The Advantages and Disadvantages of Small Scale Flower Farming
If you’re growing on a small scale flower farm, there are going to be advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages don’t mean that it is impossible to be successful, and the advantages don’t mean that you’ll automatically be successful, but it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into when you decide to grow small scale.
Like anything else, the more that you learn and the more that you are able to understand the challenges you may face, the less intimidating and better you can handle those challenges.
Let’s start off with the disadvantages first!
Disadvantage 1: Smaller Volume of flowers
With a smaller scale flower farm, you’re inevitably going to have a smaller volume of flowers that you can produce. It’s just a fact that you’ll have to make your peace with, and no matter how intensively you plant or how many successions you can cram into a season, you’re going to have a smaller amount of flowers compared to a larger operation.
While it does mean that you do have to be careful with your selection of flowers and your timing of planting and successions, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do. I’ll go into further sections later on how we can combat the issue of a smaller volume of flowers (hint: quality over quantity)
DISADVANTAGE 2: Limitations in Design Work
When it comes to certain designs - especially larger designs like large urn arrangements and archways and hanging installations - they require larger materials. Large branches play a role in this, and while we do have woody shrubs and trees that we cut from, these larger installations would require us to basically butcher an entire tree to a stump.
While if you have a large planting of physocarpus harvesting a few branches here and there may not be an issue, if you have half a dozen plants you’re not going to be able to provide enough material for even a smaller installation (and I would loath to do so).
You can of course solve this issue by buying in materials through wholesalers or other growers, but if you’re wanting to use 100% local and 100% materials you are growing, this can be a downside or disadvantage of smaller scale growing.
We have avoided this mostly by eliminating these sorts of designs from most of our design work; if a client wants a larger scale installation, we charge a ton more because we know that it’s going to be a lot of materials that will need to be bought in (and also to try and discourage people from asking for installations, which I’m not particularly fond of). It works for us, but you may of course find those are an important part of your business - so you’ll want to plan accordingly.
Disadvantage 3: Seasonal Transitions
I learned very quickly after downsizing the size of our farm that transition between seasons was a bit more difficult than when we were growing on larger spaces.
You see, by the time that the spring flowers were blooming, the summer flowers had to already be in the ground. If we didn’t plant them on time, the spring flowers would stop blooming and there would be a huge lack prior to the summer flowers starting, which meant lost sales and a loss in momentum in the season (and the same thing could happen between summer and fall and fall and spring as well)
I learned early on too that if you try to split up a small growing area into two different sections to transition between the seasons, it can work - but you must be impeccable with your timing and there cannot be any mistakes. Instead, we decided to make some hard decisions in terms of cutting out everything except the most important varieties for each season, pulling up (or not even planting) anything that isn’t 100% required.
You can find some clever solutions to this issue of course, such as growing things like tulips and hyacinths and dahlias and violas in crates that can be moved around, or interplanting flowers like sweet peas and sunflowers to optimize your space. But again, you’ll have to ensure that you do your research and ensure that it will work well.
Disadvantage 4: No One-and-Done Crops
We exclusively grow cut-and-come again varieties on our smalls scale flower farm. It’s a no-brainer - the only way that you can make the space work is by being able to harvest multiple blooms from plants to be able to justify the space.
One-and-done varieties such as nigella, single-harvest celosias (such as the Bombay series), bupleurum, stock and single-stem sunflowers unfortunately don’t have a large place in our crop planning. We’ll still plant two one-and-dones (cress and agrostemma) in smaller quantities because they are a special addition to arrangements that nothing else quite can match, but we limit them for the reason that a cut-and-come again variety will utilize the space much better.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the advantages!
ADvantage 1: Less Resources Required
It goes without saying that a smaller area requires fewer resources or inputs. Growing on a quarter acre means that you’ll use a quarter of what you would need for a full acre of growing.
What this means in the long run is that the amount and quantity of these resources is less, and is more manageable. Getting enough compost to supply a full acre of flowers can be a bit complicated - and unless you have a compost spreader can be complicated to apply as well.
I honestly also don’t miss trying to calculate and purchase in the large amounts of fertilizer and amendments required, not to mention the cost of water for irrigating as well. There’s something very nice about having a smaller amount of resources - it’s much more manageable and the numbers are smaller too, which is easier to wrap one’s head around.
ADvantage 2:Less Overall Time required
The fact of the matter is that we as humans have constraints - we can only use two hands at any one time, we can only (effectively) focus truly on one task at a time, there are so many hours in a day that we can work. And when it comes to growing and harvesting flowers, it is certainly a labor-intensive job that requires time.
Even with a very efficient workflow, the larger the farm, the more time is required to take care of it. In terms of just the sheer number of plants, with each one requiring a set amount of labor, the amount of time that gets spent can skyrocket overall if one has a very large scale operation.
Take for example if you are looking at dahlias - if you had to calculate the time it takes to prep the bed, place irrigation, plant the tubers, pinch, stake, corral, harvest, condition, then dig, divide, and store the tubers, dahlias are a lot of work and take a lot of time. And if you multiply the amount of time it takes to just take care of just one dahlia by a thousand (or more) this time can quickly add up.
Of course you can try and decrease the amount of time that you spend. You can of course hire employees, which come with their own challenges and costs and different skill sets to manage. You can try to add in efficiencies to help cut down on time and labor such as using landscape fabric to cut down on weeds, utilizing a paper pot transplanter to make transplanting easier, even perennializing dahlias so you don’t have to dig and store them.
But what if we looked at it a different way? What if instead of you shrank the size of your farm to decrease the amount of time needed in order to take care of it?
You’ll know your business best of course, but I’ve found it to be incredibly liberating to have downsized the scale of the flower farm. By focusing on becoming more effective and efficient with the space that we do grow on, we can spend less time slogging through the rows and more time doing things like marketing or designing that ultimately is closer to make more sales.
ADvantage 3: Less Complicated crop planning
The temptation when growing in a smaller area is to grow more varieties (and fewer plants) - but unless grown intentionally, you’re just going to have a handful of random blooms that most likely won’t go together and will probably leave you without the types of materials that you need for creating your products.
Instead, what’s more effective is selecting crops that are versatile, productive and will have a long harvest window. Take for example annual phlox - Phlox drummondii - that can be grown quite well on a small scale operation, highly productive, and quite versatile (can be used in centerpieces, bouquets, bridal bouquets and so much more) and combines very well with other flowers given their small scale and spray-form.
Instead of trying to grow a hundred different varieties of flowers, I can focus on growing a dozen varieties really well. And while this does mean that I end up buying fewer seeds (or at least attempt to buy fewer seeds) it does pay off when things are running smoothly and I don’t have to worry about finding enough focals or enough filler.
ADvantage 4: More efficiency and less waste
My goal is always to grow only the flowers we need, and grow less (or none) of the flowers that we don’t need (and I could also extrapolate this to growing only the flowers we can sell).
Flowers that you grow that don’t perform well, aren’t of the correct quality or color, that aren’t productive enough or ultimately just don’t get used are wasted resources, wasted space, and wasted opportunity.
For example, the year that I grew several hundred snapdragons only to not utilize a single stem in our arrangements and designs (although we regularly had vases of snapdragons around the house) was quite eye-opening: I could have grown any number of other flowers that could have been more useful, but I didn’t know how to cut my losses and start a new crop in their place (I’ve since become much more pragmatic, and if a flower isn’t performing well, I’ll put it and replace with another crop or even a cover crop to take care of the soil).
Now, I only grow flowers and materials that I know that we’ll use 100% of the time. Part of it is from years of trialing and working with all sorts of flower varieties and knowing exactly what works in our environment, in our hands, and for our customer base down to the color and season and successions.
Like a well-oiled machine, our little flower farm produces the correct amount of the flowers that we need - nothing less, and what little is leftover is either dried or returned back to the earth in the form of compost.
ADvantage 5: Allows Us To Use Eco-Conscious Growing Techniques
While I would love to be able to say that everyone could move to eco-conscious growing techniques such as cover cropping, no-till farming and integrated pest management, I know it’s not always possible due to circumstances of one sort or another.
For us, it was both the scale of economy as well as time. I didn’t have time to brew enough compost tea or the ability to create enough compost to even make a difference in what we needed for a large scale flower farm. But now that we’ve downsized, I’ve been able to have the opportunity to give more time and focus back to using regenerative and eco-conscious growing techniques.
For example, we have been able to devote a larger part of our growing space to a native prairie planting. Not only does it provide native plants for habitat, food, shelter, and nesting space and materials, we also use the spring cutback of native grasses as a natural mulch that can be utilized for our beds as a perennial no-maintenance source.
We’ve also been able to fully embrace a no-till approach to growing, continually feeding the soil by being able to produce a prodigious amount of compost and leaf litter and being able to produce enough volume to provide for the flowers that we grow.
I even have time to work on other projects (such as the zinnia breeding project that I have been undertaking) as well as creating habitat and shelter for native bees, trialing native species for cut flowers, and whatever else gains my attention.
Which brings me to my next point…
ADvantage 6: I’m Enjoying Flower Farming More
I have to admit that some years, flower farming was a slog. The hot days of August and September were filled with harvesting and weeding and designing until I couldn’t even look at another arrangement, and my hands stank of the pungent scent of basil and sage that we used for foliage. There were times that I was just waiting for the first frost to hit so that the whole miserable season would just end.
These days, things are much better. The farm seems to almost run by itself sometimes, and all I have to do is keep up with harvesting and watering, and even those tasks are not as insurmountable because the scale is so much smaller and the number of tasks is far less.
This wouldn’t happen of course if there wasn’t efficiency and intent built into the way that we run our operation, and while it seems simple in retrospection, the truth is that it took many years and many mistakes and errors for us to get to where we are at today.
But for that, I am happy. Happy with where we are at, and happy with what we are doing. And that is in many ways invaluable in itself, because it allows me to be able to have the capacity for designing and meeting with design clients and sustaining my passion for growing in the long run.
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I hope you found this useful and helps you to feel more confident about growing on a small scale flower farm! Don’t be afraid of the disadvantages that growing small scale may incur - there are plenty of advantages and ones that I personally have seen the benefit of.
If you’re interested in learning more about growing a small scale flower farm, you should check out some more blog posts here: