Recently, I began developing a new side-project which I plan to roll out in the next year. While I love the Skyflowers and creating flower remedies, growing plants and gardening is my real passion. It’s something I have always done since I was a kid and is something I will always do.
Growing plants, collecting exotic and rare specimens and propagating them is something that my soul requires me to do. By doing these things I collect to nature and through this connection is where my best insights come.
While I will continue to work on Clinical Flower Therapy, many of the goals that I have are a long way off and progress is incremental and sometimes, subtle and invisible. So I decided that I needed to have a new goal that was more immediate, tangible and results were easier to track.
So I decided to turn a hobby into a professional career – commercial cut-flower growing and floristry. Something, I should have done years ago, if I am completely honest.
Commercial flower growing [ at scale ] caters to my mad passion for plants. It also diversifies my income by selling to new, local & different customers.
I’ve grow a lot of different plants over the years and my most recent adventure is with Dahlia’s. Sun loving, tuberous rooted flowers in the daisy family that produce huge blooms. Some the size of dinner plates, but more often intricate pompom heads of every colour and combination you can imagine.
As a cut flower, Dahlia’s are perhaps one of the top 10 flowers you can grow. While rose are the most popular cut flower, you need controlled environments to grow them to perfection. By contrast, Dahlia’s thrive in the open garden, have a low water requirement and last for 7-10 days in a vase. Making them a perfect choice.
2022
Last year we grew about two dozen varieties in a test garden. I experimented with them and was surprised at how many flowers the plants produced. So I decided to take things seriously and develop a new product line of selling cut flowers, floral art pieces and offering them to local customers.
2023
This year my goal was to grow about 50 varieties and propagate them so I have about 5 plants per variety. That was the plan. After scouring the catalogues I managed to collect more than that and we have about 80 varieties. Some of them we have a half a dozen plants of already, so we’ll have a good quantity to sell when we go live with sales.
This year the goal isn’t sales so much. It’s about selecting the best plants to grow as cut flowers, propagating them and multiplying numbers of plants in ground. I do plan to sell flowers this year but instead of selling every stem, I will be sacrificing most of the growing stems to use as cuttings or breeding more varieties.
I have researched the best dozen cut flowers to grow and will focus on several of these for thins season. Dahlia’s, gladioli and liliiums are my focus this season. So I will concentrate on those and practice growing them at scale.
For this year, any cut flowers we get will likely be used to promote the new brand. And this will be done through donations of bouquets to local churches and retirement homes. I plan on brightening the day of senior citizens who don’t get many visitors with a bunch of blooms.
One other plan is to breed my own varieties, starting with this seasons crop. Dahlia’s are easily bred and I plan to develop a commercial breeding program and producing my own commercial varieties. More on this later but the breeding program will be a major component of the new product line.
That’s the plan for this year – ground work. Practice growing at scale, propagation of plants so that next year we will have a big start to the growing season.
2024 & Beyond
Once I have the concept of farming at scale and developed a growing/sowing program, I can then launch the brand proper. I have a brand name chosen but won’t release it yet.
Next year will be about regularly servicing the customers I attracted this year. By donating large and hopefully impressive floral arrangements to churches, for example, that shows off the product to a large number of people attending mass. It also paves the way for commission work for weddings, funerals and a regular supply to the church.
Same can be said for supplying retirement homes, or hospitals, etc. Large numbers of people who are likely to want to gift flowers.
Next step will be to move to acreage and set up a few glasshouses. But that is a few fears away and not an immediate goal.
Summary
That’s the idea at this stage. For now, it’s practical matters. Soil preparation, selecting varieties and practice of crop management. These are things I have done before, but always for someone else. Never for my own company.
I like the idea of developing this side-project to the same scale as the flower remedies. Flower remedies are amazing and potent but the truth is, not everyone uses them. A bunch of flowers can be consumed by anyone – young and old alike – and it can have quite a big emotional impact. I plan to explore the impact live cut flowers have on people and bringing some of aspects of vibrational medicine into the practice of floristry.
So the Skyflowers Project is branching out into floristry. Which will be fun.
P.s. The flower pictured is my favourite Dahlia, ‘Lemon Snow’. One of the varieties I will be growing as cut flowers and using in my breeding program. I’d love to produce a musk-pink or an orange version of this plant. It’s divine.