15 March 2021

Field Flowers

After a flurry of early bloomers on the farm, we’re about to have a whole load of homegrown flowers. Which is wonderful, but we’ve now come to realise that we won’t have enough of some varieties to make sure we can supplement our bouquets with them for a whole week’s worth of designs. It’s kind of a great problem to have, to be sending out so many bouquets that our initial calculations for the quantities we’d need are no longer accurate.

This year was always going to be a bit of trial and error, figuring out how things grow, what works and what quantities we need. And as we’ve previously mentioned, it hardly seems fair to claim we’re supplementing our bouquets with our own homegrown flowers, when the reality is that only some of the bouquets we’re sending out would be able to have them. Later in the season we’re hoping our floriferous varieties (plants that produce many flowers) will mean we can use these for the purpose we had in mind – our bouquets. And of course this is all a valuable lesson for us to learn and adapt to for next year but it’s also made us wonder: what do we do with the flowers that we don’t have the right amount of to be able to use across a whole week’s worth of bouquets? It seems almost criminal to waste them, and there are only so many vases of flowers we need at home (a lovely perk, but not exactly why we started growing flowers).

So we’ve come up with a new Petalon product we’re calling Field Flowers. It’s still in the planning stages but we’re very excited about this new offering and think you’re going to love it. It’ll work a little bit like a Chef’s Special board using seasonal ingredients – when there are seasonal flowers available to buy, we’ll put them on the site. These won’t be bouquets like our normal weekly offering, but loose stems of fresh, seasonal flowers for you to arrange at home and the price will vary depending on the variety and the quantity available. A box of Sahara Rudebekia perhaps, or Cafe Creme foxgloves, or maybe a mixed selection box with scented geranium, earl grey larkspur and some zinnias? We think not only is this a great solution to eliminate wastage, it means our customers have access to British grown flowers, wherever they live.

We’re still ironing out the details but if you have any thoughts or ideas on this, drop us a line and let us know, we’d love to hear from you!