A big long story about me…

Hello and welcome to Start Flower Farming!

My name is Elly Rakhmetouline and I’ve worked in Urban Agriculture for the past decade. I used to own and run Late Bloomers Flower Farm, which in its five years of operation grew to a 100+ share CSA , sold buckets of bouquets through 7 different shops, and made just shy of six figures on only about an acre of land. I absolutely LOVED growing flowers and farming but the thing I wanted more than anything was to live rurally….so when the opportunity finally presented itself a year ago, I took it! I shut down my farm, sold off anything I didn’t hold dear or necessary to easily start again, and I moved to a small gulf island of 11,000 people. I fell in love, I worked on recovering from the burnout of running a farm by myself, I floated in the ocean and thought about who I was if I wasn’t currently a farmer, an identity that defined every inch of my being for the past ten years, even while living in a large metropolitan city. I thought about all the things we don’t talk about in farming, especially with those who are just starting out (the margins, the hours, the start-up costs). I thought about the turn over rate of farmers and how desperate we are for more of them, as the current generation ages out, but how few can even make it to 5 years. I thought about how many people dream about flower farming and their ideas of it and what the realities really are. And from all that Start Flower Farming was born; a vehicle to share my knowledge with folks who are just starting out on this wild, beautiful journey. I have one singular professional goal in life and it’s this; help flower farmers in such a way that they actually stay in farming for the long haul.

So how the heck did I even get into flower farming and become a farmer while living in a large metropolitan city on the West Coast? It’s a long story, but here it goes.

In 2010 I was 24 and working for a jewelry company after doing a Fashion Marketing post secondary program in Montreal. The number of fashion girlies who end up in farming is incredibly high and fascinating, but I digress. I had spent my entire youth obsessed with fashion and magazines, so that’s what I went to school for. I moved back to the West Coast because I’m a water baby who can’t live too far away from the ocean or the mountains. I ended up getting what felt like an exciting job working for a pretty well known jewelry company but after a year of being there, I become wildly disillusioned with working a 9-5 and staring at a computer all day. I left and went to Haida Gwaii in an attempt to find time to become a writer whilst working at a fishing lodge… it was here that I realized that despite growing up with hippy parents who shopped at the farmers market and insisted on everything being organic, I didn’t actually *know* where my food came from or how it got to my plate. And that rocked me in a way I wasn’t exactly ready for. I came back from Haida Gwaii, not really knowing how this new found knowledge was going to affect my life but knowing that it would somehow. A year and a half went by and in the midst of a crappy relationship, I ended up back at that same jewelry company because I wanted to feel like an “adult” with an “adult” job. I’m the type of person that unfortunately needs to learn lessons a few times over, but this time I thankfully only lasted about three months at the position before I quit whilst going through a break up with previously mentioned crappy boyfriend. And while these were all things that needed to be done, the series of events sent me into a tailspin of deep deep anxiety. I’ve only ever had a few panic attacks in my life, but the months that followed these events left me feeling like I was constantly on the verge of one. That summer, my friend Steph had given me her garden plot at a community garden, one of the most coveted things in the goddamn city as waitlists last for years for these gardens. I got to work cleaning it up and planting it up with carrots, tomatoes, zucchini and a few other random things. In the midst of this new found anxiety I would literally walk to my little garden plot in the middle of the night, climb into this garden bed and talk to my tomatoes. Pinch the suckers and try to feel ok. Thin the carrots and try to feel ok. It was the only thing that made me feel alright, like I might be able to not feel like I was suffocating again one day. It was also this same summer that Steph, that same friend, was volunteering for one of the first Urban Farming Projects in Vancouver. A group called Inner City Farms that grew food on peoples lawns around the city. It was a crew of guys who had all gone through the Land and Food Systems program together at UBC and decided they wanted to farm, but since they lived in the city and couldn’t afford the amount of land they needed, they simply went around to a bunch of different houses that had big lawns with lots of sun, knocked on doors and asked if they could farm their lawns in exchange for a CSA share. And it worked, TONS of people agreed and they were off, farming countless lawns across our city. I heard about them and was floored. I’ve always been scrappy and hardworking and a go-getter so I was completely in love with this idea that you could find small unused or underused pieces of land in the city and ask if you could farm them, thus piecing together a quarter acre or an acre of space for yourself which is more than plenty when you’re just starting out. Now that I knew that Urban Farming existed, I started researching and found a handful of other organizations in the city. One of of which was Victory Gardens, a co-op started and run by three women in their 30’s who’s tagline was “We Help You Grow Food”. They wore matching stripey overalls and drove a little Japanese truck and I was instantly INFATUATED.

But at the time I didn’t know anything about farming or growing anything really, so I set out to find some skills. I figured first thing I should do is learn how to use tools, so I applied to every single landscaping company on Craigslist saying that I was trying to learn new skills, I was a super hard worker and that if I couldn’t keep up, they could simply fire me after a week. One guy took pity on me and gave me a job! And while it was hard work, for the first time in my life I got to experience what it was like working outside for 8 hours a day, and I LOVED IT. I knew that Victory Gardens would eventually be hiring and I wanted to be ready to apply, even though I still knew very little. About six month later, in the spring of 2013 they put out a call for interns and while I was sheepish about applying and knowing very little, my friend Steph said she knew a couple of the gals and that they were super nice and that maybe if it didn’t work for this season, that perhaps they would keep me in mind for the following year. Long story short, I was brought on as an intern and then quickly became their first hire. I ran their small greenhouse, grew all the starts, helped with garden installs, was the first point of contact for the company, ordered supplies, fielded emails and calls, kept inventory, helped with planting guides, you name it, I did it. And I loved it so darn much. I loved learning from and with these women, I loved watching them and their business grow. And since their business was a co-op, their plan was to have more workers become owners…and quite quickly I was on track to become a partial owner of the company and join their team in a big way. And then came the sudden reality check. What I didn’t mention above, is that when I left the fashion industry I was super disillusioned with working on a computer day in and day out. I wanted to be outdoors… getting dirty, seeding flats of broccoli, moving compost, anything other than staring at a screen. So when I got the position at Victory Gardens, I told them that I would intern for them until they either fired me or gave me a job, on one condition…that they didn’t put me in front of a computer. They agreed, they too had gotten out of the computer staring rat race and completely understood where I was coming from. But….they were also a company owned and run by 3 women in their 30s, so the inevitable started happening, which is they all started to have babies and that left me, taking on more and more computer jobs. In my early years of working in Urban Agriculture, leaving this company was the hardest decision I’d ever made. It was such an incredible opportunity but I knew I couldn’t get stuck in front of a computer again…so I left.

From there I worked markets for Cropthorne Farm, one of the most sought after vegetable growers in the city, volunteered for an assortment of different Urban Farming projects and saved my pennies from my restaurant jobs for when the opportunity to start my own thing would present itself. A year or so went by and my friend Michelle and I started talking about starting a flower farm together. My friend Rachel whom I had met while working for Cropthorne was on the verge of starting one (she now owns River and Sea Flowers) and it was around this time that the small scale flower farming revolution was really starting to take off. One day in 2016, I walked into my local Whole Foods and saw a bouquet of Floret dahlias and was like “OK, IT’S ON! I gotta do this!”. A few months later, Michelle and I got our hands on a well known and very well used acre of land a half hour drive from the city, that had been in the Urban Farming rotation for a few years.

That first year we grew a mix of vegetables and flowers and sold them at her skateboard shop and at a local coffee shop a few minutes from my house. Tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes with club root, kale, collards, maybe some carrots? It wasn’t a ton and it was sparse. It was unorganized and haphazard and two squiggly brained people walking into starting a business together but not actually thinking ANY of it through. As for flowers, we had some really spindly zinnias, a bit of ranunculus, a handful of gladiolas, a TON of branching sunflowers and a couple of rows of dahlias just fighting for their lives. We sold $5 bunches of dahlias and $1 sunflower stems. When I type that sentence it feels like I’m talking about something that happened in 1945 but I kid you not, that was in 2016 and I have no idea how we thought we were ever going to make any money. By the end of that season we found out that we would be losing our land, but we also knew we weren’t meant to be business partners, so we amicably went our separate ways. Michelle now owns and runs Valley Buds Flower Farm.

While there’s many things I’m not qualified to tell someone how to do, the one thing I have done far too many times with very little money/resources is start a farm from scratch. I started Late Bloomers physically from scratch three times over on three different pieces of land in three different cities. If I know a thing or two about anything, it’s starting a flower farm and eventually growing it to not only produce gorgeous flowers with stunningly long stems, but make it into something that can eventually pay you and other people. Starting from scrappy beginnings and learning by trial and error is both humbling and expensive. You screw up a lot and there’s no one to ask questions of, at least there wasn’t back then. There were a handful of flower farms that I knew of but they were all far away from me and because I was so green, I was sheepish to ask for help. And honestly, at the time it didn’t feel like anyone would be willing to share their knowledge. The knowledge sharing landscape in Flower Farming feels really different now with folks sharing what they’ve learned on Tik Tok and Instagram but back then, it wasn’t like that. Tik Tok didn’t exist and Instagram was just a bunch of heavily filtered shots of peoples food. Also, in fields that are hard to get started in, maybe there’s a lot of logistics to figure out, maybe it’s an old boys club and is hard to navigate…. once people go through hell and back trying to figure it all out, they don’t readily want to share the information. At the time, the Floret course didn’t exist yet and it was too expensive for my blood anyways. Lynn Byczynski’s “The Flower Farmer” had come out years prior but it was hard to find (I even think it was out of print when I started because books about Flower Farming just weren’t really a thing like they are now) and at it seemed like it was geared towards farming with a tractor which I didn’t have and didn’t want to work with. We did find a little course put on by Christin Geall, where we learned about spring growing and made our first big arrangements (see mine above), and everything she shared with us just made me fall more and more in love. I was a year in and convinced this is what I was born to do.

After losing that piece of land, I started looking again. The thing I’ve wanted more than anything, for the past decade is to live rurally. But for most of those 10 years, I was in a relationship with someone who not only loved living in the city, but couldn’t see how we could possibly both have jobs living in the country, so in the city we stayed. I figured a compromise I could make was if I farmed rurally and then came home for the weekends. I searched high and low for land and found some up the coast from where we lived, a 40 minute ferry ride away. It was on an 8 acre property and had lots of things already set up; three established fields, a couple of greenhouses, a germination room, a cooler etc. The owners had been farming it for a handful of years and now wanted someone else to use it while contributing to the huge CSA they had built. I could rent their tiny home, farm the land for free and grow as many flowers as I wanted, on account that I would contribute vegetables to their CSA that they would take a 20% cut from. After a rough first year, my business slowly started to grow! I had started a bouquet delivery run on Fridays to folks who wanted mixed bunches and I continued to sell straight bunches of dahlias, strawflowers and snapdragons at a handful of cafes. I raised my prices exponentially, really started to hone my growing skills and became known as the gal always driving around town with a truck full of flowers, pulling up at sunrise to stock your favorite café. I loved this piece of land so much and if they hadn’t decided to sell it towards the end of my season there, it’s hard to say how long I would have stayed. The commute was hard but rural living was so deeply for me and moving back to the city full time was tough to wrap my head around after finally finding what felt like a loop hole out. But alas, I had lost my land for the second time and wasn’t sure where I would end up.

Then, in early spring of 2019, I got a call from a friend who ran the Land Matcher program at Young Agrarians. She said she had a lead on a piece of land she thought would actually give me a substantial lease. It was half an hour drive from my house, a little piece of agricultural land right outside of the city. The neighbors had roosters, the property was surrounded by other farms, and it had previously been home to small scale urban animal raising operation so the soil was primo! I went and checked it out, hit it off with the person who had the main lease on the entire three acres and a couple of weeks later, signed a sub-lease for five years. This is where Late Bloomers really took off! This where I learned a million and one lessons in not only how to grow gorgeous, long stemmed flowers, but where I was finally able to take my business to the next level. The next few years saw Late Bloomers BLOW UP! By the time the pandemic hit, I was running a bonafide business that sold to 7 different shops, had a 100+ share CSA, hosted on site markets and every week sold every stem I could cut from the field. I was finally running a business that could pay me and pay for itself, which felt incredible. Not only was the farm becoming profitable, but after many years of moving compost and pulling weeds and fine tuning our growing practices, it was becoming easier to start up every season because I finally didn’t have to start from scratch every spring. The leaps and bounds your farm business can make simply by staying in the same place for many years is incredible. This sounds like an insane thing to say in business, as most businesses simply stay put. It’s an even more insane thing to say about a business that is literally rooted in the soil it inhabits, but it’s the unfortunate reality for small scale growers all over Canada and the US. Land is SO hard to come by being both expensive to buy and hard to lease long term, that growers, no matter how committed, eventually give up and find careers that are less heartbreaking. So if you’re reading this and you’ve been through a few pieces of leased land or you’re searching for land right now, DON’T GIVE UP! You will find something eventually. I promise! Take it from someone who literally was at her wits end with moving farms and barely getting by, it’s entirely possible and if you keep at it, it will happen for you!

Late Bloomers was slated to stay put where it was for the forseeable future. I had just received a huge grant that allowed me to get a John Deere Gator and a BCS and I was going to expand into another acre. The plans I had for this farm were very ambitious and exciting. And then, my relationship ended. That same relationship that had kept me in the city all those years, through ferry rides to follow my dreams and farm on the coast, to back in the city finally settled into a property a short drive from home. I loved my farm so much but the longing to live rurally literally radiated through my bones. I knew that if I didn’t do it now, I may never do it. So, I left. I sold off everything I didn’t need to start up again on a whim (my germination lights, trays, my favourite tools, etc) put my BCS and Gator in storage and moved to a small island of 11,000 people. Rural properties at every turn. I fell in love, I worked on recovering from the burnout of running a farm by myself, I floated in the ocean and thought about who I was if I wasn’t currently a farmer, an identity that defined every inch of my being for the past ten years, even while living in a large metropolitan city. I thought about all the things we don’t talk about in farming, especially with those who are just starting out (the margins, the hours, the start-up costs). I thought about the turn over rate of farmers and how desperate we are for more of them, as the current generation ages out, but how few can even make it to 5 years. I thought about how many people dream about flower farming and their ideas of it and what the realities really are. And from all that Start Flower Farming was born; a vehicle to share my knowledge with folks who are just starting out on this wild, beautiful journey. I have one singular professional goal in life and it’s this; help flower farmers in such a way that they actually stay in farming for the long haul. So until I find another home for my farm, I want to share my knowledge with you dear reader. If you’ve made it this far you’re either super nosey like me and we should definitely be friends, or you really want to start flower farming and this big long story felt like the inspiration cocktail that you needed. If it’s the latter, please get in touch! I’d love to hear where you’re at on this journey either in the comments or via email so I can better create things that help you follow your flower farming dreams. Thanks for being here!