When I was a little kid and up through being a teenager, I sketched vases of flowers. Other things too, like horses and ships, but mostly a simple vase full of colorful flowers.
Fast forward many years and I am still drawing flowers, just a single flower on my written correspondence, but more importantly, I am growing flowers for cutting and actually putting live flowers in vases and selling them. I have grown and sold specialty cut flowers for 39 years! With solid agronomic practices and marketing every flower for weddings, special events, to florists, and of course bouquets to the public, it has been a living and a way of life.
My success has been related to my efficiency, no wasted flowers, no wasted energy. I use stale seedbed technique, sterile compost, crop rotation, straw mulch, trickle irrigation, fertigation, hortinova fencing for straight stems, and many other tricks of the trade. Also selling the most perfect flowers for the highest price for weddings and florists and using all the rest for bouquets and farm market bunches. I also grow dual purpose flowers that can be sold fresh or dried, and dry all the surplus for arrangements and wreaths.
It’s a good feeling to be able to take my passion as a little girl to fruition, delivering the flowers to customers that I sketched for years.
