Shhhh… don’t let anyone know but I love my job. I love our farm, I love all the people I work with, I love going to the farmers markets, I feel blessed to be able to help each day to make this farm productive and beautiful. I feel good about what I do everyday. I believe in my life and work each morning when I awake and even more so when I fall asleep. Strange, I know, but true.
I think the thing I love most about my farming tasks is the fact that I get to grow flowers. Each one of us here at the farm has specific tasks that we get to do each day; repairing equipment, planting corn, CSA communications, baking bread, making lunches for tour groups, seeding tomatoes in the greenhouse, milking the cow, heading up the harvest with a crew of 50… the list could go on forever in just one day. I am lucky to be able to head up the flower production here at the farm, which started as a tiny garden out in the front of my house about 34 years ago. We used to bunch flowers at midnight in my kitchen on Friday nights before the market and feel so proud of those 30 bunches! Things slowly grew as the flowers continued to fly off the table each week and we added more land dedicated to flowers. Over the course of many years we are now growing about 12 acres of flowers for customers all over Northern California.
This weekend I am pouring over seed catalogs. I have them spread all over the kitchen table, mostly small seed companies that I have learned to trust and depend on, over the years of learning about flower growing. This is the optimistic time of year and always a joyous job – more appleblossom snapdragons? more orange calendulas? new varieties of cosmos? Such tough decisions! We grow about 50 different varieties of flowers that are planted throughout the year – from Amaranths to Zinnias – a definite trial by error when we first started. Now that we have things dialed in a bit better our schedule has been narrowed down; a big planting happens in October for all of the spring flowers, another in March and April and then another big push in June for all of the late summer and fall flowers. Right now we are very busy in the green house planting all the seeds that will be going in as soon as the ground dries out. Weather is always a farmers biggest unknown and flower growing is no exception – we are all getting a little antsy this year to see the sun and get planting!
We have gone from picking 30 bunches of flowers once a week selling only at the farmers market to having a crew of 6 amazing women helping to harvest over 1,000 bunches a day in the peak of the season. These bunches now go to over thirty stores, four wholesalers and farmers markets in the area all of whom really appreciate flowers that are grown locally. We are so happy to be able to offer an alternative to conventionally grown flowers that are primarily grown thousands of miles away and often heavily sprayed with toxic pesticides and fertilizers. The flowers grown at Full Belly Farm are all certified organic and are a testament to the fact that beautiful flowers can indeed be grown without using anything toxic.
You, as CSA members, are invited to join our flower “CSA” which runs from April 1 through September 30. Every week we will deliver a lovely bunch of certified organic flowers to you – the bouquets will be picked the day before your delivery so that they can be as fresh as can be. Some weeks there will be mixed bouquets and other weeks there will be stems of all one variety. You can be assured that they are local and grown with lots of love!
–Dru Rivers
Jan, our Farm Manager, is so amazing to work with!
Join Our CSA Flower Season
Flowers are $8.50 per bunch (plus sales tax). You can add the whole season of 26 weeks (from April through September) and get a discount to $8 per bunch ($208 plus sales tax). You can order flowers by emailing us.
