What Happens When Your Daydreams and Your Day Job Meet in a Flower Field

On my 40th birthday, someone gave me a book about a woman who left the UK to become a winemaker in Dordogne, France. I read it and thought: that's it, that's the life I want. Except in my version, I was going to grow olives in Andalusia.

I ended up growing flowers in Kaitoke, New Zealand. So — make of that what you will.

I got to tell that story, and a few other slightly-too-honest ones, on Jo Robinson's podcast Flower Farming NZ recently.

Jo farms Scrubby Gully, a flower farm on an eight-hectare property in Central Otago she runs with her husband James — the place gets its name from the stream that once supplied its irrigation. Ask Jo what she does, she'll tell you that "Running our flower farming business is my job, but gardening is my joy." The podcast reflects the depth of her passion for flowers - started after members of her 1,200-strong Flower Farming NZ Facebook community talked her into taking their conversations beyond social media.

How a business coach ended up running a flower farm

The thing about daydreams is that even if they don't turn out how you expect them to, they point to a deep want within you that can be hard to ignore.

For me, the real starting point for flower farming wasn't the olive grove daydream. It was 10 years later, when I was having something of a professional existential crisis — leaving a role as a leadership and business coach to go out on my own, with no real idea what "on my own" meant yet. Right around that time, a book called The Flower Farmer's Year by Georgie Newbery fell into my hands during a trip to the UK.

I already had a 12 x 12 metre potager — vegetables, companion planting, a mixed garden I loved. I started looking at it differently: could this become a cut flower garden? Could a cut flower garden become a business? Two unrelated things — a career in freefall and a book about flower farming in Somerset — collided, and the FBA is, in a fairly roundabout way, what came out the other side.

The part many of us forget when we take up flower farming

It only dawned on me talking to Jo: I didn't leave my coaching career behind when I started growing flowers. I brought it with me. The original idea behind The Pickery and every business tool in the hands of FBA members — the way we talk about pricing, positioning, the business-side of growing — that's a new incarnation of my work as coach, mentor, and flower farmer.

I won't be alone in this.

If you're building a flower business alongside, after, or instead of a career that has nothing to do with flowers, the professional judgement you already have isn't something to set aside while you "learn flower farming." It's the thing that makes the business side possible at all.

What's the professional skill or instinct you already have — from a career, a role, a life you've already lived — that's been influencing your flower business?

And what difference would it make if you allowed those daydreams, work experience and other roles you live with to breathe a bigger life into your business?

The farmer behind the mic

Central Otago is one of the driest parts of New Zealand — average rainfall around 400mm a year, which is most of why Jo and James built their farm around a stream in the first place. Across roughly 8,500 lineal metres of cropping rows, they're contending with exactly the kind of conditions that make theory-first advice useless. You can't talk your way around water scarcity — you have to farm around it.

That's the difference you can hear in Jo’s podcast. Jo isn't interviewing growers from the outside looking in — she's asking the questions as a working farmer with a keen eye for a new perspective on this industry and looking to keep learning herself. Every episode is recorded from the farm, not a studio, and it shows: the conversations go straight to soil, water, timing and pricing, the stuff that only comes up when the person asking has skin in the game.

Jo’s a long time member of the FBA so it was fun to be put in the hot seat to talk about the business-side of flower farming. 

Jo Robinson, Scrubby Gully Flower Farm and host of Flower Farming NZ Podcast

The rapid-fire round

Jo also put me on the spot with a rapid-fire round, and a couple of my answers might start a robust debate: my most overrated cut flower crop is dahlias (fight me), and the best $100 I ever spent on this business wasn't on seeds or tools — it was one paid coaching session with a UK flower farmer-florist who, I'm fairly sure, underpriced herself.

The rest — favourite flower, most profitable crop, the two mistakes I still wince about — is in the full conversation.

Listen to Julie on Flower Farming in NZ on Spotify or watch on Flower Farming in NZ You Tube

Written by Julie Treanor — owner of The Pickery and co-creator of the Floral Business Activator who ran away to New Zealand to live her dream life.

Follow Julie on Instagram @thepickery