Growing cut flowers: Is it worth it if I don’t want to sell?

100,000,000 percent yes. Growing cut flowers has very quickly become my absolute favorite crop. In fact, it kind of consumes my life from February to October. I love the flowers. I love starting seeds. I love spending my evenings in the field picking. I love arranging. What I don’t enjoy… is business. I love the idea of turning my passion into a career, but I also worry that mixing my favorite thing with work, profits, and money may ruin the fun of it.

So that begs the question: what the heck do I do with the flowers I grow? This last summer I had planned on attending the local farmer’s market regularly, I had reached out to city administration to see if I could have a flower stand on the curb (I cannot without rezoning our house), and I talked about it with people who know business. I even registered a business name. However, I canceled the name within 24 hours because I quickly became overwhelmed with the paperwork and details of business. It was a bummer of a day, especially since I had already ordered enough seeds to sell. I decided to plant them anyway.

Flash forward to when I had thousands of flowers ready to share with the world… I didn’t want to wake up early to attend the market or worry about profits. So instead, I decided to grow, pick, and arrange. I did everything that I love to do. Talking with my husband, we decided to donate the bouquets. I drove around town with his grandma and we delivered about 30 of my first bouquets to people around town. While I really enjoyed going around town and delivering, I wanted more of a hands off approach to getting the bouquets out into the world. I painted an old chair and used my Cricut to make a cute little free flowers sign and I put it on the curb with a bucket of 5-6 bouquets. The first few days they were slow to go, but over time more and more people stopped. I loved to see the smiles. It made everything 100% worth it. I received thank you cards on the chair. People stopped whenever they saw us outside to say thank you. IT WAS AWESOME.

I chose to make small bouquets and did have somewhat of a system to making them so they were consistent in “value,” but overall I just did it for fun! It made my heart happy to see them go out into the world to hopefully make someone’s day a little bit better! I can share my system or formulas at a different time, but I want to make the point that flowers bring joy. Plain and simple.

My grandma lives at an assisted living and talking with her we decided that it would be really fun to host a make and take bouquets there too! The first day I brought flowers there, I had arranged and wrapped them myself and grandma asked around to see if there would be any interest in making bouquets if I brought in more flowers… and there was! So a couple of weeks later we got together with a group at her assisted living and had a wonderful time designing. It was so fun to see what flowers were the most popular and what combinations people came up with!

Even if you don’t enjoy or have any interest in selling your flowers, I still highly recommend growing a few in your garden. They attract pollinators, are beautiful, and can be used to make bouquets for yourself or small gifts for family and friends! I should add that there is absolutely nothing wrong with selling the flowers! These are just a couple of ways to brighten people’s day without having to worry about selling or business 🙂