Our First Season Flower Farming at the New Farm

It’s hard to believe that our first season flower farming at the new farm has come to a close! I shared a lot of behind the scenes and many flower filled photos on our farm instagram page @coastalislandfarm. I had a blog post planned sharing our farm’s name and all those details, yet somehow life got busy and I never published it! So, our farm is called “Coastal Island Farm” you can find the farm’s website here, and we are on instagram and facebook too.

I was kept relatively busy with weekly bouquet subscriptions, supplying local shops, custom orders and stocking our weekly roadside farm stand. I was absolutely blown away with the community support for our first season. We really knew very few people when we moved here, and I am smack dab in the middle of an agricultural area filled with flower farmers. All that to say I had no idea as to what to expect for the local market of fresh flowers, and if it was overly saturated. Let’s just say the love of all things local, especially when it comes to flowers and produce runs deep in our neck of the woods, for which I am thankful.

In addition to our flowers we also added farm fresh eggs and freshly roasted coffee to our farm offering. The kids sold seasonal produce from the garden like squash and apples!

I ended up growing flowers in two main plots. Everything did relatively well. Our farm came with a 1 acre fenced “market garden” that had 7 foot tall grass. It took a lot of manual labour to scrape the sod and get the soil workable. Not to mention lots of compost! I only grew in 3 100 foot rows down there, and hope to up my growing space somewhere between a 1/4 and 1/2 acre next season. We have some more fall prep in store to get ready for next spring. In the upper garden by the house is where my bulbs, early crops and then dahlias ended up.

Our farm has several established lavender plants, and lavender seems to grow very well here. I started a small batch of lavender plugs that did wonderfully, and then started a tray of another 120 plants that all spouted and then died while I was in the thick of my terrible bought with pregnancy sickness. So that was sad, but there’s always next season. I have plans to add a lot of lavender and peonies.

This season was all about a sunflower trial, inspired by Lisa Mason-Ziegler. I more or less started sunflowers every week beginning with 3 weeks before our last frost. They make for such a beautiful, no fuss focal. I grow some specialty varieties from the pro-cut series in all sorts of colors.

There were many highlights, and one of them was coming together with some local flower farmers to create a floral installation in celebration of Canadian Flowers Week!

It was such a great first season, and I am already planning and preparing for next season!

There’s always much to learn, more flowers to grow and ways to improve! We hope to have our coffee bus up and running to be open to the public, and of course- run a few flower workshops too. All in all I am really happy with how this season went. It is a ton of work- but it is joy filled work. I love not only growing flowers, but arranging and sharing them with our community.

-Miss Ash