Nuthatch Gardens - Modern Flower Farming 06-01-2026

 In this episode, Rachann talks with Joanna Veltri, owner of Nuthatch Gardens. Joanna’s farm opens a window into modern flower farming — the hustle, the bird sightings, and the business smarts behind every bloom. She blends personal stories with practical insights on crops, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and the messy magic of growing flowers. Unused blooms become compost or dried arrangements; nothing goes to waste on her farm. Nuthatch Gardens is for anyone craving connection, creativity, and a little dirt under their nails. Come wander the rows with them. 

Nuthatch Gardens — Cut-Flower Farm in Westminster, MD

https://www.facebook.com/UMDExtension/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's podcast is brought to you by Mariah Bellmanor Kennel, offering dog boarding, bathing, and daycare in an eco-friendly environment. Our pet care with a personal touch is not just a motto, it's really what we do. Our touch extends to the food without preservatives, quality and natural shampoos, inclusive boarding, and a green living environment. Sounds like I might want to check in. Visit us anytime on our Facebook page, Mariah Bell Manor Kennel or Mariah Bellmanor Kennel.com. Enjoy your program. Welcome to Raising Connections, connecting your community to others through critters, companions, commerce, and agriculture. I'm Ray Shan Mayer. Let's raise some connections. Here we go. As always, we have a fun and interesting guest this morning. Joanna, could you introduce yourself and tell us where you're from?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

I'm Joanna Veltry. I'm coming to you today from Nuthatch Gardens, which is a small flower farm and our farmhouse and residence in the southern part of Westminster, Maryland.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Welcome. How in the world did you wake up one morning and say, I want to farm flowers?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Is that how it went? No, as it happens, it was somewhat of a decision over time. But if you had asked me 10 years ago if this is where I would be, I would think you were crazy. I was in what I think a lot of people would think was a high-powered career in international economic development. I worked at the Treasury Department in international affairs for 18 years and then worked in the UN at a lovely organization called the International Fund for Agricultural Development, or EFAD, for another five years. And then for a number of reasons, I ended up switching rather dramatically to flower farming. The basic backstory to that is that I had left government because I felt as I was rising through the ranks, I was working more and more with political appointees and less with civil servants. And for me, that was not as fun. And then when I went to the UPenn, I discovered they have a different kind of political appointee, and it was sort of the same thing. And I think I was just done with large organizations, policy making, really hardworking, amazing people, great colleagues, but it was time for a big change. So that whole thought process coincided with the pandemic, and that also coincided sadly with the non-COVID-related deaths of both my mom and my dad three weeks apart in 2020. Just briefly, my dad had Alzheimer's, so he passed in November of 2020. And then my mom had gotten a sudden diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, which, if your listeners are familiar, it's not anything that anybody wants a front row seat for, and certainly not to get a diagnosis for.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

So she got her diagnosis and died within three months. That whole thing threw my life into absolute emotional chaos. And the only respite I was getting was in my garden. And I lived in Tacoma Park, Maryland at the time, which, if you know Tacoma Park, there are some people who have larger yards, but for the most part, they're sort of, we call them postage stamp yards. Yes. And I had a postage stamp in the front and a postage stamp in the back. And I basically converted what was probably like 20 by 20 feet of grass into pollinator garden over the course of a year and a half. Compared to what I'm doing now, that was super teeny tiny, but it was like a massive undertaking of just heart. And then we took a trip to Asheville in 2021. In Asheville, everything is gorgeous. It was just a tremendous dive into nature and mountains and various gardens that we visited, where I just realized that I wasn't sure if what I needed to do was to open a nursery or to have some kind of farm that was purely about inviting people to the farm for events, or if it was going to be a flower farm. I really didn't know. The expression that kind of captures it in a major life-size way was I knew I needed to touch grass.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Yes. I can appreciate that. So you had all of these life events come together at the same time. And your education, many of our listeners we've learned, are college students who are looking at us and thinking, what do I want to be when I grow up? I want to be that. How did they get there? And it's often difficult for folks, regardless of what stage of life they're in, that path is very winding. And we're snapshotting a conversation on that path. What sort of education did you receive in order to become who you are?

SPEAKER_01 4:33

It's not usually what I lead with because I think it comes with a lot of baggage that people associate with it. But I have an undergrad and a graduate degree from Harvard. Don't hold it against me, people.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

I spent a lot of time at Yale, but I didn't attend.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Same, same. I did my undergraduate in linguistics. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but linguistics was fascinating. And then I ended up at the Kennedy School of Government for two years, not as a student first, but working for this amazing professor, Danny Roderick, who just became kind of my mentor. He was like, Oh, look, you're editing my papers and you're understanding it. Perhaps you have a thing for economics. And I said, Perhaps I do. And so I took a few econ classes at Harvard while not a student. That really clicked. And I loved international development. So I did my public policy master's at the Kennedy School. And then after that, I knew from meeting students who were a year or two years ahead of me who had gone on to the Treasury Department, international affairs, I knew it was sort of like this elite cool core of government service. And I really wanted that. And so I actually applied to a number of different places. I got like a really high paying offer from McKinsey and a rather low paying offer from the federal government and chose the government. I remember my dad freaking out. I can identify with that, yes. I bet a lot of our listeners can as well. Yes. You have to sort of follow what your heart says because otherwise you regret it forever.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Do you think that following of your heart is what led you to express grief through flowers and eventually move to Carroll County?

SPEAKER_01 6:02

I do. A hundred percent. You know, it's funny because I have always prided myself on being very practical in pretty much everything, including my philosophy of life. So I'm not very what they would call woo-woo.

unknown 6:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

I remember May 15th of 2022, this farm went on the market. It was on the market for like a day. A bunch of people came to see it. I'd already seen a couple of farms. And my realtor at the time was like, hey, this one looks interesting. Do you want to go see it? Now I'd already become like so many Americans. During pandemic, I became a birder. And I became like, as I am wont to do with random obsessions, you know, I became a very serious birder. I stepped out of the car with my girls when we parked here. And the first thing I heard was a blue-gray gnatcatcher, which is one of my favorite birds. And then the second bird I heard was a Baltimore Oreole. And every year we have Oreoles in May, and that's really lovely. May 15th also happened to be my mom who had deceased a year and a half prior. It was her birthday. There's a spring house on the property. The central part of the house is from the 1790s. It has a creek that runs through it. When we did move here finally, my oldest she ran down to the creek and then ran back and was like, Mom, I'm gonna be needing hip high waiters. Everything about the farm just seemed magical and right. That really sealed the deal. So we packed up everything in Tacoma and moved up to the country.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Wow. That's a heck of a change. And you have two daughters, and they were in for this. They wanted the waiters after the first visit.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

The older one, yes. The younger one was still enamored with nature at the time. They're both fantastic, but they are very different.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

And that dovetails and all kinds of things, and giving each other the freedom to be who you are is something that's important. Yes, very, very much so. If we go back to the very beginning here, you said something about the economics and agricultural division. Flower farming is very much agriculture. There's a component of agricultural tourism in Maryland. And when you were in Asheville and you had this epiphany of this is what I want to do, all of those things were in the pot kind of stirring for you. By having a degree in economics, by running a business that is also a passion project, but also sustains the farm. You're putting the economics, the flowers, the agricultural, the agritourism, a passion project, and the need for money. We all need groceries, we all need the basics to sustain our lives. How have you been able to do that successfully?

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Ah, successfully, that's a funny word. Interestingly, I am nowhere close to paying the mortgage with flowers. There are a couple outlets online, like Florette, for example, who talk about profitable flower farming. It is possible. I am gonna go ahead and say that I have not gotten there. I took basically a sabbatical from desk jobbing when I left the UN. I will probably sometime this summer or in the fall supplement my income. This may be a teeny tiny soapbox, but I think a lot of times people are like, oh yeah, farmers, they don't make much money. It is so much more dramatic than that. Flowers are actually a higher margin crop than most farming. I honest to goodness don't know how most people do it. I think that even if you're coming from a family farm and you have a history and you're inheriting the farm and you're inheriting all of this land and whatever, that is an amazing start. It's still hard. If you're coming from my background, where relative to say one of your younger listeners or somebody who worked in a job that didn't compensate quite as much as mine did in the last five years, in particular in the UN, I have still some and had more savings and was able to invest that in this. Is there financing available for small aspiring farmers? Yes, there is. It's a tiny amount relative to what I think really is required to make something profitable. I consider myself on the lucky end of the curve, but it still is not something that's that's perfectly sustainable. I'm trying to get to a hopeful message here that might sound very daunting. When I go out to the field, I have some folks who have helped me, some volunteers from Tacoma who just want to spend time on the farm. I have a couple people who occasionally come and do some part-time work, but 95% of what I do is me, just me. That is one of the business struggles that I am trying to get my head around. My dream is that I can employ two people full-time all year and another two or three people part-time seasonal help. That's the dream. And if I could get there, there'd be so much more I could do. With so much more I could do, there'd be so much more I could sell and market and all of these things. And that allows you to get over this hump in a small business where you're too, I don't even want scale. I want to be a small flower farm. But how do you get to that next stage? Am I successful in the sense that I get to go play with flowers all the time? Absolutely. I also sweat a lot and get really muddy. But that's a definition of success. My mental health, so much better out here. How will it look when I have a desk job again? I'm not sure, but we're gonna have to see. Not to make a pun, but it's not all roses all the time.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

It takes a very strong person to walk away from one type of life and start another one. And it takes an accelerator. And you had that accelerator in your life in the form of grief. That accelerator only gives you that passion for so long and then it becomes work. You've put a lot of blood and sweat and tears and mud and high water waiters, and you were really ready for this. But now you're talking about maybe I need to do some of these other things and looking at your business. When your passion becomes your business, does your passion still survive? It's such a great question.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

This is gonna seem like a bit of a tangent, and it is, but when I went to my undergrad, I had intended to study music performance. I was a French horn player, very serious, got some scholarship money, and I discovered that as it got more and more serious and as I was getting paid for gigs, it was taking the pleasure out. It was becoming a job and not the passion that had driven me. So I kind of walked away from that and ended up studying linguistics, which was great. Fast forward to today, I think the flowers are amazing and being out in nature is amazing, and that has not gotten old. The other thing is I've discovered a couple things which have grown the passion. It was an accelerant. But I think the thing about taking on this job and this career has been even if I'm struggling trying to structure the business and the finances and all of that, I'm still discovering aspects of it that I absolutely love. For example, I thought I was gonna sell flowers to a florist. I did not think of myself as an arranger. I did not think I had that level of creativity. As it turns out, people seem to really like my arrangements. I get tons of feedback, not just from the brides that I've done bridal bouquets, I do small and medium weddings. First of all, the brides who come to me tend to be really chill. If they're dealing with a flower farmer instead of a shishi florist, they tend to be really chill brides. I love them. All the brides that I've worked with have been like, I've seen your arrangements, you do you, I'm sure it's gonna be beautiful. And thankfully, they've all been happy. Small weddings, I would have thought would be hellishly stressful. They are stressful in the sense of, oh my gosh, I really do need to finish this by five so that I can drive it on time. But it's not stressful in terms of the creative process because you think about the person, you think about the colors they like, you think about the textures they like, little comments that they made as you were talking about flowers, and you pour all that artistic expression into something, and it's so much fun. There have also been things that I've learned in the opposite direction. First of all, I think I didn't have a fulsome sense of how hard social media is. Wow, did I underestimate that? It is so hard. I finally found a 20-year-old who is the daughter of a friend, and now she's a friend, and she's been doing it, and she's one of my part-time people. And the fact that she does social media and she does it so much better than me. Oh my god, so much pleasure. Return to my life because I could focus on the other things that I really do enjoy. Another thing that crept up, I didn't have any interest in drying flowers, but I started doing it and I was like, wow, this is not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I do have an actual dryer machine and I have other ways that I can do it, but most of them I just dry by hanging. And then I have these forever flowers to keep them out of the direct sun, they last for years. That's been a total surprise and just absolutely lovely.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Can you tell me what a CSA is and how that keeps your income stream consistent?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Yes. A CSA is uh community supported agriculture. It is fantastic. I think most people know about CSAs probably more commonly up here in Carroll County, because I think they're familiar with food CSAs. For folks in Tacoma Park, which is my other point of reference, they became familiar with CSAs during pandemic because it was a great way to get a bunch of veggies without going to the supermarket, especially during those times when we felt we had to spray everything down. So the CSA thing is very common for small vegetable farmers and fruit producers, etc. I think for flower growers, it's a little bit less common, but it's a growing thing. The CSA basically means you pay up front more or less, which allows a farmer to invest in the seeds or tubers or whatever it is that they need to put in and provides a consistent knowledge that there will be this income for this crop. And then, much like a vegetable CSA, you get what's in season all season long. So in the early parts of the CSA, there might be more sort of fancy daffodils and tulips and anemones, which happens to be my favorite crop to grow, ranunculus, things like that. And then a little bit later, the snapdragons come in and stalk and like other things like that. And then later in the summer, you've got your straw flour, you've got beautiful dahlias, you've got zinnias coming out your ears, and that's what will be in your every other week bucket or bundle. I am so thankful to my CSA subscribers because they've been so patient as I figure out the right formula here. Last year I did it as a spring CSA, a summer CSA, and a fall CSA, and I just found that that was a lot of marketing work three times a year. So this year I had basically a single season CSA that just started and it's gonna go into October. There are 10 drop-offs, which means you take the overall price divided by 10, and that's the price of your bundle or your bouquet each time. They get dropped off in Tacoma Park, where I have the most of my clients. And then I'm still really working on building my CSA up here, Westminster, Sykesville, Mount Erie. I have pickups here on my front porch for Westminster folks, and then on Sundays at the Sykesville Farmer's Market. That's basically how it's structured. It's great because people are investing in that farmer. It's like you're getting shares of something that you've invested in. And also, I have to say, my CSA customers and the events folks, they get the best flowers. I want them to be really happy because I want them to resubscribe. Usually when I'm writing my emails to them, I'll say something like, Hey, flower lovers, can't wait to bring you some color this week, and I mean it.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

It sounds like that CSA, that is your audience. You're picturing these CSA subscribers in your mind when you're planting these items. Did your economics background help you put that together? Or was that something you learned somewhere else?

SPEAKER_01 17:12

I would say somewhere else. The truth about my econ background, I mean, I do have some microeconomics and finance background, but most of my econ background was very macro. Thinking about a country's fiscal situation, for example, thinking about what development policy they're implementing. My skills, balancing my checkbook, so to speak, are not as good. Very different skills. Yeah, but I think you really have to put yourself in the shoes of the CSA recipient. Would I be happy with this? Would I feel this was worthwhile? Would I pay this amount of money for this? And I do think that that is the most important consideration. Do I find this to be a product I'm proud of that I would buy? Same thing with my farmers markets arrangements. I want them to be something that I would put in the middle of my table and be happy with.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

I have to ask this question because for me as a person, if I were a flower farmer and I put myself in your shoes, right now I have peonies absolutely everywhere. And I'm so afraid to clip them because I know that they will last differently and be appreciated differently than if I leave them out there. There's always waste. And I think that might just kill my soul to have wasted flowers. What do you do with the flowers that aren't purchased by a CSA or have a commercial use? What the heck do you do with those?

SPEAKER_01 18:26

This is such a great question because I think minimizing waste is a really important thing from so many levels. The waste that I really worry about is stuff like anything plastic, because that's gonna go into landfill and I don't love that, obviously. Plant waste is okay. It feels a little sad, but at the end of the day, it becomes compost. And compost is a beautiful thing. Let me peel back that onion. The big answer is compost. But then there are smaller things. Like the flowers that don't sell, literally, while I'm at the farmer's market in Sykesville, people have seen me do this. I always bring my arrangements and then I bring like maybe two or three buckets of flowers and foliage so that I can make bouquets there if I need to. And in the last half hour of the market, I start taking out the flowers that I can dry. And I'll cut off the wet parts, I'll start bundling them, and I hang them from my tent. Then I come home and I hang them on my drying racks. Any flower that can be dried successfully gets dried. That doesn't go to waste because I have all over my living room heaps and heaps of dried flowers. They are literally on every intersection of ceiling and wall. And they're everywhere. I can't get enough of them. So that's a big part of it. Another thing is my favorite economically, my favorite flowers are the ones that either are perennial or generously self-seed. Generously self-seeding flowers are like nature's gift to your bottom line. They're also nature's gift to your visual landscape. But the fact that they come back so predictably and they're coming back from seed is just wonderful. So I do a lot of letting things self-seed on their own, but I also do a lot of seed collecting, particularly starting in late July, really through October. That's where I sometimes trip up. I have more than I can deal with. Sometimes those seeds end up getting mildewy or whatever, but for the most part, they end up somewhere in some field trying to pretty up the place, which is just a lovely, lovely use. So there's not a ton of waste. It's very flexible.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

My guess is your flexibility really isn't as flexible as you think it is because those weeds need to come out. Things are on a season. You're moving with the rhythm of the earth, which isn't always forgiving. Amen to that. Sometimes it tells you what you're going to do that day.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

100%. The weed pressure. There's Tacoma Park, which is a small city next to a big city. If anybody from Tacoma Park is listening, I'm not trying to minimize the weed pressure there.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

But out here in farmland, it is amazing. I come from Indiana and they say you can hear the corn grow. I'm pretty sure here in Maryland after a rainstorm, the weeds, you can hear them grow better and faster and louder than the corn in Indiana. I'm pretty sure of that.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

It really is amazing the amount of effort that you have to put into trying to be a good land steward. And probably the most well-taken care of part of the land is definitely my flower area. I have 25 acres and I have about an acre and a half in flowers. And that might shock some people, but you can grow a darn lot of flowers in an acre and a half. And I have that fenced in inside a deer fence. I still get tremendous amounts of weeds, which doesn't compare at all to the areas of the property which are wooded and just have a tremendous amount of that invasive multiflora rose, the bittersweet, the various things that are just terrible. And when I moved here, I had this idea in my head. I'm gonna be the most amazing land steward. I'm gonna take care of all the invasives. It's going to be a great example to the world of like what you can do. Okay, so don't look into my wooded areas, please.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

When you were talking about the things that you've learned to do that you didn't think that you would do the dried flowers, the add-ons, the weddings, and outsourcing the things that were taking a lot of your time. Many small business owners find that this is still work and this was supposed to be fun. And I'm not enjoying parts that I was enjoying before. You outsourced it. You got that social media piece. It was something much like the invasive weeds of the back part that we're not supposed to look at. It was supposed to be easy and it wasn't. Yeah. Those add-on things that you discovered are those things that allow your business to flourish.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Yes, it definitely has helped. And the two things are intertwined. I not only didn't enjoy social media, I'm not good at it either. The thing I'm seeing right now, real time this past month, has been Aviva is the name of my social media person. As she's been going from like 15 views on the posts that I used to do to like, oh my gosh, you have over 12,000 new views. Now, some of them are in Carroll County, some of them are in like Tajikistan. But at the end of the day, we're getting a lot more views and a lot more visibility. So I am getting a lot more contacts from people that are saying, Hey, can I come see your barn about a possible flower range in class? Can I come see the gazebo and possibly tour the farm? Photographers, that was another beautiful thing that happened in the fall. Somebody asked if they could come take photos here, and somebody introduced me to the world of photographers will want to use your farm. They will pay you for that. When I discover those, I think the importance of being flexible to variable strains of income and various activities is really important. But also knowing what you're bad at is really helpful as well. Because ultimately, I was able to put in more of me into responding to these emails instead of doing the constant outreach, which Aviva tells me my approach to social media sounded a bit desperate.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

But you hit on something and you said it's not important. I think it's incredibly germane. You're creating jobs. When you said you wanted two full-time employees and two part-time employees, my guess is your vision was in the fields, not on social media. It tweaks a little bit there. But one of the other things that you said was something that is so important for small businesses. And so important that local is local, but what is local? The five or 10, 15 hits that you were getting in interactions were probably very hyper-local. And now that you've employed someone to work on these things, the expanse is maybe Tzadiki San. But you are getting two types of local. You're getting your local community online and you're getting your local community on the dirt. Right. Two very different types. Local businesses create jobs. You're creating jobs, you're creating passion, you're creating peace, you're creating other business streams and networking within the community. It sounds like you're doing all the things that we all hear that small business owners are supposed to be doing. And with that background in economics, you're looking at these income streams and sorting them the way an economist who has this practical passion would do. And yet you're still looking at going back to a desk job. In your mind and in your thought, having that economic, that agriculture, that really professional side, and this very experienced local business side, you're at the crux of putting together how do we make our local businesses better and survive to support our communities. Any thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 25:33

I mean, so many. You're asking the question that is closest to my heart right now. If I could, I wouldn't do the desk job. What I'd like to do instead with my time, I talked to somebody during the Flowers and Jazz Festival. I talked to somebody at the Carroll County Foundation. I think her name is Jackie, and she is really dynamic and amazing. And I had sort of said something about I'm not going to be able to do it yet because I don't have the bandwidth, and that is true. But eventually, what I would love to do, part of the ethos of my whole idea around this farm was bringing people here, having it be like a community spot. And whether that's as a business or having a separate nonprofit or being a nonprofit, whatever, I'd like to eventually move in that direction. One of the ideas I have here is that you bring some folks from assisted living, have them hang out at the farm. Maybe there's a bunch of nursery school kids or maybe even elementary age kids who are running around getting the flowers and then they work together to make arrangements, or they make a picture with the petals of the flowers, something like that. Those sorts of activities. We experimented with this a little bit last year, and my friend who I was experimenting with, we decided our children are in too many activities. But we started a sort of nature-based play series where we were making art, we were exploring the creek, we were talking about birds, we were doing all these different things. My friend actually developed this whole curriculum, and kids would come over after school. It was multidisciplinary, it was various ages, and it was really actually quite beautiful. The idea behind that, just to quickly dive into that, was that all of those things that we did, you could argue that kids could do in their own backyard, which is awesome. Except that when you're in your own backyard and you're the parent there with your kids and you have to get 17 things done, and the easier default is, hey mom, can I have this green? And the easier default is okay, but only for half an hour, you know, whatever it is, that's really hard to resist. But when you're explicitly and intentionally at another place and you learn something, today we're gonna learn about the life cycle of frogs, or today we're gonna learn about what's in the stream and how can we work to maintain stream health or something like that, and just have it in these bite-sized things and then have a bunch of free play. You're at a farm that's not your house. You're not near that screen. You don't have your phone or your iPad or whatever if you're a kid. And I think that was the idea. Come here for the respite from the temptation of screens. Programs like that mean a lot to me. And so there's a whole element that I would love to do.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

You've made a successful business, you have the social media engagement, you've learned the trials and tribulations, you've made product, you've learned that your original product needed some diversification for success. You've made those changes, but yet you're still looking at needing supplemental income and making that change and doing all the right things and tapping all of the right resources. Still having you come up a little bit short. And that's frustrating for so many small business owners. So you're looking at all of these other things that you could do, perhaps keeping your lifestyle in check and bringing other people into that lifestyle. So it sounds like you're brainstorming ideas, but just haven't come up with it yet.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

I think that's right. I also think that I already said, and I do mean this, that I feel like I'm one of the lucky ones I came into this with some savings, burning a little bit of my retirement. I'm a single mom. If there were two incomes, a small business in a two-income family is arguably a lot safer if that partner is employed, of course. Instead of looking for a partner, I'm looking for a desk job that will pay the mortgage. What that means is I'm not coming out of this sabbatical, as it were, to go back to an intense policy gig that would certainly pay the mortgage and then some, but it would also take up all my time. I'm hoping to find something where it's very much contained within normal business hours where I can manage it and maybe have some flexibility in the spring. So my mind is working on figuring out what that is that will work with this because I still think of this as my primary endeavor. The desk job is going to be my secondary endeavor.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

What it sounds like you're saying is often I hear it spoken about in generational context. You're looking for your five to nine to be different than your nine to five. Many of the wineries in our area will cross-share equipment where if they have a bottler, they will do bottling. Is there such a thing within the flower community where if someone has the equipment, they process different flowers, if you will?

SPEAKER_01 30:11

You know, that's a great question. I don't know the answer on that specific thing, but it is reminding me of something else. I have this little text chat group, and I want to guess that there's 12 to 15 of us on there, and we're all small flower farmers in Carol, Howard, and a little bit of MoCo. None of us, I think, are folks who have that equipment. So we'd probably have to look a little bit bigger, but it had never occurred to me to do that. I'm gonna look into that. What I will say about this group, though, real quickly, is that there is beauty in having a ton of small flower farmers who love working closely together. Because what happens is somebody will have a wedding in mid-May, and somebody else will have a wedding at the end of May, and your bride really wants white snapdragons, you don't have enough white snapdragons. Somebody else does. So you're paying farmer-to-farmer prices for those, which is fantastic. And we are doing this constantly. Or I worked with two other farmers to have our booth at the Flowers and Jazz festival, and that's really great. And I think a lot of people look at that and they're like, but aren't you guys competitors? And the big takeaway here, and God, I hope every flower farmer or budding flower farmer takes this to heart is no, we are not each other's competitors. There's plenty of room for all of us. Our competitor is the supermarket, our competitor is not even the florist, because I think we can sell to them, we can survive with them. They do a different product in terms of having perfect roses and perfect this and perfect that. We're more of a cottage vibe. But of course, we do beautiful arrangements as well. But my point is that because the competitor is non-local, supermarkets were getting their stuff wholesale, primarily from Ecuador, Colombia, sometimes Israel, sometimes the Netherlands, they're beautiful flowers. They're oftentimes flown in and sit in a cooler for a week and then go to the grocery store and then sit there for a few days. So by the time you get the flowers at home in a vase, they're already quite old. They've been cold stored, so they're in good shape for a day or two. But one of the benefits of local is that your flowers are going to last longer because you're probably getting them from picking to purchase. The most amount of time that will have a lapse might be three or four days compared to really a week with transport, etc. And so I think there has been a lot of education of consumers about the benefits and importance of buying local and supporting local farmers. Our flowers are different generally. We do grow a lot of stuff that is imported as well. Like we grow Lycanthus. Lycanthus is also, by and large, mostly imported. So we are competing in that front, but we are growing fewer roses, fewer carnations, more snapdragons, more stuff that does well in our climate. There is a difference in the varieties that you're getting, but I think the biggest difference is longevity. We compete very well against store-bought flowers in terms of longevity. And that is our competition. We could have, I shouldn't say this without having done market research, but I'm gonna go ahead and say personally, I believe we could have twice as many flower farmers and still have plenty of business if we were dragging customers away from the storefront. Not florist storefront, but from like the supermarket and such. I'm finding that so many people want to do tours now that I'm probably going to have to come up with a day or two per week where I sort of cluster those folks. But one of the best ways to come and experience the farm is to sign up for evenings in the garden. That's on the website under Experiences. It has a nice low entry rate. And what that buys you basically, you bring your picnic, your bottle of wine. When you get here, you can either have me pick flowers for you bespoke and make a bouquet for you, or you can pick them. You can arrange them with as much or as little instruction or intervention from me as you desire. It's really nice because you're there, the sun's going down, the flower field gets progressively more beautiful over the course of the late spring, early summer. You get to chill, it's like from six to nine, so you have plenty of time in the garden. You can walk around toward the creek, etc. And it's cheaper than our workshops, although our workshops are also, relatively speaking, very inexpensive. That's another way to come, is just sign up for one of our flower ranging workshops. A lot of options.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

If we have heard this, we've put some connections together, and we want to come visit, we want to be part of the CSA, we want to be part of what you've built. How do we find you?

SPEAKER_01 34:29

The best way is nuthatchgardens.com. Nuthatch N-U-T-H-A-T-C-H gardens.com. And that website has just been newly revamped. We have recently ironed out a few wrinkles with the purchase system and reservation systems. I'm hoping there won't be any more wrinkles to iron out, but people should let me know. There's a way to contact us on the website so people can ask questions.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

I hope the connections we've raised today stay with you as you engage your community through critters, companions, commerce, and agriculture. Join me again next week. We'll make some more connections. This program is a production of Raising Connections Media Company, hosted and produced by Rashan Mayer, coordinated by Beverly McGelroy, and edited and mixed by Robin Temple.