More Flowers Means More Money | Harvesting Ranunculus

this week we have more flowers which means more money [Music] our goal is to sell a thousand dollars at the farmer's market every week last year that's what we're going for and we never made it this year we need to do better this year we need to finally get those thousand dollar markets to make it worth our time last week the flowers only just started and they made a huge difference on our sales we did 450 but we only had 12 bouquets to sell this week i have buckets and buckets there's going to be lots of flowers so there should be lots of excitement for our customers down at the farmers market every single market means a new item that's coming into season a new item that's coming down to the market and it's exciting for our customers this week we have zucchini which is so exciting because it's such a summer item exciting news we have zucchinis to harvest in the greenhouse beginning of june zucchinis already things are really taking off in here no things are growing like crazy in this greenhouse with all the heat that we've been getting this week just two weeks ago these were nowhere near the same size the first few zucchinis don't get it pollinated properly so they end up they'll grow and then the tips just don't really grow so i picked them as little babies and then ian and i get to eat them that's perfect [Music] yeah you like that boom gonna blow people's minds either that or every other farmer's gonna have these two oh there we go [Music] six week itself and then a meal for us six for them a meal for us [Music] we have been really busy this week getting all of the farm planted out this section behind me wasn't anything last week ian spent all of last week preparing the ground and this week we got down landscape fabric and planted out thousands of flowers there's beds and beds of flowers in here we have space to be able to put our next planting of lettuce i have 1200 sunflowers planted and another full bed of tomatoes it is incredible to see this all happening this all getting done and i've actually now at this point planted all of the transplants that need to get planted it is amazing how much help it's been this year having our employee here to help help me you know be organized and actually be on schedule i'm if anything ahead of schedule on planting which feels amazing the goal this year was to be planted to our fence line to extend our farm all the way down our property i'm currently standing at the fence and you can see how close that is we probably have about five more beds to prep for this year and plant out and and then that's it we've we've gotten to our goal of farm size for year three it's it's an incredible feeling to be standing here and seeing all these things that we wanted to happen happen already as amazing as this is as incredible as it is to get all that planted we also got this done this week which is mind-blowing this wasn't even necessarily on the list of things to get done anytime soon this space is really big this is probably enough space for about 40 of our 50-foot beds and the other night our neighbor was out with his tractor and had the mulcher attachment behind it and i asked him i was like hey if i get all this knocked down could you come mulch this up for me he said no problem so i made it a priority i went and rented a brush saw i got it all chopped down and then that night he came over and he mulched it for us and now look at this it's it's looking amazing he's gonna come back with a plow probably after it rains sometime and just tear this all up for me and then you know i can start going through it and getting it all prepped for next year like we said this is our third market this year and it's starting to feel like we're getting back into the routine you know i'm feeling like i'm ready for it you know it doesn't feel as overwhelming and you know it is a lot of work i can definitely feel it in my body my body's tired and even still i feel motivated i feel happy i'm excited to go to the market tomorrow we've already got a lot of work done because last night serena harvested all the flowers [Music] [Music] stem lake's pretty good on that one a little stem of it [Music] stem legs have like and then [Music] dormant you know looking good huh so [Music] [Music] what there's mosquitoes trying to sting me sam [Music] [Applause] [Music] so i'm pretty far behind schedule i was feeling real good because we really don't have that much work that needs to get done today um and then as soon as i started working i cut my finger really bad with the snips and on a day like today where my hands are just in the water in the dirt in the water in the dirt all day this is like the perfect storm for any sort of cut to get infected so having a really bad cut on my hand is pretty much worst case scenario so now i've i'm i got band-aids and this protective glove to keep it dry and clean but it's it's really slowing me down [Music] we're washing greens got lots of salad mixes going down we got our 100 lettuce which means i have to pick all the weeds out and oh we have the most beautiful swiss chard baby swiss chard that we're gonna be sending down and baby kale so i have that all bagged up we have green garlic which is super fun because it's a weird thing it's one of those things you kind of can only find at a farmers market and then you know i have head lettuce to pick i have bok choy to pick um but the bulk the big remainder is putting together arrangements with all the flowers that i picked yesterday the ranunculus look ridiculous so beautiful [Music] 2 [Music] ah taking a break there's definitely going to be over a thousand dollars worth of stuff going down this week they'll be so you you need to sell a thousand dollars i'm harvesting and preparing a thousand dollars the the issue to getting to a thousand dollars isn't farm production it's sales so how are you gonna sell me a thousand dollars i'm going to be my normal delightful cheery self hi would you like to buy some veggies how have you been pushing kale you know normally people looking at the bags they're trying to decide between the spinach the lettuce and the kale and so i don't care which one they buy really you know yeah until we're sold out whatever one they're kind of looking at is my favorite this week we have a new product and it's a product that lots of people aren't familiar with we have green garlic which is when you pull out your garlic before it creates any sort of head and the idea is that you use it in the same way that you use green onions what i want you to do is i want you to use the green garlic as an opportunity to upsell the baby kale yeah because here at our house one of our favorite ways to use green garlic and garlic scapes is to mix it with kale or the red mustard and to make a pesto out of it and it's actually one of the best pestos that we make i do like to tell people about how we cook things yeah totally we don't need to bring recipes because we spend the entire day telling recipes yeah and then it's more intimate you know people care more about the interaction yeah than the take away recipe card and then i get a call later on they're like hey how was that recipe again not actually no not actually i hung up a ranunculus to dry and this is it like almost fully dry it looks incredible they're definitely whatever it doesn't sell isn't gonna go to waste because that will definitely sell later look at that the red swiss chard the baby red swiss chard doesn't that look incredible yeah how could you not sell that back to church back to torin back to churn [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i have returned so i have all my flowers out and i'm trying to figure out what i'm gonna do with them these ranunculus are like pretty fancy pretty high end these aren't these aren't snappers right like these are special these cost a lot to grow i don't want to sell these at a price that isn't what they're worth right so i'm thinking that they're kind of like three dollars each and even that is kind of like lower than than what other florists around here would definitely sell them for so i'm thinking i'm going to do bunches of five you know that's that's like a beautiful bunch of of flowers and then i'm going to price them at 15 and then if they don't sell when they come home i'm gonna hang them upside down and dry them and then two weeks from now send them back still is fifteen and all for sure drive they'd sell them then because they look so good dried and then i think what we're gonna do is we're gonna go for 20 bouquets this week last week the bouquets that we made the big you know the big bachelor button bouquets we sold them for 15 and they sold really good and now i have lots more to work with though i don't have my swiss chard definitely feeling the loss of my swiss chard this week um but i did i went and picked some raspberries and oh ian's gonna love this one because it's weird but i picked cherries no i'm more into that isn't that cool that's gonna look really good i'm super stoked because we have rocket snapdragons this week yeah not just the chantilly not the like you know everyone's like oh the chantilly they're so special they're so open but the thing that i love is the rocket and everyone's like uh it's classic boring garden but i love how just like er structured it is you know like for me it's like floofy like meh chantilly like it could use less cottage and then like rock it i'm like yes these are chive flowers the color on them but it's because they're like past their prime yeah so so i'm like picking them and using them but they're like you shouldn't and basically the idea is they're gonna be drying in the vase this was the bouquet from last week and that fell down and then came home [Music] we enjoyed it in here and then everything was dying so i hung it up to dry it but yeah so you can see this is this is like them they kind of were dying in the vase them dried looks the same as those over there and so as long as i don't put too many in for the water to turn scummy um they'll keep that kind of dusty palette make me a bouquet when you build a bouquet you need to think about what each of the flowers is worth when you're putting it together right so i've determined i'm making 20 bouquets the way i make a 20 bouquet is i start to do some math right so if if i'm saying okay this is gonna be worth a dollar fifty um then you know if i use ten of them that's fifteen dollars right but like this has value can't like disregard the value on this and then other things have lower value right like like this is a weed right like this isn't worth a dollar this isn't necessarily worth a dollar but you know i also wouldn't necessarily say 50 cents um and then some things are worth like nothing which is why i don't want to grow them like bachelor buttons um or or like a frond of grass we'll go to kx1 the kx1 is worth all the money because you can't buy that that's like exclusive to here if it's 20 bucks we need more than just like six of these and filler yeah right but we're gonna go for like cottagey look let's start with three look at that then we're gonna put some of this in some more of these in [Music] looking pretty yeah yeah but it's 20 so it still needs more now we're just gonna finish off with the ring around the outside edge of a bunch of blue bachelor buttons to you know fluff it out give it you know the bachelor buttons they drive me crazy because no one has any value to them right so you have to do a lot of work to clean all these stems to use them in the bouquet but at this time of year when there's nothing else they really had add something in in the way that you appreciate right because there's there's not very many other options it's looking pretty good yeah you gotta not cut your finger okay there we go twenty dollar market bouquet oh yes yep nothing i'd buy with all these fluffy cottage flowers i'm i'm taking home the the snapdragons and kale that's the one for me all the cats right it's bedtime for me i got an early morning tomorrow so yeah you go to bed i'll come wake you up when it's time to go to the market pretty much right it's getting close to midnight really yeah well okay go to bed again good night [Music] so the sky is lightening up and the birds are singing so i've obviously spent way too much time working on these flowers and i need to get to bed as quietly as possible because ian's gonna be waking up in a half an hour it's just after four am my alarm just went off uh as my alarm was going off serena walked into the room ready to go to bed she passed the relay baton and now it's my turn to get ready to go to market apparently we have over 500 worth of flowers today so that's really exciting that's lots and they look great so i'm excited to try to sell them all it's about 5 30 and i am all packed up so let's get to that market [Music] bye [Music] so [Music] [Music] today the market we sold 715 our best market of the year so far still not the thousand dollars but you know we're getting closer and today the flowers sold really well which i think is the key to you know making that thousand dollars the yellow bouquet sold first no real surprise because those yellow ranunculus they actually look gold like i don't think that it's fair to call them yellow i think that they're gold and they just pop so much people were like drawn to them the salad mix sold well the lettuce sold better than the kale but the kale sold okay and the chard sold you know a few the bok choy sold better than it did last week it wasn't flying off the shelf but i was consistently selling it so that was good to see it started raining when the market opened and it got heavier and heavier until at one point it was actually raining pretty heavily and that stopped all the traffic for a while but then afterwards it picked up there was a rush we did the display a little bit different this week and i really liked how i could be right out in front all the time i basically spent the whole market you know standing at the front of my booth and i was able to interact with customers a lot better than i felt like i normally could i really liked the way that it was set up so you have to think about that some more because there's downsides to it it's hard to shop with how far back it goes but there's definitely a big upside of me being a better seller the end of a market is always like the book end to the week and this week was a really hard working week we spent a lot of time expanding the farm down at the bottom it was just a lot of physical labor in the hot sun so having a decent market to you know finish off the week feels really good to me you know we're not selling a thousand dollars yet i think pretty soon we have to get that expectation that now we should be selling a thousand dollars i don't feel that expectation yet because we don't have carrots but uh very soon you know i not just serena but i too believe that we should be in that thousand dollar range for markets but i'm happy with this one the flowers sold really well and i think that's the key to our future success

Channel: You Can't Eat The Grass

Views: 168,982

Keywords: cut flowers, cut flower farm, growing ranunculus, farmer florist, farmers market, harvesting for market, farm life

Id: 1ywiqD3qeU0

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021