Hi it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm you know that old expression "What doesn't kill you
makes you stronger" i would like to suggest that from a biological point of view that's not true
what i learned this year with my roses is that what didn't kill them made them weaker and more
susceptible to subsequent infection i had a heat wave at the end of june that affected some
of my new potting really really badly the things that i potted in late may that were establishing
beautifully and then suddenly heat wave the release of fertilizer in the pot wiped out the
new roots and the ones that survived struggled and struggled and struggled over the next few months
until eventually i just looked at their condition had to give up and throw them away that's one of
the lessons i learned in 2021 is that when you're hit with a really hard set of conditions on your
plants sometimes you have to look at their condition and cut your losses sooner rather
than later today i want to talk about some of the lessons i've learned from my mistakes here on the
rose farm and of course some of the things i have to celebrate as well i do a recap like this every
year i know it doesn't suit everybody but some people are curious about how we've done in the
business and how you make a small nursery work so that's what i'll be discussing this in this video
well i'm going to be up front here that the largest challenge i faced this year was time
it was to do with work-life balance trying to fit in my day job with the job here on the farm
with youtube and with raising a young family these did not all fit well together and in some
cases i ended up lacking so that issue with the roses burning out due to the heat wave i could
have prevented most of that if i'd just been a little more on top of watering if i'd offered
a little more shade if i'd taken them out of the greenhouse where it was getting really really hot
if i'd had the time to manage that to micromanage that i probably could have resolved or avoided
some portion of the damage even a large portion of the damage but of course i was hung up doing
other things and that's where i really failed this year that work life balance thankfully
did resolve later on in the year and i think i mentioned early in the year i had a video
was "When can I Ditch My Day Job" and then finally i showed you later in the year that i have finally
retired from my day job so i should be able to focus a little more directly on these things
and it was a lesson for me about trying to prepare for those unexpected weather events so the heat
wave did pass but i knew that unexpected cold could come this year so we built a heated bench
for the greenhouse back here and thankfully over the last little few days we've had a terrible
cold snap and i had enough heat underneath that bench to keep that all the all the young
roses on top of there within a few degrees of freezing the whole way through so i was
extremely happy with that so i learned a lesson i applied it i'm happy with that one of the other
concerns that was related to my lack of time was my ability to grow other plants most of my sales
this year was in roses and i didn't mind that it seemed to be a good turn to the business but what
i had done in previous years is i'd grown a lot of perennials a lot of annuals to go along with it
some interesting shrubs i try to give a wider assortment of plants try to send the message
that roses are good companions in the garden and offer those things on the farm here this year i
fell behind on that quite a bit i didn't do as much seeding i didn't do as much propagation
i didn't bring in as many plants and i could see that in the results a little bit certainly we'd
had a better year than ever in selling roses but the companions fell by the wayside and i hope to
to fix that this year now to some positive results the youtube channel did really well this year i
saw some really good growth i was really happy with the topics that we covered
some videos did better than others certainly the propagation videos do really really well
and when i go kind of uh specialized on to small nursery or selling or software or anything like
that a little bit less so but i still feel like that's part of what i want to do here so
i try to mix it up a little bit go with rose topic videos go with propagation videos go with
small nursery stuff and one thing i did this year that i really liked is that i reached out to other
growers and other influencers and other people around the industry to get them
in on my videos as well so i collaborated with ashley from gardening in canada the rose geek
we had a video together i went up to Kelowna and visited with Serena from you can't eat the grass
so it was actually a fun year that way i got over to mark's plants that's another place i visited
and did a tour of and i always find that when i visit other growers and and see what they're doing
i come away inspired because i mean i don't know everything and meeting them and seeing
what they're doing really gives me a lot of food for thought i always come away with a lot to
process so that's a direction i enjoyed and that's something i want to keep up in this coming year as
for other things well i have to say i'm super excited by the fact that we did the retirement
and we got a lot done on the farm here i can't show you right now i can't i can't show you the
results but truly it is in better condition than it ever has been before the rose field
behind me here which we established just before last year so about two years ago was kind of in
its infancy this year i'm expecting that we will see a lot more growth and a lot more flowers this
coming year and all around the farm we've planted more we've maintained more we're just in better
condition and we've put in a lot of the pathways and a lot of the signage and everything that we
talked about in our recent tour videos to prepare the nursery for retail this will be our first year
opening retail now i will say we have opened up for events before we've had certain days
where we've invited people in by appointment but this will be the first time where we sort
of target a real open for business fridays and saturdays come on down and walk around shop enjoy
that kind of thing so it's going to be an interesting thing for us and i've enjoyed the
process of getting there some one of the things we did is i hired somebody part-time i haven't really
discussed that on the channel here but it has helped me over the past couple of months to get
the landscape back into shape after long neglect on my part and has helped us to get the
facilities ready for next year we're going to be using i'll be using his help to get in irrigation
in the next little while and to install a lot of the things that we need to have ready
for this coming nursery season so that's something i'm really excited about all right that's it i
wanted to just keep you up to date with some of the things that we didn't do so well this
year some of the things that we did fairly well and also those things that i'm excited about and
this year should be a good one stick with us i i expect to do a ton of nursery and backyard nursery
type videos on the channel but of course i still will be doing a lot of the instructional videos on
general gardening and roses and everything else i'm kind of a mixed bag that way and i know it
probably to the detriment of the growth of the channel but it's just it keeps me
interested and keeps it interesting for you i hope all right thanks so much for watching