What wintering means for a flower farmer

Photo by Annie Spratt

The daylight hours are as important to flower farmers as the nutrients in the soil. Light is the fuel for photosynthesis, essential for plant growth. So the winter solstice this coming weekend is a welcome turning point towards the light for next season.

Before we get too excited about longer days ahead, we still have the dead of winter to navigate.

I've been re-reading Katherine May's book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. If you haven't yet read it, it's worth seeking out. It's not a business book, and it's not really a self-help book either. It's more a reflection on the fallow time in the year, or the low periods in a life.

May writes that plants and animals don't fight the winter. They don't pretend it isn't happening and attempt to carry on as if it were summer. They adapt to prepare for what the next season asks of them.

This is the perfect time for flower farmers to practise a little wintering.

Wintering down under places different demands on you

Katherine May wrote her book from Britain, where winter arrives with real authority. Short dark days. Genuine cold. The kind of weather that takes away many choices from you.

In many parts of Australia and New Zealand, winter is different. For some you're still in the tropics, others waver in the wet and dark. Some winters are hard and cold, punctuated with bright sun.

Here in Kaitoke, on the hill north of Upper Hutt, there's no hard stop, no moment where the world clearly says: rest now. Although cold, wet winds can be decidedly wintry when they blow from the south.

For many Australian and New Zealand flower growers, the field work keeps going. There are always things to plant, things to tidy, things to do. June for me is one of my most active months -- finishing the autumn planting, getting tulip bulbs in the ground, starting to clear the paths of their summer weeds.

There's an old saying that you should plant your garlic on the shortest day. I'll be doing exactly that this week.

When the work doesn't stop and a hard winter isn't something imposed on us, wintering is something we have to choose for ourselves.

But wintering is more than the weather

May's concept of wintering extends well beyond the literal season. She's writing about all the fallow periods in a life -- the times when you're not producing, not performing, not moving forward at the pace the world seems to expect. An illness. A grief. A business that isn't working yet. A season of life that asks something different of you.

She says, simply, that we have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us. And that given time, they grow again.

What strikes me about this -- reading it as a flower farmer -- is how completely we understand this in the ground and how poorly we often apply it to ourselves.

We know that soil needs rest. We know that a field cropped relentlessly without regeneration loses its vitality. We know this, yet it's so easy to forget it applies to us too.

What to do when a holiday feels beyond your reach

Last winter, I went to metaphorical Bali. I didn't book a flight or go anywhere. But for about a month I slowed right down, with the sole purpose of doing nothing I didn't want to do.

Instead I took longer dog walks, read heaps, caught up with friends who'd been bumped down the list all season. Days where I only did the work that genuinely needed doing, at the pace that felt right rather than the pace my to-do list was insisting on. A kind of deliberate, at-home quietness.

It's harder than it sounds when your business and your home occupy the same piece of land. There's always something visible that needs attention, which makes a staycation harder to enjoy. The trick, I found, was to be a light-touch caretaker for a while rather than the person responsible for everything.

That month gave me more energy and clearer thinking about what I actually wanted the next season to look like.

Wintering as a business practice

I want to be careful here, because I'm not suggesting you stop working in winter. Most of us can't, and many of us don't want to. There are seeds to order, plans to make, things to repair and rethink. Some of the best business thinking I've ever done has happened in June and July.

But there's a difference between working in winter and wintering.

Working in winter means shifting your activity to suit the season -- less production, more planning, more learning, more rest between tasks. That's good and necessary.

Wintering means something a little deeper. It means letting the quiet be genuinely peaceful. It means not filling every quiet moment with useful activity. It means allowing the slower pace to do something to you, rather than simply using it to get ahead on the next season's to-do list.

May talks about how enduring winter can feel like an annoyance -- as though we've failed to achieve the eternal summer we think everyone else is living. That impulse to be productive even in the quiet months runs counter to what winter, and wintering, actually asks of us.

Rest is part of the work, not a reward for finishing it.

What wintering might look like for you

Maybe wintering means a literal holiday -- a week or so away, off the property, out of sight of the beds that need mulching. For others, it might be the kind of staycation I stumbled into last year: a deliberate dialling back, a decision to move at your own pace for a few weeks rather than the season's pace.

It might mean reading a book in the afternoon without guilt. Taking the long route on your walk. Not checking your phone before 10am. Making time for a proper coffee break, lunch, and afternoon tea, rather than having them on the run.

It doesn't have to be grand. It just has to be deliberate.

The one thing I'd gently push back on is the idea that winter planning is the same as winter rest. Planning is valuable -- more on that next week. But the kind of renewal that makes the next season genuinely good requires something more than a filled-in spreadsheet. It requires some actual downtime, genuine quiet, with space for nothing -- or for something else you love.

The solstice is a good moment to ask yourself: if this is my time for wintering, what would I actually do with it?

Explore more

Katherine May's book is worth finding if this has resonated. It's gentle, honest, and doesn't try to make rest into a productivity strategy.

And if you're planting garlic this week: I hope it goes in easily, the ground is kind, and you find at least a few minutes to just stand there in the quiet before moving on to the next thing.

Happy solstice.

Written by: Julie Treanor - Owner of The Pickery and co-creator of The Floral Business Activator currently planting garlic on the shortest day and trying to remember that the field knows what it’s doing.

Follow Julie on Instagram @thepickery