at times throughout the last five years we've looked at different ways of monetizing
farmstead scale enterprises such as selling meat to customers csas dairy honey etc
but one thing we've never discussed on this channel until today is selling flowers today we're
heading over to the grumpy chicken farm to talk to renee nelson about her u-pig flower operation
i'm renee nelson and i own grumpy chicken farm uh started this farm this year it's a
u-pig flower farm i've lived here four years it was a field of tansy and weeds and i would
you know hop on every week and just mow and i thought boy i have 10 acres there's
something better i could be doing with this so originally i thought oh i'll plant sunflowers
started off as just sunflowers and then winter happened and youtube videos and facebook groups
kind of inspired me to go a little bit bigger than that so my career if you can call it that which it
really is is i sell things on ebay so another home-based business that i have running here
i've been doing that about 15 years when you do ebay you're kind of alone all the time and yeah
i kind of want to get out and do the you pick and welcome people to come and just meet my neighbors
and you know haven't really been out and about because i work indoors by myself all the time
so the u-pick is really like it's community building it's meeting
new friends and it's just been amazing really i've never i didn't expect the
outpouring of help that people have offered i have people come to me
i sell them a bouquet of flowers and they go out and pick it on their own people come in i
advertise only have only advertised on instagram and facebook and just a lot of word of mouth
okay so the whole process is here's my cup it doesn't look that bad that big but i'll show
you it'll get big so i sell this for 20. you get your cup you get water you grab a pair of clippers
and then i take people out to the field and give them a quick lesson so i have these tables set up
so you can set your cup down because it's a lot easier to set the cup down and not carry
it around with you set the cup down um then when you want to when you cut flowers you want to cut
them cut them longer than you think or if you have like a vase in mind at home you want to use so cut
them longer than you think you want to strip off the leaves on the bottom i just throw this
in these aisles and then i at one point i will come back and grab and compost it
if you cut them at a 45 degree angle is the best because it allows the water to
saturate more of the stem clip them at a 45 degree angle strip off the leaves and then
you know you can leave on some it's kind of nice for the foliage start your bouquet if there's a
few things damaged it doesn't affect me at all and and the whole point of annual flowers is
the more you cut them the more they come back so i love people to come out and cut their own
i had no intention of making any money for the first couple years honestly um within the first
month we had paid off everything that i invested what started just hey this might just be for us
this might be just my garden that we're going to enjoy and have coffee out into being open seven
days a week people calling for appointments people wanting to have parties out here
weddings things like that so right here we have zines i started these in about three weeks
before our last frost they're not they don't love to be transplanted but these three rows i did
have um starts by the time i got to the fourth and fifth rows it was kind of scattered seeds
and they look almost just as good so um these did come out a bit earlier so that is good to
stagger your plantings if you want them to last especially if you're doing a cutting garden
these guys are sweet peas um they have an incredible smell i would highly suggest i mean
just for the smell they're gorgeous i grew these from starts back in i think it was march
so they've done quite well and they they they are a cooler weather kind of
annual this is the worst soil on the whole entire property and i mean i'm five six
these cosmos went crazy um they've done amazing and there is actually a four foot row here but
you can't you can't even squeeze through so cosmos don't love great soil so anyone can plant a cosmo
and they they make it with the field of weeds that i had here before going over the the fall in the
winter last year and learning from some of these seasoned flower farmers uh went ahead and put down
the road i didn't use weed fabric i use road fabric it's a lot tougher than weed fabric
so what i do with the weed fabric is i create a template and then i go through with my
my torch and i burn holes every nine inches some weeds are going to get in but it keeps
the majority of them out so this is um all basil which i grew as a filler flower which smells
absolutely amazing of course what i found is not a lot of people use it but the
amount of honeybees that that love this i i will continue to do this even if i don't sell it for
um you know as a filler plant these are the teddy bear guys the fuzzies super fuzzy um
i ordered 70 wait 7 200 of those i didn't plant them all though thank goodness
so i will go and save some of these for seed a lot of this is pro cut which are they're pollenless
but they still feed the bees and somehow i don't quite understand the science of that but um pro
cuts are four cup flowers they're one stem one stock and that's all they're used for is just for
the one flower so that's why i have so many this is what i'm kind of talking about with six session
planting this row down that way is totally done i planted these
let me think i planted these about 50 days ago and they're about they're about 60 day sunflowers so
hopefully i'll get these before they freeze and i know they're supposed to be like a peach color so
we'll see we'll see if i can get those these are pro cut gold
and they you know they were beautiful they're kind of on their way out right now
but the birds have really enjoyed them and will continue to enjoy them and sunflowers are super
easy i water them really good for the first two weeks and then again i'm going to go in
and and go against all the rules and say i haven't really watered these and we have had a dry year so
they've done really well i plant the sunflowers
six inches apart and that's what gives you these littler stalks so when you're making a bouquet you
don't want the massive even though they're cool you don't want the massive stalks that you you
you get when you grow them you know grow them out in the field they're they're huge
you can actually you know you can put this nicely into a bouquet it's not going to take up the whole
thing so that's that's one technique i use is doing it you know planting them six inches from
each other see this one's a little further planted away this was about nine inches away
from each other and look how bigger this the stock is look at all those seeds has tons of seeds in it
so well this one won't last as a cut flower but it's great for birds and if you want to
save the seed and plant them in the spring next year
this is what i would pick if you were gonna gonna do that
my total labor starting this was literally sun up to sundown just me mostly
my mom does help me here and there and my two boys my teenagers they helped a bit the heavy lifting
was done by my husband he put in the fence and my brother and sister-in-law helped with that i'd say
i started building these beds in march and it took me march to about may the first week of may
to build all the beds and this is a half acre i did that at least six days a week maybe i took one
a day break in there so it's a lot of work i'm not it's a lot of work getting them started
getting them you know beyond seedlings is to me i put in eight hours a day um as we go on
and and throughout the year the maintenance gets a little less because like you know they're planted
close i don't have to water them as often they're planted close i don't have to weed as often
so starting in the spring eight hours a day and then probably fading right now to maybe
i spend an hour maintaining things i could spend a lot more but that's where i am starting out the in
the spring 80 hours a week and as it goes into the into the fall i'm spending a lot less time
i would say 10 hours a week okay these are fox gloves so these are a bi-annual so
some of them have come out this year and this was a kind of a fast producer so this will
actually come back next year so you can see 20 bouquets a little better than your walmart
15 whatever they sell that's imported okay here's my dahlias i said i didn't have a
favorite but they have to be pretty close to the top they're stunning and there's so many different
types and varieties i have reinvested some money in getting more of these
they are hollow stem so it is a little harder for me to let people come and pick these because they
get knocked over because they are kind of fragile these are a little more labor intensive but
as you can see like i mean they're totally worth it this look at that dinner plate
i mean i have a big hand and that's pretty big but and it's not even all the way out so
pretty impressive flower as you can see renee's main focus is growing flowers
but she is experimenting with a few other things i flower farm because i don't vegetable farm
but there are a few vegetables that i will always have tomatoes and hot peppers
and i'm trying artichokes and i am i have to say i'm pretty proud to grow an artichoke which
you'd think it would be this but it is the artichoke um these are purple globe
and they will be perennial for up to four years in zone five renee is also dabbling
with pumpkins and is considering adding a yupik pumpkin enterprise to her business plan
so you can find me on instagram and facebook
both of them are grumpy chicken farm yeah just message me renee obviously has an abundance
of sunflowers and she was so kind to give me a box of sunflower heads to give to the chickens
let's go see how these ladies like that treat let's start taking them off
all done almost that looks pretty good dinner
no takers
nothing that's weird you get another one we'll feed it to the free-ranging chickens
okay weird chickens no one wants sunflower seeds do you think
pigs will eat it definitely because pigs eat anything all right let's try it
nope
i guess animals don't like them
well i think it's ours don't i think most chickens will go crazy over it like most of farming
having a flower farm is a lot of work but it's a definitely profitable and visually pleasing
element to add to any homestead as you heard from renee having a you pick flower operation can also
open the door to many other things such as events like weddings or gives you the opportunity to
sell other farm products like honey and probably the best part is the building of community