Posted in Hitting Paydirt
While you're picking beans and shelling peas in this hot summer weather, let your mind wander to a cool place, where the sweet tea has been poured up and the coconut cake is ready to be sliced. Now, think about the setting: what will make this picture complete? Flowers! What table is perfectly set without an arrangement of seasonal color?
One of my favorite farm stories is that of Mary Denton, a flower farmer in Walton County, east of Atlanta. She doesn't have a website that I can find, but she grows the most amazing flowers and sells them cut, by the stem and by the arrangement, at farmer's markets in and around the city. She used to have a "real job" but through a series of mergers and buyouts, her position was made unstable enough that she turned to growing what she loved best: organic flowers.
Mary encourages those of us who are already growing edibles to sell to add a small bed of flowers to our product mix and promises we will be thrilled with the results, both visually and financially. Most catalogs will make note of which flowers are good for cutting, and she recommends starting with those varieties. This link to fellow blogger, Harriette Jacobs, does part of my work for me today, as Harriette sings the Zinnia song so many of us love. She includes seed sources from which you can get many varieties of colors and sizes. I would add Seeds of Change, where I got a fabulous red zinnia last year that my husband still mentions.
From my viewpoint of a market vendor, I see that people are more than willing to pay great money for beautiful flowers, sometimes to the detriment of their food budget! Think of adding flowers to your garden for more beauty and perhaps more profit.
Denise Burns is the wife of Mike and the mother of Cooper, William, and Eston. Their family farm enterprise is Burns Best Farm, and she blogs here at Homestead Blogger at a blog by the same name.
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