What's Going On With Farmette Flowers?

Note: Artemis Flower Farm was formerly named Farmette Flowers.

Hey there. A lot has changed since I last wrote a blog, and I wanted to just tell you the story of the last couple of years. Things haven’t been easy, but I’m finally in a place to write about it. I am writing this in part so I can get over it and move on, and I am writing it in the spirit of sharing and vulnerability, nothing more. I think my experience may have some valuable insight for those of you running businesses and farming flowers. I hope those of you who don’t find it valuable can at least be kind and respectful to me as I share this story.

What Happened?

In 2018, my business blew up, right in the middle of the season. I still had 50 wedding contracts to complete out of the 100 we had booked. I lost the arrangement I had with my farm’s landowners, and with it I lost 5 years of soil improvement, infrastructure gains, and perennial plants. I lost longstanding friendships, my clients, my livelihood, and my home. For months, I struggled with severe anxiety and its symptoms, from insomnia and night sweats to nausea and weakness. I lost nearly 20 pounds, which is about 15% of my body weight. I went to urgent care. I went to therapy. I went on drugs. I had severe side effects from the drugs, and went on other drugs. I subsisted on protein smoothies that I could often barely choke down.

 Thanks to my incredible partner, my true friends, my mother, my father, friends of friends, my doctor, my therapist, my lawyer, and my business advisor, I did not die, though I often felt like I would. Instead, I finished my wedding season, dug and divided my dahlias, sold much of my flower farming apparatus, moved off the farm, and said goodbye to the place where I had learned to love flowers and how to run a business.

I had never before experienced betrayal, and it shook me hard. That’s a dramatic word, betrayal, but it’s not hyperbole. It is the feeling of being hoodwinked by those you trust, when the people close to you to take the things that you love most and use them to hurt you where it hurts worst. The experience was profoundly destabilizing, like waking up in your own house but finding it unrecognizable – and then being told that this is the way it’s always been.  

During the wedding season, while trying hard not to collapse from exhaustion, I was locked in a struggle over my intellectual property, and because the situation was so painful, and all I wanted was for the pain to stop, to run away, to disappear, I let go of much more of that property than I should have, for much less than it was worth. I still have regrets – that I didn’t draw harder lines; that I didn’t know how much some things would mean to me; that I didn’t value my own work more. I thought I was losing my job, so I thought I needed money; but some things are worth so much more than that.

What did you do next?

I was able to retain my business name and to “hold it together” on the internet, so that I could finish my season and not ruin any client or job prospects. I successfully built an online shop for my dahlias, and in the spring, I got them packed and shipped to my customers. I loved that experience. I consulted with flower farmers, taught a design class, and went to the ASCFG conference in Denver, on the business of flower farming, where I met a few of my farmer idols, like Shanti of Whipstone Farm, Jenni Love, Judy Laushman, Gretel Adams, and Mandy O’Shea. I took Neversink Farm’s online course, and found it fun and enlightening. I read a ton about saving seed, employee management, and no-till farming.

I also joined the Flatirons Young Farmers Coalition chapter here in Boulder County, and have since joined the leadership board as Secretary. Through that group and its inspiring members, I found an awesome opportunity to join Aspen Moon Farm, one of the largest local market farms, as their flower manager. In the 2019 season I had free rein over about 2 acres of flowers, plus many plantings in other fields, made over one thousand bouquets for our farmers markets, managed a small but mighty team of farmers, and made arrangements for a few casual weddings. I’m learning a ton about larger-scale farming, tractor cultivation, irrigation systems, and working on a large team. I love the diversity of Aspen Moon and how much potential there is in the land and the people I work with.

I also love working for someone else! There is so much less stress and so much less to do when the field day is over – I'm not doing taxes, payroll, insurance, bookkeeping, website maintenance, or any of the other mundane and time-sucking tasks that a business owner has to deal with. I desperately needed this break, though secretly I do enjoy some of those mundane tasks – or at least figuring out the systems for making them minimal.

What’s next for the business?

So, Farmette Flowers. While the farm is currently landless, I wanted to keep it alive as a business and an online presence, because I do think I continue to have valuable things to offer the flower community. I’m still offering consultations to new flower farmers, and I continue to vigorously research new species and varieties, while keeping records of my experiences as a grower and team leader. I hope my next few blogs, crunching some harvest and yield numbers, will be informative and useful.

Of course, I’m also keeping Farmette Flowers alive in the hope that I will acquire my own ‘forever farm’ where I can plant my windbreaks and my peonies and roses and create my Eden. Ideally, I’ll keep working for someone else after buying a place, while I cover crop it and silage tarp it and compost it and generally whip the soil into shape.

What did you learn?

I’m writing this post because I want to share what I’ve been going through, and also because I wanted to offer some practical advice for anyone starting or maintaining a farm business, especially one connected with floral design. Many of these things are basic business common sense, but for those without a business background, they are key. Because I became a partner in an existing LLC, I did not have to deal with setting up the business, and just assumed that everything was tip-top. When things started to blow up, it became clear that this just wasn’t so.  

1. Know the legal framework of your business and your role in it.

   • If you have a partner, even if they’re your spouse, you should have an operating agreement. This sets out the terms of the partnership and what is expected of each partner.

   • Don’t trust that someone else has done the legwork properly. Do it, or at least understand it, yourself.

2. Put agreements in writing.

   • Your lease. Even if you have a handshake deal, or an agreement that requires no exchange of money, write a lease. Make sure the landowner tells you their expectations in this document. Many of my troubles came about because I had no formal document to define the relationship between my business and the landowners.

   • Employment agreements. An employment contract can be very simple, but you can outline what you will and will not tolerate from your employees, and gives you grounds for disciplining or firing them if they breach these boundaries. If written fairly, a contract like this can also make employees feel secure, since they have written confirmation that you will pay them, and of the time period you expect them to work.

3. Protect your name and your work.

   • Register a trademark for your business name with your state.

   • Make sure that employees understand that their work is the property of the business. This is pretty standard in an employment contract, but in floristry it can be easy for an employee to think that because they physically made an arrangement, that arrangement, or images of it, is theirs and can be used to promote them or another business they are associated with. Alas, just as an app produced by a Google employee belongs to Google, floral work produced by your employees, and any representation of it, belong to your floral business. If an employee goes their own way, you can always provide written consent for them to use images of work they produced for you to further their own careers or businesses – if you’re so inclined.

4. Get a lawyer to help you.

   • Intellectual property, contracts, and business responsibilities are complicated legal topics. Attorneys know how this stuff works, and they can review a contract, a lease, or an operating agreement to make sure you are laying a good foundation for your business relationship. Yes, they are expensive, but it’s worth it to know you’re protected and on solid ground. Find a person who makes you feel safe and heard.

5. Reach out to your network.

   • Many people, and it seems especially women who have recently become flower farmers, have a ton of business experience in other fields. I had several friends help guide me through the disturbing and confusing minefield of losing my land, using knowledge they had from being business executives, running other operations, or from being employees in larger, more well-regulated firms with HR departments and the whole shebang.

6. Take advantage of your local Small Business Development Center.

   • I can’t say enough about the woman who helped me when I was looking for business advice at the SBDC, even before the whole thing happened. She let me cry in her office, realized how difficult and unusual my situation was, and showed up for me at very important meetings. I am sure that, had I not been in the place I was, she would have helped me build a stronger business. As it was, she helped me not go down with the ship. SBDCs offer lots of services, including business advising, workshops and trainings, and networking opportunities. They really help point you in the right direction.

   • Here’s the link to the Colorado SBDC site.

7. Try to buy land, or look for a very long-term lease.

   • Sometimes it feels like the worst part of what happened in 2018 was leaving the land that I’d worked so hard on for so long – all those wheelbarrow loads of compost, all that time spent broad-forking, all the cover crop sown and smothered, all the life I saw creep back into the more degraded sections. My relationship with that little acre was something precious, and I never want to go through leaving something like that again. That’s why my business’s next home will be land that I own, even if I have to expand it by leasing nearby. I want to see the long-term effects of my sweat and effort. If you have to lease though, find a landowner who will consider a 20 or 30-year lease, even if they won’t give that to you right away.

A few other things I learned:

A garage can hold A LOT of shit, when you need it to. Mine held thousands of dahlia tubers, arbors & arches, hundreds of 1020 flats, and nearly all of my vases and floral design tools, farm tools, plus row cover, landscaping fabric, and bulb crates galore.

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Thanks Brené Brown!

Get everything in writing. If you come across someone who doesn’t want to put things in writing, you probably shouldn’t do business with them.

Be a vault. You don’t have to disclose everything that makes you tick, because your hopes and dreams can be ammunition.

Lean on your partner and your family. They are there for you.

Try to separate your self-worth from your work. It’s not the only thing you are.

Trust your instincts and your intuition.

Therapy is the worst. Therapy is necessary.

You can feel really, really close to dying, and still not die.

The door to leave any situation is not locked, though it might be swollen shut. You might have to push hard, and you might have to push against yourself to get out.

There is a way. There is always a way.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts, but this is painful for me to write and publish. Please be kind, if you can.

Love, Helen

Photo by my one & only, Nelson Esseveld.