TIPS for Starting a FLOWER FARM in 2023 | PepperHarrow

hey y'all Adam and Jen here with pepper hero farm and we're back from a little bit of a break and today we want to talk about can you start a flower farm in 2023 yes you should and here's why we're going to give you the steps and kind of some tips and tricks that we have possible suggestions as you begin your flower farming Journey that you should look at before you get started [Music] oh the first suggestion we have is really research your Market make sure that you have demand for flowers stock your competitors check out local florists and actually have a little bit of Growing Experience under your belt too those are all really helpful things we see a lot of people wanting to get into flower farming who have never grown a garden before we recommend at least just trying to start some seeds and kind of gradually easing into it if you haven't had experience growing a garden before or growing flowers or anything from seed ease into it at that point don't jump right in and you know plan on growing 20 acres of flowers so take your time really plan it out do some market analysis and research your Marketplace and really build your knowledge base and learning right we actually do cover some of these topics in our book small farm Big Dreams we lead off and we give some of these tips and tricks in here so if you need a backup resource aside from this video This Book is a really good it's a really good source to be able to look at what we what we've done here and with researching your Market you want to find your own niche in the flower farming world you don't want to completely regurgitate what someone else is doing that's yeah you need to be your own person and find your own way find a specialty crop maybe that nobody's growing think about doing edible flowers because that is becoming a huge big hit do something that nobody else is doing and you're going to really find your stride have a specialty something that you really bring to the table and do better than anyone in your local Marketplace another thing we recommend with researching your Market is go to your local farmer's market and buy some local flowers and kind of break it down and you know look at the cost of the bouquet for how many stems are in it and that is a really good guide to get you started and also it doesn't hurt to go to the grocery store and buy one of the grocery store bouquets to look at the cost and break that down very different than what we offer as far as local flowers but it just is a good guide to what the grocery store is offering how you can differentiate from the grocery store and as well as learning a little bit about cost and I say go to low local grocery stores who are maybe a little bit more specialized so go to a place that carries local bouquets with researching the market looking at local demands it's you know how many people are in your local area already growing flowers who might be already in the space and just taking a look at that and understanding how many people you would have to compete with even if there are competitors in your Marketplace that's okay there's still room for you to be able to grow flowers it's just to Adam's point you have to look at some of those niche market places and kind of doing your own thing and yeah I wanted to fall back to that because you're talking about local demand yeah there there is all sorts of different things that you can do you don't need to rely on what you see someone else doing there there's a lot of different Avenues researching your local demand really lets you know what everybody else is doing and really put your mind on the path to what you can do to differentiate yourself from other Growers yeah really important the next thing we highly recommend is creating a business plan okay the deal with the business plan is that it is not a Bible it is basically a guide for you to help guide yourself along and kind of stick to a plan as you're billing out your flower farming business definitely what we found we have zero stuck to our business plan but it was an absolute great starting point to just give you a frame of reference of what you're looking at as far as running a business and I would say it was up until year five that we were kind of following it along roughly following along with our plan we hit year five and it was like we just kind of busted out and started like thinking of some new ideas to implement in our business that weren't actually originally in our business plan so I'd say a five-year Rough Guide is what your business plan what you're going to be looking at and the other thing to think about with a business plan is you're just doing this for yourself to keep yourself on track however the other thing a business plan will help you with is going and getting funding so if you actually need a bank loan or an investment from an outside funding company of some kind having a business plan is a requirement to be to being able to go out and get that funding so for that reason we also highly recommend having it of course you can bootstrap your business and do things very cost effectively and grow small or start small and grow over time and scale yourself but if you're looking to step immediately out of something like a full-time job into flower farming then you'll have to go big and go home if that's what your plan is we kind of eased into it working full-time jobs on the side and then working flower farming is kind of like a part-time hobby gig yeah and the small business administration has some business planning guides that kind of help you and part of that is putting together numbers it seemed really daunting in the beginning but once I started to make a rough list of okay the tiller is going to cost this much seeds will be this much soil Etc it you know again it is a guide but it's just good to see those numbers start to be laid out on paper to just give you an idea of where you're headed yeah SBA is a really great resource and they'll actually give you one-on-one coaching so utilize as many free and valuable resources that you can possibly access the other question we get to on kind of creating the business plan somebody asked us what our initial investment was in in year one and two on seeds for example I invested two hundred dollars in seeds my first year and for me that was like an outrageous sum of money and every year since then I've doubled it doubled it doubled it doubled it and I just feel like it grows over time but for that 200 investment in seeds right up front in year one I had a thousand dollars of profit just to kind of give an example of okay I put two hundred dollars in I made a thousand dollars so I made sure to cover my investment costs into my seeds at that point because we were starting so small we didn't have a lot of upfront costs because we didn't have a ton of investment into it beyond our own labor into growing those flowers and we had a lot more Comfort because we were both working full-time jobs so you stress a little bit less about it totally now we're both full-time on the farm so different whole different level of stress there you go it's a whole different ball game having both of our incomes coming full time from the farm you know having a kid in college and two other children at home we have a family to take care of so yeah way different ball game so I'm like well I kind of miss having a full-time job just kidding I do now that you have done your market research you have a rough business plan written out and you have an idea of what your strategy is going to be now's the time to figure out where are you going to grow these flowers are you growing them in you know a fourth of an acre in your backyard are you growing them on an acre outside on on an acreage you have to figure out now where these flowers are going to be and something we did when we moved to this Farm Adam made us walk this Farm the whole property like at least once a week I swear and we didn't make any large moves at all we had a small garden the very first year oh man and it drove me it drove me batty because I was just so ready to like spring forward and like get the garden going and like grow my flowers and he made us like really be intentional about where we were going to start and plant our flowers so a few things you need to look for is areas on your property ours is actually hilly we're growing flowers on a slight incline on a hill so something that's always of concern to us is soil erosion we don't want to lose this valuable topsoil so we try to make plans on when to plant so that we had the least impact on soil erosion but we actually like planting on the side of a hill you know a slight incline because it helps with drainage we don't have any sitting water on our property so that's another tip is as you're going around and looking for where you're going to be growing on if you have any places on your property in your backyard on your acreage wherever that have standing water after heavy rains you want to steer clear of those areas or if you're if you're going to use those areas you have to plan around how to drain that water off or you know to build raised beds or to do some healing techniques where you kind of make little Mounds that you grow in or you could grow rice hey I bet that's pretty profitable but yeah work with what you have like yeah if you do have any of those areas grow flowers that like a lot of moisture certainly wouldn't want to plant dahlias there because they would rot right right in the ground so really pay attention to your property look at where your growing space is going to be and try to figure out what's going to work best for you and also pay attention to areas that get sunshine and maybe some that get part shade or total shade because again you're going to grow your flowers towards those specific areas and this might seem a little bit simple but we always recommend a soil test it's really good to know your Baseline that you're starting off with in your soil it's often overlooked and it seems like overly simple but that's one of the number one things that we recommend especially in our flower farmer boot camp is to make sure you get a soil test totally yeah once you have your location selected you want to plan your layout and this is another thing like the business plan like we do we will plan a layout every year and it for the most part Goes to Hell in a hand basket and we just go crazy planting it's a great starting point to give you an idea again give you an idea where you're going to plant your plants yeah I say like if you don't end up following your garden layout and and how you're going to put your your flowers in like at least have a Rough Guide know when you're going to plant your first succession your second succession and your third succession of flowers I would plant three different ones to make sure you have blooms all season long it's not gospel again it's not a Bible you're not following it every single step but it's good to have a Rough Guide of what you're going to plant and when you're going to plant it and where you're going to plant it so have your little map all planned out just to give yourself a guide to have an idea of how the season is going to operate yeah and I guess a little bonus to this number three and choosing your layout is learn about succession planting when we first moved here like a lot of people we plant our garden in May and think that that's it uh well that's not the case you're going to run out of flowers pretty darn quick here maybe you can link the succession video in the description below I'll put it up here you'll see it like okay somewhere up here it'll pop up but the this succession video is a great kind of guide again to how to implement a succession plan on your farm the next fun part is like getting to buy your tools and implements and all the little things that you need to be able to grow your operation this is actually Adam's specialty he's my my tool man McGee he does all of he does all of this stuff he makes sure that we have enough shovels rakes I don't know pose all all the things that help us be able to run a successful flower farm oh yeah landscape fabric and watering irrigation irrigation and anything like that Adam's the guy our big advice in this area and I'll let you talk about Tools in a second but our big advice on this is like you know back to my earlier Point figure out how big you're going to go initially if you're doing it like us where you grow small and over time just kind of scaling yourself that way you do not need all of these big fancy tools and equipment right up front one of the things that we recommend and this is another highly recommend thing is starting slowly and that was kind of goes back to I made poor gin walk the farm weekly or first year and that was just starting small and slowly and I think that really set us up on the right track to success is we didn't get in over ahead two two soon yeah well what we don't want for you is that you invest thousands of dollars and decide after year one like hey this isn't for me and you're already in the hole you know twenty thousand dollars so if you are kind of doing this on the side trying to see if it will work for you start small invest a small amount up front and some of these supplies tools and equipment and then grow gradually Over time however you know to my earlier point if you're going all in going big and going home in year one you are going to want to make sure that you have some of those Investments as long as you have the capital to invest in that so just understand that if you don't do go big in year one without any Growing Experience that there is a lot of risk in that that you need to be aware of and and with the supplies and equipment you really kind of need to know how your growing technique is going to be are you going to be no-till are you going to do the fabric that fabric style that we do that really depends on the tools that you'll need we particularly hear plant and fabric and that requires a whole different set of tools and if you're doing no tool we do require the same amount of organic matter as a no-till bed because we we incorporate tons and tons of organic matter and composted to our soil to keep it happy and healthy but we highly recommend growing in landscaping fabric and having some kind of a tool for watering and irrigation those are the two main requirements to making sure that you can keep your sanity as you look to scale your farm when we first started out we did not have landscaping fabric and we were literally out weeding 24 7. you still have to weed but it is way less than what you would have to do without it right yeah without the landscaping fabric yeah one of the first larger Investments that people typically make is a tiller or a tractor and a tiller um with our fabric method we do till but we do a light till we only disrupt the top couple of inches of soil we we don't do any deep tilling investing in a tiller that's probably your biggest start something to prepare your soil is going to be your largest upfront investment and the last thing we're going to talk about is and it kind of goes pretty similarly similarly with the first part of researching a market is where you're going to sell your flowers or maybe you're not going to sell your flowers yeah did I say that yeah we know a lot of flower farmers who don't sell their flowers but just a couple of avenues to think about are a Farm Stand or your local farmers market people actually will sell a lot of their flowers on Facebook Marketplace surprisingly yeah uh your local grocery store you'd be surprised at uh we were very it was one of the things we were very surprised with is how interested even the large chains were in getting some local flowers just getting something different in there than what they typically have I that was actually a pleasant surprise one tip though to keep in mind at uh for the Farm Stand is we've been seeing a lot of people talking about like oh I'm in an HOA and they will not let me have a Farm Stand so make sure right up front as you're researching your Market make sure you include that as part of your like your research make sure if you're going to try to be selling flowers from your home that that is actually allowed that the zoning in your area actually allows for you to sell flowers from a farm stand at your property or allows you to have people come purchase flowers from you from your home yep and one thing I want to point out in this section is a a veteran grower set at a conference one time to know where you're going to sell your flowers before you grow them like don't grow flowers without knowing where you're going to sell them and we have kind of found the opposite to be true we grow more flowers than we know what to do with we want to make sure that we always have an abundance to sell because I'm fairly confident that we can sell our flowers they're beautiful it's a pretty easy sell selling flowers I I think that probably changes from like starting out early to like becoming mature in your business okay and then it probably also you have to look at if you have a big investment in tulips you probably need to make sure that you have them sold even before you buy them because they're expensive it depends on the cost on the things that you're looking to grow so like any bulbs tulips ranunculus anemone stuff like that very expensive Investments expensive stuff I would make sure that that was sold even before I grow it however you know stuff that I start from seed it's like whatever of course it's not it's not free but it's a very inexpensive compared to making investments into things like that so yeah so I guess this goes both ways you can go both ways but and when I was speaking about that I'm thinking of the cheap things like zinnias like that's easy yeah a pack of a thousand seeds of zinnias is super cheap compared to a thousand Tula bulbs yeah but fundamentally I agree with that statement like I only care about like selling the things that are really expensive but the things that are a little bit more inexpensive like zinnias and things like that I'm not as worried about like if they sit out in the field and nobody Cuts them they can be beautiful and sit out there and I don't care if they sell or not because sometimes it's just fun to enjoy them and to see the pollinators enjoying them too and growing more than you need kind of goes along with uh just kind of typical loss that you have we are growing in an unpredictable environment you don't know what's going to happen one day to the next what kind of bug pressure you're going to have so it's nice to have extra just to make sure that you have it I'd hate the word one Xenia and need onesie and it gets chewed up yeah exactly grow an abundance if you want to see a video of how we do our Farmers Market setup you can link it above yeah above here somewhere you can see how we do our Farmers Market set up and how we really make our setup shine if you're looking for inspiration if Farmers Market is something that you're looking at as you begin your flower farmer journey in 2023. we wanted to keep this video fairly basic and just kind of leave it with the fundamentals of what we think you need to start a flower farm curious about your opinion if you're an experienced grower what have you found important also in starting a flower farm and if you're new what do you think might be important as well we hope you all enjoyed today's video on some tips we have for starting a flower farm in 2023. we want to give shout out to our patrons thank you all so much for being part of our Big Dreams family if you liked today's video please like And subscribe and totally comment below and as always thanks for joining and happy growing

Channel: PepperHarrow Flower Farm

Views: 40,695

Keywords: flower farm, flower farming

Id: yLEeQz0Kk9g

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023