The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

June was a nice gradual lead up to the peak of my busiest time of year. All of the flowers are now in the ground and it’s all about maintaining and supporting the flowers while they continue to grow tall and strong. It was a colder than usual Spring so the flowers were a bit slow to grow in June, but with the weather taking a warm turn they will soon be taking off and the field will be bursting with color! Right now, the sweet peas, yarrow, lady’s mantel, and feverfew are in full bloom with the snapdragons, phlox, cosmos, calendula, and delphinium close behind. The Sunflowers are almost as tall as me. The Dahlias are even starting to show some small buds. All just in time for this busy month! I have lots of exciting projects, weddings, and plenty of field maintenance (weeding) and I’ll be needing lot of flowers for all of the July happenings.

I’m diving straight into the month with a big wedding this weekend plus, it’s the first week of my Summer and Full Season CSAs! This week’s CSA subscriptions will feature the start of those early summer blooms. This is my first year doing CSAs and over the past six months I’ve tried to think of every detail so it’s a successful first year. Things like field planning, sending out information to all of the subscribers, designing and gathering materials, and carefully creating schedules to stay on top of deliveries and juggling all of my other projects each week. I’ve done all that I can, and now it’s time to execute. Knowing it’s my first-time doing CSAs, I’m reminding myself that there will be learning moments along the way, and that’s ok! I’m eager to see how it goes and improve each year.

While I love the farming part of my business and being able to share my flowers through things like Flower Fridays and CSA subscriptions, I also love being able to express my creative side through wedding and design work. Since farming takes up so much time, I’m limited to how many weddings I can do each season, but I have two in July that I’m so excited for! The first is a goregous garden party themed wedding at Kiana Lodge. This wedding will be full of light blues, purples, creams, and whites and will include flowers like hydrangeas, sweet peas, roses, scabiosa, and more! Plus I will be doing my first ground arch for the ceremony which I am really looking forward to. It’s going to be stunning and I can’t wait to share pictures with you all!

Most people don’t see all of the behind the scenes work that goes into wedding floral design. There are months and months of planning, designing, and prepping that go into each wedding and event that a floral designer does. Then, there’s figuring out where to source the flowers from. Since I’m a micro-farmer, I use as many of my flowers as I can and then reach out to other local flower farmers to help source whatever else I need. This requires some coordination of when to harvest and when to pick up from other farmers. A typical wedding week starts on Tuesday with washing buckets, prepping the vessels and any other materials that will be used. Wednesday is harvest and flower pick-up day. On these days flowers need to be sourced and processed, which typically takes 6+ hours depending on the wedding size and how many farm pick-ups I have. Once all of the flowers have been collected, properly processed and cared for, it’s time to start designing. I like to save the wedding party and family flowers for the last design day so they are as fresh as they can be for the wedding day. So, I start with the ceremony and reception. Things like aisle or altar arrangements, centerpieces, or bud vases. These will take hours to create and sometimes, spill over into design day two. On the final day, I will create the bridal bouquet and bridesmaid bouquets. I want these pieces to be as fresh as possible since they will be photographed the most and you always want the flowers looking their best in the photos. I will also make all of the boutonnieres, pocket squares, corsages, hair pieces, etc. Any piece that has flowers that are out of water and will need to be created last and kept in a cooler overnight to stay fresh.

After all of that, it’s finally wedding day! Wedding days are spent on-site for the majority of the day, starting around 8am to load up the flowers and drive to the venue. They typically end between 10-11pm once the end of the night clean-up is complete. At this point, we’re exhausted but there’s follow ups to do and next week’s projects to start thinking about, emails to catch up on. This is what we sign up for though, we wait all Winter for this. We allow ourselves to rest during the off season, so we are ready to put in the extra work this time of year. To me, it’s all worth it because I truly love what I do, even the difficulties that may come with the job. I’ve found that when you’re passionate about what you are doing, the stress feels easier to handle and the hours don’t feel as long. Plus, who doesn’t love spending their days outside in the sunshine surrounded by flowers?

Each year I love this work more and more and I feel inspired to keep going. With my business growing by the year I’m taking on bigger projects and doing things I’ve never done before. It’s nerve-wracking and so exciting all at the same time. I’m proud of myself for continuing to try new things, take risks, and work hard to improve my skills, knowledge, and business tactics. With all of this growth I’ve tried to work on learning how to be the most efficient with my work. Last season my approach to growing my business was to just say yes to everything. That ultimately lead to me being so burnt out by the time October came around, I could barely do any of the fall projects I had planned to do. This year, I decided to narrow down what I want to focus on. By doing this I can specialize in a few things, and master not only the skills that are required but the processes to make it as smooth as possible. I’ve decided to primarily focus my business on weddings, CSAs, custom orders, and dried flower wreaths in the Fall. Stay tuned on how this new approach turns out, my hopes are it will lead to a more steady season.

In other news, Flower Fridays officially started last week! If you’re local to Bellingham be sure to stop by Lettered Street Coffeehouse or Lost Giants Cider Co. this Summer for fresh flower bouquets, every other Friday. The next Flower Friday will be on July 12th. Bouquets will be delivered to Lettered Street Coffeehouse by 9am and to Lost Giants Cider Co. by 2pm. Can’t make it to either of these locations? Need flowers before then? Reach out or visit the BB Shop to place custom orders all season.

July is also the last month to sign up for the Autumn CSA subscription. This season I was gifted nearly 100 dahlia tubers from Carolyn at Willow & Mabel Garden Co. These gorgeous dahlias will be featured in the Autumn CSA bouquets, you won’t want to miss it! Spots are limited to sign up sooner rather than later.

That’s all for this month, stay tuned for next months when the field will be in full bloom and Summer will be in full swing!

Chase