Creating the Garden
- Cameron
- Mar 2
- 6 min read
It was the end of Winter in 2024, and Linnea and I were working out after work. Sometime earlier that week, she had casually mentioned that she was starting a flower farm. At the time, the “flower farm” started small, with just a few seedlings. However, Linnea continued to mention this whole “Flower Farming” thing and how amazing it would be to have our own small creations from nature. One thing to note about me is that I tend to get very fixated, so when I hear about something that sounds slightly interesting or out-of-the-box, I can get hooked. Flower Farming was one of those interesting things, enough to the point that it was all I was looking up and researching. I went up to Linnea after that workout and told her, "You're right, this looks awesome, I'm on board, so let's go full throttle.” So, within that 1 ½ hours at the gym, I had made up my mind; this was our new calling, and we were going to make one of the grandest Flower Farms ever created… How hard could it be?!
There were many steps to get there, but the first thing we had to do was figure out what we wanted to grow and where to buy seeds from. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but there are more than, like, a billion different types of flowers, some with names I can never pronounce and some that come from something called a “tuber”. To say I was overwhelmed with the variety of flowers would be an understatement. We spent the better part of 2 weeks looking at hundreds of different flowers, deciding between which ones would be good cut flowers, which would be good in our climate, and which ones we thought looked the prettiest. Once the first hurdle of finding the seeds we wanted was jumped, we moved onto creating our “seed station” to start growing the seedlings.
Fast forward a few weeks, and we bought our first small indoor greenhouse. A 2.5-foot wide by 5-foot tall wire shelf with a plastic covering to contain humidity levels. The greenhouse cost less than 40 dollars; we then bought 8 cheap grow lights to hook onto the shelf to create our first seed starting station. We also invested in some heat mats to help the germination process. Once we got everything assembled, it was time to figure out how to seed all of our seedlings. We settled on soil blocking our soil since it seemed like an easy and simple idea. I still remember the first night of blocking and seeding the soil, it took roughly 3 hours to make 3 trays. No one told me snapdragon seeds were invisible! But when we finished, we felt accomplished and learned a lot for the next round of seeding we would do in the next few weeks. While the seeds germinated, it was time to go out and till our first garden. Again, how hard could it be?
We already had a perfect location at our property marked out, the previous renters had a small vegetable garden that we would re-till and set up. Luckily, the owners of the house we are renting loved the idea of us creating a flower garden and gave us the thumbs up! I marked out our garden to be tilled and realized that we needed a 30x40 space! That is a lot of space, but no need to worry because my good friend owned a cultivator I could borrow so I could till the land easily. It would take me 3 hours max!
It did not take 3 hours. Did you know a cultivator is NOT the same as a tiller? A cultivator mixes soil, compost, or other amendments in an already tilled area. A tiller, on the other hand, breaks up the ground to start the process. Also, unknown to me at the time, grass can really clog up a cultivator easily. I proceeded to spend 8 hours tilling and untangling the blades from all of the long grass. Needless to say, I only got 300 sqft of the 1,200 sqft done. I came inside and told Linnea, “You know what, I think we need some help.” Luckily, Linnea’s family knew a farmer who was teaching his grandson how to use a tractor. We paid the youngster $100 to come out and till our plot. He came to our house, spent 10 minutes unloading the tractor, did 3 passes on where we wanted the garden within about 20 minutes, then loaded up the tractor in about another 10 minutes and headed on his way. All in all, it took him less than 1 hour to get done 3x what I could do in 8! Just goes to show me the valuable lesson that having the right tool for the job will always make things easier.
We had the land, we had the plants, and we had the manpower, but we were still missing something: water. Our plants could not just survive on the rain here and there to keep them alive; we needed a way to ensure they got the hydration they deserved. While researching and watching videos of other flower farmers, we noticed many of them used drip-tape; the idea was that water would run through small plastic lines with small holes punched out about every foot or so. We loved the idea since it would save us from having to go out every other day to hand water each plant, and we were planning on having A LOT of plants. We used a company called Drip Depot to buy all of our drip-tape, and I am so happy we purchased from them. When it arrived, I was a little scared. If the other two projects were any indication of how this was about to go, then I was anticipating some roadblocks. But oh, how wrong I was to be scared. We opened the box of parts and were pleasantly surprised to find Tootsie Pops included so that we could enjoy them while we worked. How thoughtful is that? By the time we hooked up the lines to our spigot, the sun was barely breaking through the clouds.
The plot was tilled and the irrigation placed, and by that time, it had hit late March. It was almost time to plant our growing flowers, but we were still missing one thing - something that would save us a ton of time and a ton of headache - a weed tarp. This would allow us to do less weeding in the garden and give us more time to work with the flowers. It would also help to prevent any of our direct-seeded flowers from competing with weeds, which is a huge deal! We bought a high-quality weed tarp to make sure we could use it for at least the next 5 years. Laying it out was super easy: Roll it across the path, cut it to the length you want, then use landscaping staples to keep it down. Once we had them in place over the irrigation, we needed to create holes to plant the flowers into. I cut out templates from a couple pieces of plywood with 2 different sets of holes; one having 1-foot spacing and the other with 9-inch spacing, I then went to our local dollar general and bought a small butane lighter after stating that “the people in the videos use a large butane burner but I bet I could get away with a handheld one I bought for 6 dollars”. You would think I had learned my lesson about having the right tools after the tilling incident. I proceeded to spend 4-5 hours burning close to 750 holes while Linnea moved between direct-seeding some flowers and gathering all of the loose circles of tarp I had created.
When we finished, I was so happy to see what Linnea and I had accomplished. We had a small greenhouse full of growing plants, a tilled garden for all of our flowers, a drip-line to water the area, and weed tarping to make weeding a bit easier. I know at the beginning of this Blog I posed the question “how hard could it be?” Well, to be extremely honest, it was hard, and that was only the setup phase of it all! But man, was I excited to see where all of it would lead. Linnea and I learned so much in just those few months. Through every small hiccup and fall, I felt like I knew so much more than what I started with. It was time to sit back and see how all of our hard work would pay off; besides, we just needed to keep the flowers alive long enough to be able to cut them… How hard could it be?
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