Benefits of hiring a flower farmer as your wedding florist
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
The field-to-table experience has only become increasingly more popular thanks to the Slow Flower movement that launched about a decade ago. The Slow Flower Movement brought consumer awareness of the ecological benefits of supporting locally grown flowers and the unique and diverse varieties that are unique to locally grown flowers. Debra Prinzing is the frontier of the movement, which initially started through her books Slow Flowers and The Fifty Mile Bouquet. Along with bringing awareness of the beauty of locally grown flowers, it has inspired existing and new growers, florists, and wedding couples.
The truth is, weddings can have a lot of waste—especially destination weddings. One way couples lessen their carbon footprint is by hiring vendors that are local to their wedding venue. Another realistic and convenient way couples can reduce their carbon footprint is by hiring a flower farmer as their wedding florist (or, as we call ourselves, a farmer-florist).
In today’s post, I wanted to answer some potentially lingering questions:
What are “Specialty Cut Flowers”?
What is considered “Locally Grown Flowers”?
What is a “Farmer-Florist”?
Can a “Farmer-Florist” still design and carry out the role of a mainstream wedding florist?
What are some options I can expect a Farmer-Florist to offer?
What are the benefits of hiring a Farmer-Florist?
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
What are Specialty Cut Flowers?
You may be asking, “What are specialty cut flowers?” Specialty cut flowers are explicitly grown as cut flowers that are not the typical roses, carnations, or chrysanthemums typically seen in grocery stores and florist studios. Anything outside those three central traditional flowers is considered “specialty cut flowers,” some of the most beautiful varieties do best when they come directly from the grower locally.
Some of our favorite specialty cut flowers we grow here at Sierra Flower Farm that are best locally sourced are:
Dahlias
Ranunculus
Peonies
Cosmos
Zinnias
Poppies
Marigolds
Snapdragons
Bachelor Buttons
Ammi
Sweet Peas
Ornamental Grasses
Anemones
Corn Cockle
I must cut myself off… I have too many favorites!
Though many specialty cut flowers have become more mainstream with florists and wholesalers, locally grown specialty cut flowers are an absolute treat.
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
What are Considered “Locally Grown” Flowers?
Honestly, there is not a definitive answer. It will come down to your ethos. At a minimum, you are purchasing domestically grown flowers. The closer you can source a grower to your wedding location, the better! If you go with one of Debra Prinzing’s book titles, the definition is fifty miles or less. My favorite is walking about twenty steps out by the back door.
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
What is a Farmer-Florist?
A Farmer-florist is a grower of specialty cut flowers that also designs with their grown flowers.
Farmer-florists can come in all shapes and sizes, from a small urban backyard grower to one who grows acres worth of specialty cut flowers. Not all flower farmers are also florists, and not all florists who grow flowers to supplement are farmers. Melding the two together means a lot of work but ultimately results in amazing flowers that create unique pieces of art not commonly seen and will be a conversation for your wedding guests for years to come.
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
Can a “Farmer-Florist” Still Design and Carry Out the Role of a Traditional Wedding Florist?
As with hiring any wedding florist, there are different skill, professional, and quality levels in the realm of farmer-florists. Ideally, a flower farmer taking on weddings will have enough confidence and skill to provide the flowers that match your vision.
Asking a farmer-florist for out-of-season ingredients or patent-protected varieties privy to imported flowers and wholesalers may not give you the whole “farmer-florist” experience. The farmer-florist may deem your vision not a fit with their standards or beliefs.
Working with a farmer-florist can be a wonderful and distinctive experience for the right wedding couple. They must be adventurous and willing to incorporate varieties of flowers not commonly seen and within their rightful season.
Some farmer-florists will take on engagements year-round, willing to supplement with imported flowers. Other farmer-florists will only work within their growing season using their or other flower farmer friends’ blooms. Here at Sierra Flower Farm, we only take on weddings during our growing season (May through early November). We will also outsource with some of our favorite farmer friends domestically in the US on those finicky shoulder seasons of spring and fall.
Another common question that is linked to whether or not a farmer-florist can provide designs like a mainstream wedding florist is:
What do we do in case of crop failure?
Each farmer-florist will have his or her own way of handling this, but most commonly, we never promise specific flowers. Instead, we work with color palettes. Any professional florist worth his or her weight in gold works in the same manner.
As wedding florists, we work with natural products, and nature can be finicky. In case of frosts, pest damage, and other potential problems, we have a few tricks up our sleeves: rest assured, your farmer-florist will have your wedding blooms.
In some ways, we have more control over the flowers for your wedding by sowing multiple rounds of flowers, utilizing low tunnels, high tunnels, or other forcing measures. We are not held to the mercy of only being able to purchase what is available from a wholesaler the week of your wedding. We can use what they offer, but why do we have a field of beautiful blooms at our disposal? We are a great example of having and eating your cake.
Not having flowers for your wedding is not an option.
Speaking of options, let’s go over some of the more common ones farmer-florists offer!
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
What are Some Options I Can expect a Farmer-Florist to Offer?
As mentioned, farmer-florists and their offerings come in various shapes and sizes, much like a mainstream florist. Farmer florists may also offer some unique options that mainstream florists do not.
DIY Flowers/ Bulk Buckets
Flower farmers or farmer-florists may allow you to play with and design your wedding flowers. This can be an excellent option for couples on a budget, having a friend or family member who can arrange flowers, or couples with a DIY spirit.
Often, the bulk buckets are growers' picks. Some may allow you to choose a color palette, and others may allow you to choose varieties and colors up to two weeks in advance. Depending on the grower, there are many ways that these DIY/Bulk Buckets will be available. In the past, when we offered Bulk Buckets, we allowed up to two colors to be omitted and provided a well-rounded amount of stems and components to complete designs.
Micro/ A La Carte/ Elopement/ Intimate Wedding Packages
A middle tier between a full-service package and bulk buckets is the “a la carte” option other florists may offer as elopement, intimate, minor, or micro wedding packages. This option often has the farmer-florist doing the more intimate designs, such as Bridal Bouquets, Boutonnieres, and other personal items.
Sometimes, it may include table designs in rented containers or outright purchased by the couple. When we offered this option, it was often paired with bulk buckets and was only available for pickup, usually the day before their wedding.
Full-Service Wedding Package
The Full Service Package is the most common package for wedding florals and is as it sounds. This is where the farmer-florist provides installed designs, personal items, reception items, delivery, and the setup and breakdown of the wedding florals. Everything a mainstream wedding florist may offer, even the candles. Each farmer-florist, much like any other wedding florist, will have different offerings, purchase minimums, etc.
A unique aspect of having a farmer-florist for your full-service wedding is that, with enough time, your farmer-florist may custom grow flowers especially for your wedding- how special is that?
Now that you are familiar with some of the definitions and concepts surrounding a farmer-florist, let’s discuss some of the benefits!
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
What are the benefits of hiring a Farmer-Florist?
The farmer-florist aesthetic has become increasingly popular, even if you don’t realize it.
Seed pods, tons of variety, and less commonly seen flowers are all markers of a farmer-florist’s work (or a lucky florist who has happened to become friends with one!). Not only will you get to indulge in beautifully scented flowers, but they are free of the many toxins that cover imported flowers, making locally grown flowers a more sustainable choice that is fresher.
The cherry on top?
You will get to work intimately not only with the florist but also with the grower.
Unique and Distinctive Varieties and Designs
Mainstream event florists are either limited by the number of varieties they can provide in an arrangement, or you are paying a very high price since they have to purchase each variety typically by the bunch. Conversely, a farmer-florist can use a handful of each variety straight from the field.
Not only do we have the option to put a single stem here or there for a design, depending on the farmer florist’s approach, but it may be more intimate where they hand-select every stem to go into the more personal items, such as the Bridal Bouquet. With a French bucket and clippers in hand, it’s my favorite part of the process.
Dahlias, zinnias, sweet peas, and cosmos are prime flower varieties that do not handle shipping or cold storage well. Many of the imported flowers need to be able to be harvested weeks or months in advance and held in cold storage even before they get to the wholesaler or florist’s hands. This limits which flowers the mainstream wedding florists have access to, which is why you see many of the standard designs, including roses, carnations, mums, and eucalyptus, since they are all bred and handle being stored for long periods.
A farmer-florist, even in the realm of the typical crops of flowers, often grows heirloom varieties unsuitable for transport and wholesale. Decadent garden roses that smell of myrrh and fruity essence with atypical eucalyptus varieties. Even for mums, farmer-florists will grow interesting forms of heirloom ones that larger growers have long abandoned. Varieties that are delicate, whimsical, and soft that don’t look like your everyday mum.
When grown locally, the varieties of flowers that do well being shipped and stored are less bruised and have more scent and character.
Flowers entice all the senses: from the feel, visual, the sound, and most importantly, the smell.
The smell makes the locally grown flowers shine since most of the ones from the wholesalers lose their scent in transport/storage or were bred out of them for shelf life. There is a sickly artificial scent that clings to imported flowers that have undertones of chemical smells. Not the most romantic scent.
In our designs for wedding couples, I always add a component with a distinct scent, peas, peonies, or scented geranium, provided the couple does such as sweet can’t have sensitivities to scent. The reason is that memories fade, but our olfactory senses are strongly linked to memory.
So the next time one of our June brides comes across sweet peas, the hope is that it brings her back to happy memories of her wedding day. Since locally grown flowers aren’t that common, they should trigger that extraordinary memory, or at least that’s the hope.
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
Toxin-Free and Sustainable Blooms for You to Stick Your Nose In!
Unfortunately, imported cut flowers have quite a mash-up of toxic chemicals: preservatives, fungicides, and pesticides.
This is not without good reasons, but those reasons don’t make the chemicals any less harmful. It is recommended that florists gear up with gloves to handle imported cut flowers due to the increase of cancer in the industry caused by the cut flowers and the standard florist tools. Handing over flowers into bare hands, knowing the chemicals, makes me cringe. We prefer to work with our own or other locally sourced ingredients.
Each farmer-florist will have their own pest and disease management approach, so you'll have to research the grower you're interested in hiring. For us, we have focused on the health of our soil and choose to encourage and allow natural predators to take care of any pests. In the rare case we fertilize, spray fungicides or pesticides; we use only OMRI-certified products. We are very strict in our protocols not to harm the beneficial insects of our ecosystem.
Our growing field has become a place of protection and nourishment for many critters, large and small, who have found refuge within the jungle of plants, from ladybirds to bees to quail. Each of them, even the pests, has a role to carry out. By focusing on plant health and accepting nature's natural ebbs and flows, we have been able to churn out buckets of gorgeous blooms that add to the earth’s health rather than deplete it.
At the end of each wedding, we take the remainder of the unwanted flowers and add them back to earth by placing them in our compost pile. That compost pile is heavily worked by our free-range chickens and worms that, once ready, go back into the growing beds to grow future wedding flowers. It is a beautiful cycle. Many couples feel the flowers can be a waste for one day; with our system, nothing goes to waste.
We also focus on investing in high-quality materials and try our best to lessen the amount of one-use plastic in our growing and floral designs. Traditional florist foam is plastic that doesn’t break down and contains toxins such as formaldehyde, which is why we use other, more biodegradable, natural products that can be added to our compost piles. We also reuse chicken wire and water tubes to lessen the amount of waste. This can be a more expensive and time-consuming approach, but we feel that our earth and the future of our planet are more than worth it.
Working with a farmer-florist means less fossil fuels are involved in long-term cooler storage, and semi-trucks and planes are used to transport cut flowers. Each farmer-florist will have their approach to how lean they are in their carbon footprint. For example, we do not have a large heated greenhouse. We prefer to focus on what we can grow in the rightful season or using minimal energy.
We are also increasingly investing and planning on how to lessen our energy consumption. Some farmer-florists save seeds or propagate from cuttings from their current stock of plants or trade with other growers to reduce the amount of shipping of seeds, plants, and plugs. We focus on growing everything we can from seed here on the farm to lessen the exposure to various systemic toxins that come with greenhouse-grown plugs.
We also source from small family businesses, growers, or businesses we believe in.
A large reason I decided to become a farmer-florist instead of a mainstream florist is my love and passion for nature.
I wanted to take my little patch of earth and make it a beautiful space that has a positive impact on our local ecosystem. Sowing the tiniest seeds and watching them grow into plants taller than myself is exciting and humbling.
Over the years, I have had incredible hands-on experiences with hundreds of different flower varieties, many of which more people would hardly ever hear of and rarely get into their own hands without the help of a local flower farmer.
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
Expert in the World of Specialty Cut Flowers
As a farmer-florist, I can tell you… flowers are my life!
Growing, harvesting, and designing with flowers: they become one with you. I’m truly surprised some days that I am not like Daisy-Head Maisy with a flower stem growing out of my head!
A farmer-florist acquires an innate intuition for tending the flowers, the plants, the growing season, and the weather. In one look, I can tell when a cut flower is too immature, the right stage, how long it’ll take to open fully, and when it is on its way out. This may not seem like a superhuman power, but it allows us to use the best flowers at their peak, not their downfall, for your wedding.
Farmer-florists know the life of their flowers- the twirls, the dance, the finale. As growers know how to be florists, we work with flowers, even wholesale-purchased ones, that will look incredible for your wedding day. Over the years of growing, we have experimented and explored the flowers we grow.
As a farmer-florist, I choose to take on a limited number of weddings yearly, around ten per year… not a hundred. Some may perceive this as a lack of experience or demand, but be assured, it is not that. As mentioned, growing flowers takes a lot of time, and custom-growing and designing those flowers even more.
It is a more customized and collaborative approach to wedding floristry, so we limit how many we take on per season. On the other hand, as a flower farmer, I have had my hands on countless stems and thousands of floral designs over the years, from mixed bouquets to more elaborate designs.
Photo Credit: Sierra Flower Farm
Freshest of Fresh Flowers
Locally grown blooms versus imported ones are night and day.
What you have in a farmer-florist is a grower and small business owner invested in their crop. This is our business, our reputation, but more than that, we have been babying these crops for months and even years. In turn, we provide our wedding couples with the best of what’s in the field for your wedding day. Wedding flowers are only intended to last for the event; that is often not the case with locally grown flowers. We have gotten much feedback from guests who took the flowers home and enjoyed them for well over a week.
Fresh flowers have personality.
They twist and twirl, bringing a distinct look to the floral designs; they are vibrant and alive! Once again, I will loop back to the smell of fresh flowers from the field. The musky scent of Bells of Ireland, the light rose-like scent of ranunculus, sweet peas that will teleport you back in time, and even the smell of bubblegum that wafts from Madame Butterfly snapdragons.
The fresh scent of apple mint tangled with the decadent scent of peonies is a delight. Even our field-grown eucalyptus smells more potent, fresh, and medicinal than sourced from a wholesaler.
The fresher the flowers, the better they will perform in the floral designs, bringing interest and conversation for your guests. Fresh from the field flowers provide an experience that is difficult to compare.
This leads me to my last point: hiring a wedding farmer-florist is for adventurous couples who want memorable wedding flowers.
For the Adventurers, Farmer-Florist Designs can be an Intimate Storyteller
As a farmer-florist, I do not repeat the same design. Perhaps similar, but never the same.
As mentioned, locally grown flowers have personalities, movement… quirks! You never know which twisty stem will inspire a different take on a design! Unique elements tucked into designs will have your guests pondering… Are there actually tiny tomatoes in that bud vase?
Just the other day, we had guests gush about plucking the raspberries from the arrangements to snack on. This was a fun experience, and they also said they were the most delicious raspberries they’d ever tasted! The small detail brought such delight and stood out as a lovely memory for the couple and their guests.
After all, isn’t a wedding all about creating memories while celebrating the union of two cherished souls amongst loved ones?
We have seen a huge wedding trend: couples wanting memorable experiences to create a meme for their guests. Undercooked risotto and overcooked chicken do not cut it any longer, nor do the typical wedding flowers… or even the process!
Couples aren’t interested in picking out a photo in a catalog and having a copy-paste version of their Bridal Bouquet that hundreds, if not thousands, of other brides have had repeatedly. Just like grooms aren’t running to tuxedo rental outlets and opting for custom-fitted suits, couples seek flowers that fit them.
Flowers that fit their style, vision, and ethos… flowers that weave their love story together, and a more personalized experience with their wedding flowers.
With enough notice, as farmer-florists, we can get down to custom-planning your wedding florals. It takes planning, various seed-sowing dates, and spreadsheets galore…. to have the flowers in peak beauty for your wedding day. We often have couples who like to see “progress” photos of their seeds being sown or plants being planted; they are on the journey of growing their wedding flowers with us, even from afar.
Through this process, we talk to our wedding couples more often than most event florists (if the couples want!). The conversations bring great anticipation for our couples, making the flowers much more than something pretty. Their wedding flowers become an experience.
Just as we lovingly grow every variety by sowing the seeds with our hands, planting the seedlings on cool spring days, and weeding on the blazing hot ones, we take that same dedication with floral designs. Many mainstream florists have a team of designers.
The overhead cost of running a brick-and-mortar location is huge. Often, your wedding florist is balancing multiple weddings in a single weekend, and the designer you think you hired isn’t even touching your flowers. That is the nature of their business model.
Each farmer-florist may be different, but here at Sierra Flower Farm, it is our hands in the dirt and then our hands on the stems, a husband and wife duo. You get us directly, which goes back to why we limit the amount of weddings we take each year to serve our wedding clients better. If that means having to get up at one in the morning with headlamps to harvest after an alert goes off on temperatures dipping unexpectedly… we handle it!
We have done it.
For the sake of our wedding couples and their vision for their florals, they are that important to us. Most couples don’t see what we do behind the scenes to bring their vision to life; we prefer it that way.
Our couples deserve to be encompassed by the beauty of the flowers without concerning themselves with what it took us to get there. That’s our job and our passion to provide lovingly grown blooms for their wedding day.
As farmer-florists…. We’re invested.
Flower farmers tend to be instead nurturing spirits, much like many other gardeners or people who relish nature. Calm and patience are practiced for the flower farmer, which we have found our couples much need sometimes, especially when plans begin to get bumpy with weather or other unforeseen events. From seed to centerpiece, we are there every step of the way. Bumps are in the road, and in the end, beautiful flowers will entwine your love story and union together.
We are looking forward to handing you blooms soon!
Jessica & Graham
If you are a more adventurous couple seeking a more sustainable, customized, and exciting twist on your wedding florals, a local farmer-florist or a florist who works closely with flower farms may be an excellent fit for your area.
If you are getting married in the Reno-Tahoe area, check out our inquiry page by clicking below to see if we’re a floral match for your special day!