Flowers From the Farm Feature

This week I’ve been hosting the Flowers From The Farm’s Instagram, where I’ve been posting about our flower growing story as part of their member take over. Each week a different member takes charge of their Instagram to share a little bit about flower business This week I shared our story, how I came to be here and made it a family ‘thing’, our growing spaces old and new, our values and the challenges of small scale farming. (Spoiler: it is not as idyllic as the lifestyle articles make out!) I’ve compiled all my posts together for you to read here...

An Introduction

For those of you who don’t know, I am Harriet, the muddy hands behind Cumberland Flower Farm way out west in west Cumbria. For the sake of the introduction I forced myself to post this photo of me, *totally out of my comfort zone*, which was take last year for an article featured in the summer edition of Flora Magazine and I’ve followed Cel’s lead and included a photo of little me too.

At Cumberland Flower Farm we grow cut flowers, which we sell in bunches and bouquets direct to customers and wholesale to retailers, in buckets for DIY weddings and to florists too. In normal times at least! Through Flowers From The Farm I have made some brilliant flowery friends, including Cel from Forever Green Flower Co. who I take the Instagram baton from this week. And what a task to follow such insightful, articulate posts! So brilliant! I share Cel’s concerns about the flower industry, I am not know for being shy about talking about these issues either.

Having a network of likeminded growers that you can draw advice and support from is a strength of Flowers From The Farm, and it’s really important that we use our collective voice to shout about what makes our flowers so brilliant, so different, and not just aesthetically but ethically and environmentally too. It’s also important that we clearly acknowledge the challenges and inequalities which prevail in farming, horticulture and floristry, and actively push for societal change so that more people can enjoy the work of a small scale Flower Farmer. Flowers, colour and the natural world have been my constants and are strong themes in our business now. It’s very exciting (and totally nerve wracking) to be in charge of the Flowers From the Farm Instagram this week! Best get on with Monday jobs. Seeds to be sown, weeding to do and the small matter of Home School. I don’t know about you, but we’ve never been more ready for the school holidays....

Our Roots

There was a point in 2017 when Martyn gave me the ‘sell them or grow less’ ultimatum. That, you could say, was the starting point of our business. Creating our family was very difficult. I had taken redundancy to be with our little boy, then spent three years struggling with back-to-back pregnancies, involving stillbirth, premature births and trauma. Growing flowers brought me a lot of joy during this time. Sowing seeds, watching them grow, the abundance, colour, the vitality. I grew A LOT of flowers! A friend left me her polytunnel when she moved abroad and with the extended season that enabled (and Cumbria requires!) and *that* ultimatum, Cumberland Flower Farm was launched in the spring of 2018.

At this point we were a flower farm without the farm, growing on 1/4 acre of allotments, but we had customers and a vision and no idea that securing land to rent or buy would be so fraught. Availability, suitability, affordability are huge hurdles to overcome. It took 18months of active searching and negotiation but in October 2019 the stars aligned (the things that came together ‘just in time’ were incredible) and we bought our land, which is amazingly only one field away from our house. We now have 6 acres of fields and woodland nestled in a little valley between the Solway Firth and the Lake District mountains. It’s a very beautiful spot to grow our joyful flowers and we have to pinch ourselves to believe we are its current custodians. It’s a long held dream come true.

Members of Flowers From The Farm grow on plots ranging from small gardens to large farms, some having owned that ground for generations and others on very short leases. I could talk a lot about the inequalities in land ownership and the problems with how it’s used. Subsidies. Monocrops. Property development. And there is huge resistance to change. What land you use will inform your business, as will the experiences you have had and the values you hold. There is no ‘template’ for success; knowledge, location, market, personal circumstances are all contributing factors alongside a lot of hard work. Lots of hard work.

Flower Growing in Cumbria

Our neighbour has lived in our street since it was built in the 40s and her uncle used to grow cut flowers to sell on our allotment. It’s funny how things ‘come around’ isn’t it? Flowers for life’s events and celebrations used to be grown within our communities and the growth of Flowers From The Farm memberships sees locally grown cut flowers come full circle. Local produce and short supply chains are ‘the answer’ I think, by connecting consumer with producer we can reduce the environmental impact of a luxury product and reconnect people with their local environment and natural world too.

One of our business aims is to grow year round Cumbrian bouquets. Our business is predominantly about brightening people’s lives with vibrant flowers, and to that end we grow early narcissi and anemones, and chrysanthemums and dahlia under cover to extend our season as much as possible. With more space we will try out more things.

We try to encourage a seasonal perspective, and a Cumbrian one at that because our season is very different to Yorkshire, Lincolnshire or Cornwall. Indeed our part of Cumbria is milder and less wet(!) than over the other side of the mountains. Outside of our growing season we use British grown flowers, because the environmental values we have don’t go away in November. It takes a lot of coordination between different growers and regional wholesalers (we do this to reduce road miles as well) but it is possible to sell Christmas Bouquets in December and wholesale bouquets at Valentines Day that only contain British flowers thanks to the large-scale growers still growing here in the U.K. Our hope is that we can change consumer’s mindsets before the world is irrevocably damaged, and at Cumberland Flower Farm we are doing what we can to ensure ‘Global Warming’ is not the enabler in us achieving our year-round Cumbrian bouquets goal.

Provenance

The ‘seasonal, local’ message is important to our business Cumberland Flower Farm, and so I thought I’d follow on from that with our labels. We designed these stickers for the bunches and bouquets we wholesale to clearly communicate the provenance of our flowers. It’s important to us to encourage consumers to look and ask for information about where flowers for sale are grown. It’s all very well educating people on the environmental and ethical problems of imported flowers but it is really difficult for customers to make an informed decision when labelling is non-existent! Supermarkets are getting better at this, with some showing their country of origin and others clearly labelling what is British, and so we thought we’d follow suit and ‘be the change’. We wanted to be as specific as possible and so we only use the term ‘Cumbrian flowers’ when the bouquet has been wholly grown by us. Even If there’s just a few things bought in, it would get a ‘grown not flown’ label instead. Geeky? Maybe. But in a world where ‘organic’, ‘ethical’ and ‘eco’ seem to be used and #hashtagged with wild abandon, I feel it’s more important than ever to provide clear, accurate information on provenance to our customers. Green washing is a very real problem and once useful terms like ‘eco’ are now a brand aesthetic and a marketing term... diluting the real deal for something that looks like it could be... so for us our little labels act to help the consumer and maybe encourage a mindset where provenance matters.

Flowers for Florists

Up until now we’ve had limited capacity to provide our Cumbrian flowers to florists but have enjoyed supplying a number of British focussed event florists across Cumbria when we’ve had the flowers available. Expanding into the field should have enabled us to do this a lot more, but the pandemic has obviously affected the demand and our ability to get the field up to speed. (2020 was the first season when I should have had full-time childcare! Ha!) It is therefore particularly lovely to be able to provide some flowers to a new event florist here in west Cumbria (and a new Flowers From The Farm member too!) Eliza & Flo, who has an exciting floral project going on this weekend. I’ve snuck a couple of roses in alongside the fillers and foliages to show some of the beautiful varieties of roses that we’ve got growing here at Cumberland Flower Farm - we planted 100 bare root roses in January! I’ve added some more photos of them in stories too. It’s a tricky year to be starting something new and Flowers From The Farm friends are a great support. Here’s today’s bucket of ‘new normal’ in a very not normal year...

Busy Bees

We put a lot of time and effort into taking the environmentally friendly solution over the quickest/easiest/cheapest here at Cumberland Flower Farm and a lot of joy comes from knowing that our flowers are beneficial to wildlife and our approach is doing wildlife no harm. From the peat free compost produced in Cumbria by Dalefoot Composts in which we start our seeds to our neighbouring farm’s muck that improves and fertilises our clay soil, we try to choose local, sustainable options. It’s not always easy - most of our plants are grown from seed, but others are sourced from a small local nursery or from larger British ones and a small number are from abroad (due to that breeder controlling the availability) such as our ranunculus. (And the seeds we grow are sold by British companies but are sourced from farms around the world!)

We don’t use chemicals - no fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides or preservative treatments here (I’ve recently blogged about the use of chemicals on imported flowers, and the risk to those who handle them) - and we use natural pest control methods and fertilisers instead. When it comes to preparing our flowers for sale we have sourced recycled/recyclable kraft paper and tissue paper, labels and string. It’s not easy, it’s more expensive and as many people have commented or messaged me over the last few days it’s often very difficult to work out if something is environmentally good or bad because the provenance and ingredients are so difficult to trace. We have a little bee on our provenance stickers because that bee sums up so much about us and our values - busy people, growing flowers that bees love. And today it takes on a new relevance as Martyn has collected and introduced a nucleus of bees to our first bee hive! Thank you Flowers From The Farm members Andrea and Mark at Lavender View Farm for supplying us!

“Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability, and that way you might change the world.”

- Charles Eames

I ended our week hosting the Flowers From The Farm Instagram with this quote told to me by Sarah from One Owl Studio with some images of a farewell flower wreath I made earlier in the week. (Our flowers, foam free.)

I had a lovely time sharing our business and talking about our values. Growing flowers has many challenges, from finding ground to grow on to managing pests, and working ‘with’ the weather. It’s physically demanding, labour intensive work, with thin profit margins. Satisfaction comes from the process (muddy hands, working with nature, nurturing abundance) and in selling the end product. But the reception of our flowers is hugely motivating too. Many Flowers From The Farm members have been delivering flowers throughout the CV19 shutdown, flowers that have expressed love, care and concern, sadness and joy. Flowers do that. They have the ability to convey so much, without words or human contact.

We only provided funeral flowers during shutdown and were overwhelmed by the demand, the sadness and the gratitude. We’re living through exceptionally difficult times and it’s good to be able to provide comfort and some kind of ‘normal’ to those who are grieving. I know grief and it’s pain. And flowers have certainly helped me with that. Indeed, as I’ve previously said, it led me to this place, this corner, where I pick away at doing things the best I can. There is an environmental need for us to each do our best. We each have it in us to change the world, I think, it’s a matter of little steps in the right direction.

Harriet x