Jenny (00:31)
In most cases, making a living or even just earning a little extra income from your flower farm is going to be a lot harder with a very short growing season than compared to a longer growing season. But that's not a reason to give up. If you live in a cold place like I do and have a naturally short growing season and today's episode, I'm going be going over some real numbers from my own farm. So you can see how powerful.
Season extension can be in creating a profitable business that pays you well as well as a few tips and tricks for implementing season extension tactics on your farm. Now when I say season extension, all I'm saying is that you're taking your regular natural growing season where you live in your climate and you're extending that using either high tunnels or maybe even low tunnels or
other factors or other tactics to extend your growing season. So let's say, like for example, on my farm, my regular growing season would probably be late, like mid to late July through late September. And I'm in zone six in upstate New York. But with season extension tactics that I use,
My growing season is March through Thanksgiving and even after that before that. So I could really extend my season even more if I wanted to, but I just don't want to. And the reason why we're talking about this today is because squeezing a salary, like paying yourself a living wage out of just three months of cashflow is going to be way harder than you bringing in cash for your farm over a period of nine or 10 months or even year round.
So the more time you have to get cash in the door to sell your products, the more potential revenue you're going to be able to capture. And so when we have a naturally short growing season, we want to try to extend that season as much as possible in a lot of cases, maybe not every case, but I I shouldn't keep saying that because everything that I say, there's always like a caveat to, because that's just the world that we live in and how life is. But for most of us.
It's going to, you're going to want to extend your season a little bit. Now there are a lot of growers out there who are trying to grow or succeeding at growing year round right now. And I think when we think about year round versus seasonal, it's really up to you and your business model and what your numbers look like. Like for me, I don't want to farm in the winter time. mean, I do farm all winter time because I'm growing stuff all winter.
But I'm not selling flowers all winter. And I'm okay with that because I like the seasonality of having a farm business. like having a slower time of the year during the winter, which is not really slow for me at all anymore because I'm teaching a lot over the winter. But for a lot of people, they want to have that income coming in all year round. So a lot of farms are growing in heated hoop houses or forcing tulips all winter and finding some really creative ways to bring in that cashflow.
during times of the year when previously it would be really hard to do that. When I ran the numbers for my farm, which I honestly have done a few times because I really want to give my employees a chance to farm year round. But when I ran the numbers for our farm, it just didn't make sense for me to force tulips or pay to grow in a heated high tunnel in my marketplace.
I think that if I was closer to a major city, like New York city or Boston or somewhere like that, I think it might make sense for me to put in a little bit more money to grow year round and have that year round cashflow. But in my market, the prices that I get for my cut flowers, I really charge like the highest that I can, that I feel like I can in my market. And so the amount that it costs me to grow flowers in the winter versus the amount of money I would earn, it just like.
The juice isn't worth the squeeze for me. So that's why I don't grow year round. And it might be a choice for you to not grow year round either. Maybe you just don't want to, or financially, it doesn't make any sense. So let's talk about the numbers here.
My farm actually earns 60 % of the revenue during quote unquote shoulder seasons. I'm gonna say that again. My farm earns 60 % of its total revenue during shoulder seasons. And we earn a 40%, so the remainder of the revenue during what you would call our main growing season.
And so within that 60 % of the revenue that we make during shoulder seasons, about 75 % of that is being made March through May. So early spring shoulder season, and about 25 % of that revenue is being made October through November, which is like the fall shoulder season. Then the main season, that 40 % of revenue that's made is any revenue that comes in June through September. So as you can see,
the majority of the revenue that is earned for my flower farm is actually outside of my main growing season. And so the revenue that my farm makes would have never been possible for my farm to earn that amount of money that it does without season extension tactics and really hitting those shoulder seasons hard. And so this might not be the same for your farm, but for me in the summer times where I live,
There's usually pretty low demand for flowers. live in sort of a like vacation area in the Finger Lakes area of New York. There's a lot of wineries, a ton of lakes, a lot of people from cities come here for the summertime and like everyone's on vacation. Everyone's in like summer vacation mode. And so there's just a lot of demand for regular, like table cut flowers. Now some of our sales for like our bulk buckets and stuff increase over the summertime because people buy them for parties or graduation ceremonies or whatever.
But we experienced the highest demand for flowers in the springtime and in the fall and around holidays. So the spring, and I know I've talked about this before on the podcast, but the spring is where we find the biggest demand for cut flowers is. And in order to hit that demand and to meet it, you really have to have some season extension tactics in place. If you're living in growing zones, I would say like seven and below.
Now, if you're in growing zone, like two, I'm not really sure how this would apply to you, but grow like zones three, four, five, six, like there are so many things you can do with just like a basic high tunnel to really, really extend your season. And we'll talk about that a little bit, at the end. But I'm so thankful for having springtime because we sell so many flowers during the spring. And then holidays is when we also experience really high demand for flowers and.
As business owners, we have to look at the marketplace and try to meet demand. So if you're finding that you're not selling that many cut flowers in the dead of summertime, like maybe try marketing and growing flowers outside of that and see what happens and trying to hit some flower holidays. Now hitting flower holidays has been.
Huge for us, like before I was able to hit mother's day, like our farm did well, but that was a total game changer for us. We make a huge chunk of change over mother's day, you know, multiple five figures over mother's day, just in one weekend. So hitting these holidays can make a huge difference in your bottom line and in your overall revenue for your flower farm. So hitting those flower holidays is like a must, I think for me.
Other flower holidays that we hit include Thanksgiving, a few Jewish holidays in the month of September, which we actually have a lot of Jewish customers. And so that's always been a really good month for us. And we do not hit Valentine's day, which a lot of flower farmers try to hit.
A lot of people are forcing tulips or rununculus or, you know, doing some other strategies to hit Valentine's day. Just the way that like my markets flow hitting Valentine's day, like doesn't really like make a lot of sense for me. sometimes I am like, yeah, we're going to do mother's day or I'm sorry, Valentine's day this year. But then I sit down and I run the numbers and I'm like, is it really going to be worth it? So we haven't done that one yet. I don't know if we ever will.
But just between like Mother's Day, Thanksgiving, and then some Jewish holidays, those times add a lot to our revenue. And so we really focus on hitting these holidays, particularly Mother's Day and Thanksgiving, by really pushing our early spring plantings and planting in the summer for fall harvests. So for Mother's Day in particular, we hit it hard with planting in the fall time in our high tunnels.
to get really early spring flowers, Ranunculus, Anemone, Butterfly Ranunculus, some Tulips, and then our Campanula and Snapdragons come on usually like end of May and in June. And those flowers, I don't know if it's because it is just really early spring and there's such a high demand in our area for like spring and color and like signs of warmth because we have really long dreary.
dark winters. So if you can relate, you know what I'm talking about. or if it's just because the types of flowers that we grow are not normally seen by most people, like the ranunculus that we grow, you pretty much can't find them anywhere. mean, you can't find the ones that we grow anywhere else. They're huge. They're amazing, really cool varieties. but like things like tulips, like we grow the double tulips or the peony style tulips. And a lot of our customers have never seen those before.
Same with Campanula, same with Butterfly, Ranunculus, even an Anemone sometimes people have not seen before. So we're definitely like differentiating ourselves in the market, but you know, more and more people are kind of catching onto that. Even our local groceries chain is like starting to have more flowers like Ranunculus and an Anemone and Campanula and stuff like that. Haven't seen double tulips there yet or Butterfly, Ranunculus. So we'll see if they catch up to that. But.
For whatever reason, in early spring, people go absolutely nuts over these flowers. And we experience such massive sales that we would be stupid to not keep focusing on growing these and growing in season extension, using season extension tactics.
So spring is huge. Like I said, we make about 75 % of the revenue that we make in shoulder seasons during that really early springtime. And then in the fall, we have been hitting Thanksgiving for the past few years, which has also been a really big holiday for us. And for that, we are growing heirloom mums and eucalyptus, which are all grown in our high tunnels. We also have sort of had snapdragons and a couple other things, but.
We pretty much are just selling lots of heirloom mums, heirloom chrysanthemums and eucalyptus.
This is possible for even really, really cold regions with a big high tunnel or like a D maybe not a big high tunnel, but like a decent size high tunnel that is built correctly with frost cloth for even just like a tiny bit of supplemental heat added to that with propane or wood or whatever. Like you can make a really big difference in your season and extend it by many, many months.
If you just take advantage of a couple of these growing tactics, I'm a huge proponent for high tunnels. High tunnels were by far like the best investment into our farm. And we got most of them paid for through a government program. But even if we hadn't, we would have made our investment back in like just a few months after putting them up. So on our farm, we have a few different sizes of high tunnels, mainly like a smaller caterpillar size high tunnel or
I don't even really know if you can call them a high tunnel. call my tunnel, but like Caterpillar style farmers, style tunnels. And then we have a bigger 30 by 96 foot high tunnels that have two layers of plastic on them. And we blow air in between those two layers of plastic with an inflation fan to increase the R value. So it holds in more heat. And then we also have polycarbonate and walls on that high tunnel, which also increases the heat that is.
able to be captured inside of that high tunnel. So your flowers stay warmer. And so I think if you're going to go into season extension tactics, high tunnels are really the first place to look. I highly recommend those bigger, like more structurally built high tunnels than compared to like a caterpillar tunnel. The high tunnels work better because the more surface area that you cover, the more ground that you cover, the more heat that you're going to be able to trap.
And the better you're going to be able to stabilize the temperatures in there. And so the flowers just seem to do a lot better in those high tunnels. And then the other fact is that you're just keeping more heat in there because of the increased R value with the double layer of plastic or any polycarbonate end walls or anything like that. They can be pricey, however, but like I said, you're going to make your money back so fast on them. Like, it's not even funny, but if
That's like not really an option for you. Those smaller caterpillar size tunnels are really great to start with and start learning how to grow in a high tunnel. And you can get those through companies like one really popular one is farmer's friend. have two high tunnels that are similar to the farmer's friend ones, but I actually bought them used from another farmer in our area that was moving and needed to get rid of them. And so we got them for super cheap and it was a great deal. But.
The reason why I'm recommending these high tunnels is because they're really built to withstand weather and conditions that some of those smaller ones and then the low tunnels, like just like the little hoops out in the field with the frost cloth on top or plastic on top. Like what, if you get a big snowstorm or if you get a ton of wind, like it's just going to rip those things up, but the big high tunnels are really built to withstand a lot of that weather. so.
just like the emotional investment into going out and caring for those like stupid little low tunnels. I hate them by the way, like the little tiny low tunnels, they just always like cave in because of snow or the plastic gets blown off because of the wind or animals get inside of them and destroy your flowers. Plus I don't really think it does a whole lot. yes, it's sort of protecting your flowers from like the elements, but it's not really like.
capturing any heat or a significant amount of heat from the soil to regulate the temperatures that much. So I just really think that high tunnels are the way to go here to extend your season. So as you can see, 60 % of our revenue is earned in the shoulder seasons outside of my main growing season.
And I just really don't think that my farm would have ever been successful or would ever have earned the amount of money and the profit that it does. If we didn't implement these season extension tactics by growing flowers in high tunnels and hoop houses to get that really early season flower flush and to hit those flower holidays. I think that if you are a flower farmer that's struggling to get your revenue up.
This could be a real game changer for you to learn how to grow in high tunnels and to really extend your season. I don't think that the low tunnels are the way to do it. They're just a pain in the butt in my opinion, unless you live somewhere that's like really warm or something like that. don't know, or you don't get a of snow or any wind, but with all the natural disasters and like unpredictable weather that's happening everywhere, like just get a high tunnel, please.
So I hope that this episode inspires you to learn more about season extension and how you can apply it to your farm.
I also would love to invite you over to my farm this summer. I am teaching my annual on farm workshop where we talk a lot about season extension, growing in high tunnels, efficiencies, systems, time management, all that good stuff. And so if you're interested in that, head over to my website, trademarkfarmer.com and you'll find more information about that workshop there.
But that's it for today. And real quick, before we get off, I just want to ask you to please share this episode with another flower farmer that could use this information. Maybe someone who is struggling a bit and could just like use a little leg up or some encouragement, because I just want everybody to succeed. And I think this is really helpful and valuable information that could really help someone else out there. So please share this with a friend and also leave a review for this podcast.
If you have gotten any value out of this podcast at all, your reviews really helped me in getting my mission of getting as many flower farmers as profitable as possible. Without reviews for this podcast, the flower farmers that really need this information might not be able to find it. So please, please just take two minutes to go and leave me an honest review on Apple or Spotify and the flower world and me would appreciate it so much.
So thanks for joining me for this episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Don't forget, new episodes are released every Monday. So I'll see you next week, same time, same place.
