Jenny (00:29)
If you've ever felt like harvesting takes over your entire day, you're not wrong. On most flower farms, harvesting alone can eat up probably 60 % of total labor time during peak season. And the problem is, it just becomes, this is just the way it is. Harvesting takes forever, takes up all of our time. But the truth is, harvesting doesn't have to take that long.
Hi, if we haven't met yet, my name is Jenny Marks. I have built a multiple six-figure flower farm, growing flowers on less than an acre. I've been farming for literally my entire life, but I have been operating my current cut flower farm business for about 11 years or so. And now I help other flower farmers stop guessing and start actually making money doing this because a flower farm business is way too hard and way too much work to not make a profit at it.
So today I'm gonna walk you through where our time is actually going during harvest, what was slowing us down, and what we changed to cut time significantly and how you can do the same for your farm.
The first point I want to make is that a lot of your harvest time isn't actually spent cutting flowers. The cutting the flowers part is usually the fastest part, but when we looked closely and this is, I'm talking years ago when we've started analyzing our harvest, um, I was being really frustrated because we had like three different harvesters and it was still taking us from 7 a.m. Until 11 a.m. To cut all the flowers we needed and
Yes, we were bringing in revenue, but
not enough to justify that amount of time that we were spending on harvesting. So years and years ago, I really looked at what we were doing with our harvests to figure out how to speed it up. And at the time I was looking around and realizing that a lot of the time we were spending out in the field, we weren't actually harvesting at all. We were walking back and forth. We were talking to each other. We were searching. We were deciding. We were backtracking.
And that's what was really slowing things down. So if you're somebody on your flower farm who feels like harvesting is just taking way too much time, some of these things might be your problem. Pay attention to things like how much time you spend walking around or walking up and down the rows versus cutting, how often you kind of double back or you go back and forth, and how often you're touching.
The flowers are physically like holding onto them, touching them, putting them down, picking them back up. I'll talk more about that in a minute, but just to give you a brief walkthrough of how we used to do things as we didn't have a plan. We kind of just, or I guess I had a rough plan, but because we had multiple harvesters, there weren't basically tasks or harvest tasks assigned to them. And so what would happen is.
You know, Sandra would go over to harvest all the Zinnia stems we needed for mixed bouquets. And then Helen would go and also harvest Zinnia's, but everyone thought she was harvesting bunches. It turns out 25 minutes later, she was harvesting stems. So then we had double the amount of stems we needed and no bunches. So then we ended up having to bunch them and it was just a nightmare because I didn't know how to manage things at the time, but
Also in the very, very beginning when I was just me harvesting flowers, I never really had a plan. And so I would just kind of be like, I'm not sure what to cut today. I guess I'll cut this. Guess I'll do that. And so it comes down to one, having a plan. ⁓ that's a big thing and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes, but it's also just having those efficient processes and systems in place. So you can get in there, start cutting and take as few steps as possible.
to harvest all the flowers you need. So what we do is we take all the buckets we need and we put them at the tops and the ends of each bed we're going to be harvesting from. So they're filled with water, they're placed at the ends of the beds. And then we will start at the top of a bed and just go down and just like clear cut harvest, or maybe not clear cut, but harvest everything that's ready. And we try to harvest as much as possible into bunches already.
We try to sell almost everything in a single variety bunch. We harvest stems separately that will go into our mixed bouquets, but mostly we try to harvest in bunches. So as we're going down the aisle, we are counting either, you know, it's usually five, eight or 10 stems per bunch, but you're counting the stems. We'll just say 10 some bunches for now to make it easy. So you're counting your stems.
As you're cutting, you have one hand with all the stems in them. I usually hold my bunch upside down so all the ends of the stems are in my left hand and the heads of the flowers are down towards the ground. It's really the most efficient way to hold them. Because if you try to hold them the other way, first of all, the flowers tend to get more damaged because the flower heads are up at the top. Plus your hand tires faster because you're holding it upright. Whereas like the heavy part of the...
flowers should be at the bottom, so we kind of like hold the bouquet upside down. Hopefully I'm describing this okay, I'm probably not. But anyhow, as we're harvesting, as I'm cutting, as I make a cut, I basically take the stem, flip it upside down, and put it with the other flowers in my left hand, because I'm right handed, and all the flower heads are even at the bottom.
So it's not like the stems are kind of all over the place. All the flower heads are clustered together. So it makes it look like it's a bigger bunch. All the flower heads, all the blooms are all together. Then once I get 10 stems, I snip the ends of the stems even, wrap it with a rubber band. And we have a special way that we wrap them. I'm not really sure if I can do or describe it very well over audio. I'll have to make a video another time about how we do it. But essentially,
We slip the rubber band over one or two stems, then wrap the whole rubber band around the bottom of the bunch and slip the other end of the rubber band around the bottom stems in the bunch. Again, I'm gonna have to make a video about that, because I'm not really sure how to describe it over audio on this podcast, but then I set the bunch on the ground. I know this is like very granular detail, but these details are important.
So I set the bunch on the ground where I am and I keep on moving down the bed. So I go to harvest my next bunch and I keep doing this until I get probably about halfway down the bed. Then I will stop as soon as I get a bunch, turn around and as I walk back up the aisle, I pick up all of the bunches I had set down on the ground. So this means I'm harvesting anywhere from like, could be depending on the type of flower.
you know, 10 to 40 bunches of flowers, maybe not 40, 10 to 20 maybe. And I'm picking them all up as I go down the aisle back towards the bucket of water. And then I have a huge armful of bunches that I just basically drop into our bucket of water. Now some people freak out about that and they'll be like, oh my gosh, the flowers are out of water. Oh, they're all going to wilt and die. And we
do not have a problem with that whatsoever. Obviously it depends on the kind of flower. Some things need to be harvested directly into water or directly into water with hydrator, like our Baptisia, for example. We do have a lot of Baptisia on the farm and when we harvest that, we basically do the same thing, but we have a bucket of water with hydrator there with us because they cannot be out of water. But for the vast majority of flowers that we grow on our farm,
It's okay if they're out of water for a little while. It depends on how hard they are. ⁓ to be quite honest, most of the things that we used to grow that really need a lot of hydration and have a tendency to wilt, we just don't grow them anymore because it's not worth it. It's not worth the headache. ⁓ and our customers have never complained about not seeing baby's breath or not baby's breath. ⁓ what's that stuff? I'm thinking of Sina glass on the blue Chinese. Forget me. That's what I'm trying to say.
Sorry, tripping over my words today, but yeah, they don't miss that. Or the serinth that we used to grow, like those things both had a tendency to wilt for us and we just stopped growing them and it was fine. So we also count our rubber bands ahead of time. This is like a hack that has been so great because.
If you've ever harvested flowers in two bunches and somebody else has been trying to talk to you at the same time, it just doesn't work because as you're counting, you lose count, you lose track about how many are in your hand. so, ⁓ what we do is we count out stacks of 10 rubber bands. And so we'll put 10 rubber bands on one wrist, 10 rubber bands on the other wrist. And that way, as we're counting, we don't have to count our bunches as well as the number of stems.
So as I am bunching, I just take all of the rubber bands off of my right wrist and when they're gone, I know I've harvested 10 bunches. So before we even start harvesting, we're counting out those rubber bands and putting them on our wrists in like 10 stem, not 10 stem bunches, but in 10 rubber band bunches. So we don't have to also count our bunches that we're harvesting.
So those are, that's just like a general rough idea of how we set up our harvest. So we're not walking up and down the aisles back and forth all the time. If you are going down an aisle harvesting flowers and you walk back to the top of your bed, every time you have a bunch of flowers, you are literally walking 10, 20, 30 times more than like I would be in the situation I just described.
which means it's probably taking you 10, 20, 30 times longer. So keeping everything nice and close and tight and just trying to not walk all over the place and backtracking and deciding and searching for things is going to make your harvest so much more faster. So that was point number one.
is really focusing your time on actually cutting the flowers, not walking around and doing other things.
Jenny (11:22)
If you're feeling stuck or scattered in your flower farm right now or totally overwhelmed with information, I made something for you. Most flower farming education just throws more information at you, but what actually grows your farm isn't more info, it's knowing what to focus on and knowing which problems to solve in the right order. So I created something different for you. It is a free personalized profit roadmap.
All you do is answer a few quick questions and I'll send you what stage of business you're in, what to prioritize right now, and what you can safely ignore in order to move your business forward. Because honestly, trying to fix everything at once is exactly why most flower farmers stay stuck. You can grab it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. I'll also link it in the show notes.
Jenny (12:17)
The next point is having an efficient field layout because your layout of your farm is incredibly important. It has to be set up efficiently. It could be costing you so many hours every single week. If your most harvested crops are all spread out or if they're hard to access or not grouped logically,
You're adding in extra steps all day long. So when we do our crop planning, we plan to plant all the flowers are going to be blooming at the same time together. We plant them in the rows right next to each other. And I know that this may sound like very nitpicky and like, it doesn't really matter, but it actually matters a lot because even if you are walking from one side of your farm to the other one, when you're harvest,
And that takes you five minutes to walk back and forth. And let's say you do that four times a day. That's only 20 minutes a day. And you're like, not a big deal, whatever. But if you harvest four days a week over the course of a season, that's like almost 50 hours. And if you like, let's just say you have your labor rate at $30 an hour as owner, that's $1,400 in labor. And if you are in a different situation, if you have multiple harvesters, let's say
three harvesters and your labor rate is $20 an hour, that's almost $3,000 over the course of the season that you've lost in inefficient harvests, just from not planning your harvests appropriately. Now, this is one of those things that you don't notice it until you fix it or until it breaks, which is my situation. Because last year, was it last year? No, was the year before, it was two years ago.
We had this weird situation where we kind of had to pivot and we didn't. It's a lot to make a long story short. We have a Dalia rotation where we try to rotate where we plant our Dalia. So they're not planted in the same place every year, you know, basic farming basics, crop rotation, but we were doing, we had like construction going on or something, and we couldn't put our Dalia is where we wanted to that season. had to split them up. So we had half of our Dalia is on one.
part of the farm and the other half of the dahlias on the other side of the farm. Like literally they were like opposite edges of our one acre that we plant on. And it was crazy. I never ever expected this to happen. But our crew, like our harvesters were like, Jenny, this is taking so long. There were multiple, I mean, pretty much every single week during dahlias season, it was taking
way longer than normal. And like, I don't have the official time. Like I can't tell you this many hours versus that many hours because I didn't track it, but I just know there was so many days where we were like up against the wire or we were still harvesting right up until like 1130 AM, which is like the maximum cutoff for us. like, we should not be harvesting flowers after 11 AM. And, it was because the dahlias were split and we were having to move back and
forth across the farm. And we were trying to do like all of one plot at once, obviously, and then go do the other one. But even just having to like move around the farm, it just added so much more time into our mornings. And, ⁓ it was really a big waste of time. So this is how I know it matters is because I broke my own rule,
by accident and we really noticed a difference. So moral of the story is try to grow your flowers that you'll harvest at the same time together that this precision crop planning really, really matters and keeping frequently harvested crops easily accessible. Like an example of that is that we have our eucalyptus tunnel. have a, it's kind of like a farmer's friend caterpillar style tunnel right in the middle of our farm. And it's
all eucalyptus. have three full beds of eucalyptus in there. It's perennialized eucalyptus, comes back every year. And it's in the middle of our farm because we harvest from that all the time, basically July through the end of the season, through end of November. And we need it easily accessible because we need it close to all the other crops that we're harvesting with it because that changes July, August, September, October.
but the eucalyptus we are harvesting consistently throughout the year. we put it in a centralized spot. So think of laying out your farm in terms of flow, not just like space that this field layout doesn't need to create unnecessary work. can make it flow a little bit more easily. Okay. Next point I want to make is handling flowers too many times really slows things down.
Every extra touch adds time and in a lot of cases can reduce flower quality. So when you're cutting, setting down, picking back up, moving to another bucket, like these are all extra steps that eat up time and energy. The goal is to handle each stem as few times as possible.
which is why we try to cut and bunch, like cut, strip and bunch directly in the field, all in one motion. We try to do that as much as humanly possible. And I know for other farms that doesn't work for them, like whatever system works fastest for you is the best system. This is just what works for me. And so I'm going to share it with you. I've seen other farms like larger farms, they have big crews and a lot of times they'll have
people who are actually cutting the flowers, runners who are grabbing the flowers from the cutters and bringing them up to strippers, bringing them up to people who are at the top of the beds or somewhere else in there or in a studio and they're stripping the flowers, all the leaves off. And so they basically have a large crew and everybody has a specific job. And I think that can work really, really well.
for big crews, but for just a few people and for my farm on a small scale farm when we timed it, that didn't work for us. In fact, it added a lot of extra time into it. And if you're somebody who is harvesting in your tunnel, but then you're stripping outside of the tunnel and then you're also bunching it and then you're putting them in your cooler and then you're taking them out to bunch them and sleeve them later, like.
You just want to touch the product as few times as possible. So it's as efficient as possible. And this may take some like time studies on your farm to see what works best for you, but I'll just tell you what works best for me. Part of this is also keeping things as close as possible. So a great example of this is our tulips. Like I actually, we grow a small amount of tulips every year still. And I think this is our last year doing it. I am over them. them. But, ⁓
I recently was harvesting tulips. I'm recording this in April. So, ⁓ the tulip example is when we harvest tulips, they are in a ⁓ pretty wide bed and we have a lot of space to harvest in the aisle where we plant our tulips. And that's on purpose because this is like a painful crop for us that is inefficient.
And I know a lot of people when they harvest their tulips, they dig up the bulbs and they save the bulbs so they can, you know, make them last for a long time or whatever. ⁓ we don't do any of that. We pull our tulip stems just like you would a Narcissus or a
So when I harvest my tulips, I set it up so I have a bucket on either side of me and I am facing the bed. So I have a bucket on my left side that is filled with water and I have a bucket on my right side that's filled with water, but one is for dirty water and one is for clean water. I'll explain more in a second. The dirty water is for swishing off the dirt on the bottom of the tulip stems so they're nice and clean.
And then we bunch them and put them into the bucket of clean water, which is the bucket that they will live in in the cooler. So the way that this happens is as I'm looking at my tulips, I'm standing over them, looking at which ones are ready. And I would grab the heads with my left hand. And then I take my right hand and I go to slide it down the stem so I can grip the bottom of that ⁓ stem. And as I'm sliding my right hand down the stem, I'm stripping off all the leaves and I grab the base of it and I pull up.
to actually harvest the stem. So as I'm doing that, I'm putting the stems in my left hand and I'm lining up all the flower heads. And then when I get a bunch of, we do bunches of eight, I snip the stems off so they're even at the end. Then I take the bunch, dunk it in the water, just real quick swish around, just like one little swish around.
that gets all of the dirt off the bottom of the stems. Then I band it, band the bunch and throw it in the bucket next to me. This process has saved us an incredible amount of time and money. can, like this past Saturday, I harvested tulips by myself because you know, it happens on a Saturday, the sun comes out, they all blow open.
when no one else is around. And I was by myself and I was just kind of like leisurely enjoying the day. And I probably harvested between 250 and 300 stems an hour doing it like that. And all we have to do at this point is take them out of the cooler before a farmer's market and throw them into sleeves. The way that we used to do it is we would dig them, carry them to a wash station, wash the stems and the bulbs off, then
put them in a container, bring them into the cooler, then take them out of the cooler, cut the bulbs off, count out the stems into bunches, bunch them with a rubber band, then sleeve them. You get the idea, right? It's hours and hours compared to just pulling, swishing, bunching in the field and throwing in a sleeve later. So again, you wanna set up your systems so your flowers basically go from the field to the bucket to the cooler to a final sales outlet.
in as few steps as possible. You want to handle them as few times as possible. Plus the other thing is if you handle them a lot, they're getting passed off to like a bunch of different people doing a bunch of different steps and you're picking them up, putting them down, moving them in the cooler, out of the cooler, onto a table, off the table. They tend to get bruised and beat up a little bit so the quality can go down as well. Next point I want to talk about is decision fatigue when it comes to harvest time.
Decision fatigue is a hidden time killer and I sort of touched on this earlier with the first point I made, but if you're deciding what to cut while you're out in the field, you are already behind. Stopping to think, do I need more of this? Or what should I cut next? Or how many of this do I need? It just adds so much time waste into your day. So you wanna show up in the field with a plan because just multiply.
all those little micro decisions and your harvest time is just going to stretch way longer than it needs to. So before anybody gets out in the field to harvest, we have a time, we have a dedicated plan of exactly how many stems we need to put towards mixed bouquets. So we make our mixed bouquet recipe ahead of time. know how many bouquets we're going to make. So we know how many stems we need. Everybody knows how many they need to harvest and who is harvesting what.
And then everything else that's ready in the field just gets harvested into bunches. And so that's how we do it. And it, seems so obvious, but I don't think a lot of people do it this way. And it adds so much time and complexity and decision-making and headaches into your harvest every single day. So before you go out to harvest, just create a very simple harvest plan. Like what crops, how many bunches are stems? Like how many stems in a bunch?
You can use a clipboard, can use a notes app, you can use a whiteboard. It really doesn't matter. Just make sure you're going into it with a plan.
And finally, the last point I want to make about cutting your harvest time down is that to really win at this, comes down to small, boring improvements over time. There's really no magic trick to this. It's just better systems being put into place and your systems might change over time as your farm changes too. You know, a lot of people are looking for like one big hack to save them all the time in the world, but in reality, it's just a bunch of small improvements that add up to
hours saved each week. And once those systems are in place, they can keep working for you all season long and for years and years to come. So just think about improving just one part of your harvest system at the time, at a time. Maybe it's the plan. Maybe it's your crop planning. Maybe it's the root. Maybe it's the tools that you're using. Ooh, that's another good one. We didn't really talk about like using snips versus a sickle knife or like a rice sickle.
or there's a lot of different tools out there depending on the crop and what you're harvesting. ⁓ Just think about what's one part of your harvest system that could save you a ton of time. Maybe it's just showing up more prepared. You wanna aim for consistency, not perfection. And just try to target areas that are the biggest frustrations first. But truly, truly, if harvesting feels like it's taking over your farm right now,
You don't need to work harder. just need to look at how you're doing it. So next time you harvest, pay attention to where your time is actually going. Are you walking around a bunch? Are you deciding? Are you handling too much? Are you not like the way you're placing your hands? Is it just taking you too long? Are you showing up without a plan? Ask yourself what's one small change I can make this faster. Just start there. And I know over time you'll be able to cut your harvest time.
down. We have literally cut our harvest time in half over the years just by making these small, simple little tweaks over time. So if this episode helped you rethink your harvest process or gave you any light bulb moments or just things to think about to improve your farm, I would really love it if you could just take 30 seconds to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
It just helps more farmers find the show and it helps all of us build more profitable and sustainable flower farm businesses. I would really appreciate it if you got any value out of this to go and leave a review. Thank you so, so much if you have already.
Jenny (27:11)
If you're feeling stuck or scattered in your flower farm right now or totally overwhelmed with information, I made something for you. Most flower farming education just throws more information at you, but what actually grows your farm isn't more info, it's knowing what to focus on and knowing which problems to solve in the right order. So I created something different for you. It is a free personalized profit roadmap.
All you do is answer a few quick questions and I'll send you what stage of business you're in, what to prioritize right now, and what you can safely ignore in order to move your business forward. Because honestly, trying to fix everything at once is exactly why most flower farmers stay stuck. You can grab it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. I'll also link it in the show notes.
Jenny (28:07)
So
Thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I'm Jenny. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
