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  • From: Leigh Hauter <lh AT pressroom.com>
  • To: "market farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Flower shares
  • Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 23:49:15 -0500


We added a flower share to our regular vegetable share last year. It was
very successful. We are expanding the program for this coming season and
raising the price and are already close to sold out even though we have not
started our spring subscription drive.
Oh course, we are serving a relatively affluent, singles and couples
dominated community, Washington DC.

We started our program incrementally. When I first started a CSA, 7 years
ago, there were no flowers. The next year zinnias, the following year we
added sunflowers to our regular share. Then black eyed Susans, and so on.
We have also played around with other flowers that we have either not
continued or decided not to grow very many of.

I just made our seed orders for the coming year (over $800 worth) and
there were a lot of flowers. This year the core flowers in our flower
share will be sunflowers, zinnias, black eyed Susans, coneflowers,
strawflowers, calendula, asters, salvia, Shasta daisies and gloriosa
daisies. We are planning on growing to a much lessor degree almost a
dozen others. I think I would grow this many flowers even if we diddn't
have a flower share. We like flowers around the farm.

We deliver almost all of our shares (DC has horrible traffic and very few
people could get out to our farm for their shares). Sunflowers are in the
five gallon buckets and for the others I have bought 4 and 5 quart plastic
paint buckets. Because of the time involved we don't give bouquets but
instead bunches. I either pull out the stems from the bucket in front of
the shareholder or let the shareholder select her own stems (ie this week
you get a dozen zinnias, two sunflowers, six black eyed Susans, two
strawflowers and four coneflowers). I try to give close to two dozen stems
a week.


The regular vegetable shares get flowers (sunflowers and zinnias mostly)
occasionally. Either when we have extra time for cutting, when the shares
are small, or when there are extras to cut.


That's probably than you wanted to know about a flower share.
Leigh




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