PearlGirl Flower Farm

This year has started off well and I have had the privilege of meeting and strategizing with many flower farmers both throughout the state through the SC Flower Growers Luncheon as well as with upstate local growers through SC Upstate Flowers.  The focus of these meetings was to analyze where our farms stand, what resources we need, and ultimately setting our goals for the year and becoming more efficient. With this in mind, I have been pouring over my processes.  What kind of processes? Well, the ones that we all dread of course, like keeping up with receipts and images of said receipts.  Here’s a pro tip for you, I’ve found that the easiest way to deal with this is to immediately upload the picture of the receipt to google drive right from your phone.  Rename the file by the date, followed by the company, then add a .jpg.  Save this to your designated expense file, then go to your google sheet with all of your expenses on it and input all the receipt’s information and insert the picture into a cell on that row.  This way you’re not doing what I did at first, tracking down hundreds of pictures at once and inserting them into your file, and receipts don’t get lost.  You can set a day each week to update your google sheet file. 

I have to update my google sheet weekly anyway because that is where I track all of my sowing/planting/harvesting information.  You see, being a farmer with limited amounts of space takes a lot of time planning and calculating.  If I want to have sunflowers available every week throughout the season then I need to be sowing seeds every week as well as planting out the seeds sown from 2 weeks ago.  Then, when you add 119 other varieties of flowers to the mix with different sowing requirements, growing periods, and harvest times, well you see where it could become overwhelming.  I used to think I could keep all of this information in my head, but then I got behind of course, in some cases completely forgetting about seeds that I had purchased with good intentions (looking at you Chrysanthemums) and failed to get them in the ground at all.  Now, I have my handy dandy spreadsheet that I created that has my seed varieties, what weeks of the year they need to be sown, and calculates just how long until transplanting to the field and adds the maturity days so that I know just about when I should be able to harvest. 

Now that you have a little behind the scenes of the farm information, my goals for 2023 are to have 50 bouquets available each week throughout the season which runs from mid-March through November.  Why 50? Well, I have multiple channels to fulfill this year including the Bouquet Bar at the Local Farmer’s Market, the local wholesaler, as well as CSA subscriptions.  This year’s intention is to be able to provide my wholesaler with 50% of my inventory while dividing the remaining inventory between the Bouquet bar and potential CSA subscriptions. That being said, here is a link to purchase a spring or summer bouquet subscription and have it delivered to your house if you live in the Seneca, SC area:  https://pearlgirlflowers.com/bouquet-csa-subscriptions/. They make a great gift for Valentine’s day-a spring season full of 4 weeks of flower deliveries.  Plus, my subscription customers get the best of the prettiest of the stems; for instance, there will only be a few lilies and peonies available this year, therefore those will end up in a subscription bouquet! In addition, when you purchase a subscription it helps me plan for future endeavors such as the gorgeous hellebores seeds that I have been eyeing all week-they run $1.00/ per seed and I am looking into acquiring 150 of them, so quite a large upfront cost as far as seeds go.

In order to reach these goals of the farm we would need to produce 1200 stems a week.  This amount includes 180 focal flowers such as Large Sunflowers, Zinnias, Asters, Ranunculus, Lisianthus or Dahlias.  Then we need 130 Spike flowers such as Snapdragons, Lupine, Larkspur, and Delphinium or sometimes I even like to through in a Hosta flower because they’re awesome.  Disk Flowers (and I refer to these as a basic shape and not based on anatomy) are next with 240 needed weekly such as Rudbecia, Ammi, small Zinnias, Cosmos, Statice, Yarrow, and Love in a midst.  Then we need 240 Airy flowers or foliage in which I like to use Cosmos foliage, Asparagus, Fennel, Angelica, Amaranth and Gysophilia.  Finally, we need a whopping 360 Stems/week of basic filler foliage like Bupleurum, Bells of Ireland, Gardenia, Boxwood, honeysuckle, Basil, Mint, Lavender, and Sage (many of these I still need to order).  On a side note, I would really like to have eucalyptus, however they always seem to succumb to the summer heat here-however I will diligently continue to try. Now, in order to have this many flowers available to harvest, I plan to sow 640 seeds each week. That is 5 trays of 128 cells some in the greenhouse, some of the more high maintenance seeds in my house so I can dote on them more frequently. That also means that every two weeks I will be planting out 640 seedlings and rotating planting beds.  Thanks to my handy dandy spreadsheet, I know that this week I need to start 256 Sunflowers (already done), 50 Lobelia, 50 Rudbeckia, and 50 Coreopsis (To be sown tomorrow).

There are plenty of other activities that need to get accomplished as well like creating more low tunnels in case of sudden freezes (if anyone knows where a girl can find cheap bendable electrical conduit tubing hit me up), ordering more organic fertilizer for the year, ordering bulk compost and worm castings, and I still have to order seeds for the 2^nd half of the year.  Then, there are the most dreaded tasks, such as washing and sanitizing all of last year’s seed starting trays, ugh (they were the cheap plastic kind that always break in the wash, luckily I was able to upgrade to several sturdy cell trays from bootstrap farmer this year and I plan on purchasing more). Anyways, there’s always a ton to do and I am so looking forward to longer day lengths (Hello Mid-March!).  The first few successions of specialty daffodils are just beginning to peak through the soil, so that’s exciting at least.  Also, my son just got an awesome new drone and we are both looking forward to sharing that floral footage as more stems come through!  So, here is to setting goals, making more spreadsheets, taking more classes and sharing in the farming community.  Cheers to each and every one of you who choose to buy local and sustainable.