Part two: crop planning

In the first part of this two-part flower CSA series, I discussed the logistics and rationale of running a successful flower CSA. This part covers the more fun (and often more stressful) aspect of a flower CSA: crop planning.

As I mentioned in Part 1, at Moonshot Farm in East Windsor, New Jersey, we utilize mixed bouquets for our CSA rather than rely on single crop CSAs, such as a peony share. We also operate on a monthly basis, with members picking up bouquets once a month. This model allows for a lot of variety in our bouquets — each month is usually dramatically different from the last.

 

August CSA bouquets featuring dahlias, cosmos, lilies, celosia, and asters. All photos courtesy of the author.

 

In 2023, we operated a full-year CSA and provided members with fresh cut flowers every month except December, when they got a potted amaryllis. I admit that running a CSA this way was a recipe for burnout. It was incredibly stressful to guarantee flowers nearly every week of the year. Somehow we managed to pull it off, and we learned a lot of crop planning lessons along the way.

 

Keeping it simple

When we first started making CSA bouquets, we would cram them with a dozen or more different flower types. The bouquets were beautiful, huge, and very time-consuming to make. Handling and arranging so many ingredients could take ten or more minutes a bouquet, which was way longer than made sense.

Today, we try to keep our CSA bouquets ideally limited to three to five different flower varieties. The bouquets come together much more quickly, translating to less labor and more profit. Utilizing multiple colors of the same flower (e.g., dahlias in orange, white, and pink) provides the same complex look while being simpler to arrange.

While our farmers market and wedding bouquets often have sophisticated, monochromatic palettes, we generally pay less attention to the colors of our CSA bouquets. As a chef might say, “what grows together, goes together,” we liken our CSA bouquets to a sampler platter of everything that’s best on the farm at that moment. We also try to keep all of our CSA bouquets approximately the same each week so that members feel like it’s fair.

 

While we prefer mixed bouquets for our CSA, some lean weeks we rely on single-variety bunches, like these daffodil bouquets with several different types of daffodil.

 

Based on what’s in bloom, we’ll craft a quick recipe. This week at the farm, for example, our recipe was 12 dahlias of different shapes and sizes, three celosias, and two eucalyptus stems. We always double-check our recipe against our farmers market prices to ensure that our members are getting a great price and a discount against our market prices. After all, they paid well ahead of time to support us.

The recipe purchased by the stem or bunch at market, would amount to around $54, but our membership bouquets are just $40 to $45 depending on the pick-up location. In weeks like this, when we have an incredible abundance of blooms, we love to spoil our membership with oversized bouquets.

We keep track of our recipes on a spreadsheet so that we can refer back to them. If members ever have questions or concerns about their flowers, we use the spreadsheet to identify exactly what they received. We’ll also note any issues on the spreadsheet, such as a lack of flowers, and it serves as a great record when planning for the next season.

 

Focus on focals

We organize our CSA around our focal flowers — the big, expensive blooms that draw a lot of attention. In each month, we aim to have at least one focal flower to build our bouquets around. Filler flowers and foliage are less important to our members, and in some months we might only provide an XL bunch of focal blooms. In dahlia season, for example, we’ll sometimes just provide big mixed bunches of dahlias. We have also provided daffodil-only bouquets occasionally in April, when little else is blooming.

While it’s not always possible, we also try to plan for a back-up focal flower each month. We’ve learned first-hand how easy it can be to lose crops, and having the back-up provides a lot of resiliency to our CSA.

In the chart (below), you’ll see we have tulips or lilies pretty much every month of the year. Planting these in succession ensures that we have a reliable back-up focal flower each month even if our planned flowers don’t work out. Both tulips and lilies have a great vase life and provide a “wow” factor to our bouquets.

 

We have tulips or lilies pretty much every month of the year. Planting these in succession ensures that we have a reliable back-up focal flower each month even if our planned flowers don’t work out.

 

We also only count on flowers for the CSA that we’ve successfully grown before. While every year brings new trial blooms — like July curcuma and November sunflowers this year at our farm — we don’t plan on having those for CSA.

 

Estimating yields

Once you’ve figured out what flowers to grow, figuring out how much to plant can be one of the hardest parts of running a CSA. In Part 1, I discussed how it can work well to balance a flower CSA with an additional outlet, like selling at a farmers market or to floral designers. We sell at three farmers markets each weekend and we are generally able to move a lot of flowers there. This means we don’t have to plan our CSA too carefully and instead aim to have a surplus, which we’re able to then move at our markets.

In general, we try to plant at least 20 percent to 30 percent more than needed for the CSA. Crop loss, insect damage, and timing hiccups can easily lead to shortages, but building in this cushion helps ensure we’ll have enough flowers.

For example, one lily bulb usually results in one lily flower. If I want to have three lilies for each of my 200 members, I’ll be sure to plant around 720 to 780 bulbs. Hopefully, we’ll have some extras, which can be added to the bouquets or simply sold at our other outlets.

Planning yields from cut and come again flowers, like zinnias or ranunculus, is more complicated than plants that yield just one stem like tulips, lilies, or sunflowers. Ideally, we rely on our own harvest records and experience when determining yield. But for newer farmers, the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers and North Carolina State University cultivar cut flower trials can be a great place to get information around yield.

 

We try to plant around 20 percent to 30 percent more than we need for CSA bouquets to ensure we have plenty of stems. March CSA bouquets feature ranunculus, freesia, tulips, and anemones.

 

To provide further cushion, we generally just dedicate around 20 percent of our total production to our CSA. This aligns with the percentage of our gross revenue coming from the CSA. It also means during weeks when things don’t go as planned, we have plenty leftover for the CSA.

Here’s a planning example. I like to ensure all of our members get a bouquet featuring ranunculus, with at least five ranunculus stems. Planning for an extra 30 percent cushion because ranunculus are finicky, that means I want to plan for 1,300 ranunculus stems for a 200-member CSA.

If I’m planning on those 1,300 stems being 20 percent of our production, it means I want to plan for 6,500 stems. We can typically rely on three quality stems of ranunculus per plant, with blooms over a four-to-five week period. So, I’ll want to plant at least 2,170 ranunculus corms to ensure we have enough for all of our outlets.

 

Planning for issues

Unlike a farmers market where we just sell whatever we have, or a florist who may order a week or two beforehand, our CSA members prepay for their bouquets many months in advance. So it’s especially important that we deliver what’s been promised.

Ahead of the season, we try to think through potential issues that could happen and plan for them. For example, our dahlia season generally runs quite reliably through the third week of October and sometimes even into November. An early frost, which we are facing this year, would mean a sudden end to this crop which we rely on heavily for our October CSA. We’ve added some early-blooming heirloom chrysanthemums to our tunnel crop plans now to serve as a back-up in case the dahlias end early.

We also get creative with holding flowers in the cooler for our CSA. In weeks when production is lean, we may leave several buckets of long-lasting flowers behind from market in order to use them in our CSA bouquets. It’s a real stress reliever knowing we already have next week’s CSA flowers stored and ready to go. While we certainly don’t do this with all varieties, some flowers that hold beautifully in the cooler for a week or more include lisianthus, tulips, peonies, marigolds, chrysanthemums, eucalyptus, and callas.

 

Setting up to make CSA bouquets in our barn. Limiting bouquets to three to five ingredients each has made arranging go much faster.

 

Our back-up plans also sometimes include buying in other local flowers. We often seem to have issues with our peonies, for example, including thrips, botrytis, and frost-damaged buds. But peonies are a flower that our members look forward to, so we now build into our plan to buy in extra peonies from some other local farms. Similarly, winter tulip production can be hit or miss, especially when cold gray days delay flowering. So we have worked out an arrangement to purchase tulips from a large greenhouse nearby when we don’t have enough.

We always try to be transparent with members when we have to buy in extra flowers, and we always choose locally grown. Folks are happy just to get blooms, and they seem to appreciate that we still get them flowers even when ours have failed.

Of course, if you’re planning to buy in flowers occasionally for your CSA, it’s critical that you have priced your membership high enough that you aren’t losing money. Here in New Jersey, where we have many huge wholesale flower farms, it’s ironically often cheaper for me to buy in flowers than it is to grow them myself. Last year, wholesale peonies were just 85 cents a stem from another local farm — definitely close to or even lower than my own cost of production.

 

Communicating abundance

No matter how much you plan, your flower CSA season will have highs and lows, with some weeks more abundant than others. While it’s a good idea to communicate crop issues during lean weeks, I think it’s especially important to tell our members when they’re receiving abundance. I’ve noticed in a veggie CSA I’ve belonged to that farmers will often complain about poor weather conditions, yet in the weeks when we’re receiving so many tomatoes, they don’t always call it out. There’s almost always a month in our CSA when our members get absolutely loaded with dahlias. We’re sure to let them know how lucky they are.

Running a flower CSA can be a lot of stress as farmers are essentially in debt to their members. But with careful planning for tough situations, it can also be a fun and profitable outlet, especially during months when there is an excess of blooms.    

 

Rebecca Kutzer-Rice owns Moonshot Farm, a specialty cut flower farm in East Windsor, NJ. She grows flowers year-round including in a geothermal greenhouse, for retail markets in and around NYC.