we had the little white wildflowers growing amongst them kind of popping up in random places i don't know if we can see it here but uh this is fleabane has a horrible name it's a horrible name it's such a beautiful little flower but we'll do a little close-up and show y'all i'm wondering if maybe fleas don't like it that's why they call it fleabane in one of our fields we had tons and tons of this fleabane kind of popping up so i left it rather than prepping it for another installation we just kind of let the fleabane come up and just it's a big field white it's really pretty yeah we'll have to go show it actually so no you don't have to intentionally plant a place if you have flowers coming up that are native to your area that are a beautiful flower i think of iron weed and queen anne's lace at one point both of those come up in our native area that we have our wild areas on the farm even those two things together look absolutely incredible and are a wonderful backdrop for photos as well what we have found also is this property was horse pasture that was planted grass so it's non-native kind of invasive grass everywhere i till if i just disrupt that grass it brings up a bunch of native seeds and those sprouts so this fleabane is where tilled up that sod and grass and have tilled it up a couple of times to kind of just disrupt it and native flowers and grasses and things have been coming back where we've kind of disrupted that soil so that's actually kind of cool to see it is another plus about the fleabane is great for photographers it's a beautiful white backdrop so it's just another place to give our photographers to shoot while they're here exactly speaking of succession planting this is a second planting of cosmo so that first one we've shown you is just starting to bloom about another weekish it'll be full blown probably sometime by the end of this week sunflowers are a great one to succession plant so this isn't the only sunflower field that we'll have this year i actually have several others going and i'll plant them every few weeks for a couple of months so we work to try and make sure once they bloom that we keep having ones because these only bloom for a week maybe so we want to make sure that we have sunflowers blooming all year round as much as we can so we we plant them every few weeks they're about 60 days more or less yeah they're a quick one for sure yeah so we'll plant till about roughly 60 days before our anticipated last frost because we want sunflowers as late as possible too and think about this you don't have to have a massive field of sunflowers to get really beautiful photos you could do something as simple as a strip of sunflowers to give that beautiful backdrop for photographers yeah that's what we started with when we first started kind of experimenting with these big field plantings we just did a strip and yeah got fantastic photos out of it still in fact that's one reason not to do a huge swath like you don't need acres and acres if you do that they're gonna bloom all at one time and be a week of beautifulness but like that's all you get so it's better to do your succession in smaller patches anyway yeah this is kind of an experiment fluff the cosmos a little bit yeah where jen is i uh this is a mixed field of sunflowers and cosmos i just wanted to see how it would look it's good to experiment i'm laughing because i was mowing and i'm like hey there's cosmos in with the sunflowers what the heck's going on he's like i'm experimenting it's just a little patch just kind of try it out to see what we got right here is milkweed i love taking the milkweed pods and floofing them around during the wintertime and letting the seeds spread and we keep having milkweed like just pop up all over the farm which is fantastic and we'll leave it where it grows yeah our butterflies are thankful too we actually had questions from people about milkweed seed we will try to collect those and share those with people online when we put our seeds for sale this year yeah [Music] y'all look at this this is all that beautiful fleabane i guess it's called daisy fleabane it's beautiful yeah look this is absolutely insane this is a great example of how disruption of the soil can actually be beneficial and can't really see it but i also see tons and tons of red clover in there and i don't know if the bees like this or not but i know they love that red clover so it's been super cool to see the impact of that disruption bring up a lot of natives natives back in adam was actually afraid to get rid of some of our red clover but we did see the bees have moved on mostly from the red clover onto our lavender which is interesting to see they transition to different food sources at different times of year yeah for sure any time you have photographers out to your farm it's best to have an faq dock in fact we have one linked on our website we'll link it below so you can get access to our faq dock to see some of the rules and other frequently asked questions we get from photographers it's nice to head off some of those questions before your photographer actually accesses your property there's a lot of questions that you can avoid and avoid a lot of emails too yeah yeah for sure it's just nice as many emails as you can avoid out of your life the better seems to be our biggest question is what do you have in bloom when when are the sunflowers gonna bloom [Music] [Music] our other really great spot the photographers really like to shoot in is our lavender fields they capture some of the most incredible photos in our lavender fields especially at sunset which seems to be the most popular time to shoot in the lavender fields this is a second year lavender field it's incredibly fragrant and it's just starting to hit its peak with the beautiful lavender blooms that we have oh jen wafted the flowers a little bit and it just got just a big whiff of lavender it smells so great so this is another really popular area to shoot we do charge just a little bit more per hour for the lavender because it's so popular and very special it's special and but very fleeting we use our lavender for production to make products here on the farm and we harvest it out very quickly so there's just a very small limited window to be able to get into the lavender fields to shoot which is usually about two weeks yep and like jen mentioned sunset's the best time but we're out here at sunrise and the lights actually pretty beautiful too it was more beautiful a few minutes ago but yeah now the sun has kind of peaked up you can see it hitting off my face it's getting a little bit warm it looks like today's gonna be another one of the hottest days we've had so far upper 90s yeah over 100 heat index so yeah it's nice to get out here early in the morning and get a bunch of stuff done and do like a chill out inside some inside work yeah it always seems to be if the sun is not up or out in the evening when it goes down those are the perfect magical hours to be able to shoot out here the heat goes away and it's absolutely beautiful [Music] we often get questions from mothers of senior graduating seniors like what outfit should i have my daughter wear we don't like to answer those kinds of questions we leave that up to the photographer but for those of you who know the best thing you can do is to wear neutral colors when you're coming out to shoot in a flower field there are so many colors that if you wear a solid neutral color that's the best idea if you're getting your your photos taken here and you don't want to ask me because i'd say pantsuit but usually if you have really good photographers they instruct their clients on what to wear and they know that as well stay tuned till the end and we'll talk about pricing a little bit yeah [Music] the faq document we talked about we do get photographers asking what we have blooming at certain times a year and in general we have some sort of an idea the only kind of variability is the sunflowers but we know in september we have dolly is blooming and our annual field looks like literally like a rainbow full of color they can shoot photos anywhere in those fields and get absolutely incredible photos the final thing to consider is upselling an opportunity when you have people on your farm something i often get asked is if i can make a bouquet for the people who are coming out and that's an added on service but something that we often provide in fact we have one on wednesday and i'm going to make a gorgeous bouquet for her to get her photos taken in our flower fields also we need to talk about zinnias as a photography opportunity this is our wildflower zinnia patch this one i did specifically kind of a peachy orange mix just to get mix it up a little bit and it's going to be beautiful i've been doing fairly well with keeping it weeded i need to come in here and get some wheel hoe and done but this is another great opportunity these zinnias here [Music] this is our final area that we have to show you it's a wildflower field a mix that adam put together of lots of different things there's larkspur bachelor's buttons wallflower baby's breath poppies a couple other things are starting to sprout so i tried to do a season mix so things sprouting throughout the year so we'll see how it turns out but this was kind of our first mix selection and it worked out really well i it's incredible yeah this was a winter sewing and it worked a lot of people ask what our most popular places for photographers are we showed you the two in particular are sunflowers and lavender i don't think you can go wrong with these huge swaths of flowers no matter what the flower is they just love flowers and masks to get beautiful photos and in fact outside of photographers when we have guests visit the farm we oftentimes get a lot of uh i don't know probably college age girls dressed up in their pretty floral dresses guess what they're coming out here to get selfies in the flower fields and that makes us really happy to see we love that we finally want to talk about scheduling these appointments as well as how much we charge for photographers to rent our farm out we have an online scheduler that we use so that it's all automated we don't have to do anything and in fact we let photographers rebook their own appointments so that we get taken completely out of the mix on that when we first started this we were doing it manually and it quickly quickly got to be too much so it was nice to set up an online system we open the calendar to what date dates we have available people can shop dates and pick their date that they want like jen mentioned if there's a conflict we allow rescheduling up to i think an hour couple hours before an appointment we don't like to allow reschedules if at all possible only in event of an exception like bad weather inclement weather and we do that because if someone misses their appointment that's miss revenue opportunity for us it's hard for a small business to accept a rebook because somebody else could have rented that and we could have made money off of that so we try to limit the amount of reschedules that we have in terms of how much we charge we charge fifty dollars per hour photographers can rent as many hours as we have available early morning or into the evening if a particular date isn't on our calendar they can contact us and we can specialty book it sometimes if we have it available generally we try to block out as many of our event dates and things when we're going to have lots of people on the farm because we really want to make sure that our photographers have a unique experience all to themselves when they rent the farm there's nothing else going on typically some sometimes there's a scheduling conflict we we want the photographer to have the farm to themselves and that's part of the experience for the photographer private exclusive experience another thing i wanted to note is we eliminated photographers doing mini sessions out here we only allow a photographer with one client we had photographers booking the farm and they were booking many sessions every seven minutes it was absolutely insane they were damaging the flowers and that's when i started to see kind of like find a cigarette butt in the parking lot which is like a pet peeve of mine yeah adam lost it the final thing we want to talk about is pricing for our lavender in bloom we had to increase our price for that we charge a hundred dollars per hour instead of just that base 50. and that's just because the uniqueness of that experience it's lavender y'all let's feel the lavender because it's very limited because we're getting it harvested out because we gotta we gotta get it processed for our products yep if you all enjoyed today's video please hit that subscribe button and give us a like while you're at it and hit the notification bell so you know when we're releasing a new video and we'll see y'all next time and as always thanks for joining and happy growing

Channel: PepperHarrow Flower Farm

Views: 12,979

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Id: fFgLDMPhFGw

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022