When my sisters and I were growing up, my mom always had a big veggie garden, butI hated growing veggies. I was about eight years old when I vowed that I would NEVER grow a garden. To this day I despise the itchy green stuff that gets all over me when Itry to pick tomatoes, but when I dropped out of college a few years ago I found myself back in the garden at home. That year I tucked Zinnia plants in every extra corner of the garden, and by the end of the summer, I fell in love with the magic of gathering armloads of bright colored flowers.
One afternoon when I returned from a weeding session in the garden, I marched into the kitchen where my mom was doing dishes and announced, "Forget the veggies. Next sum- mer I'm going to grow only flowers, lots of flowers!" My mom looked up from her work and responded, "You better find a way to make money with it then." That's what I resolved to do. I had no idea what it meant to be a flower farmer, and I had no idea the ways flower farming would change me.
In 2020 we sold our home in Cashmere and moved to Leavenworth- and settled into the flower shed on our new property for a year while we built a home again. (Talk about serious family time with the 8+ of us all squished together! and yeah, squished together enough that you could be in the shower but still be in on the breakfast table conversation 😂) We've never lived on a highway before, and weren't sure if we'd like it. But that opened a whole new family for us- our farm family.
The flower farm and (now Strawberries as well!!!) is run by my mom now--well, this year we're all pitching in as much as we can.
Being flower farmers is really just all about sharing love with other people. And love that we get to be apart of that everyday. There's kindhearted people who order subscriptions for flowers all summer for people in nursing homes, there's celebrations and weddings, and families taking time to spend together in our fields. And we love that.
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