How We Became First-Generation Flower Farmers

Wondering how to start a flower farm? Keep reading to learn how Chris and Kelly Stanley of Gray Arbor Farm started a family business growing flowers in Georgetown, Ky.

Gray Arbor Farm in Georgetown, KY

This interview was featured in our Summer 2020 issue.

Names, business names, and how long we have been in business.

We are Kelly and Chris Stanley. Our farm is Gray Arbor Farm, and we are in our 4^th year of flower farming. Our 8-year-old daughter Averie is a huge help on the farm as well. Our German Shepherd, Luger, provides us with endless entertainment as he runs around the farm! We are located in beautiful Georgetown, Kentucky, just 10 minutes from downtown.

What is Gray Arbor Farm all about?

We are a seasonal cut flower farm. We grow flowers and greenery that you normally would not see in traditional bouquets. Since we are seasonal, the flowers that we have to offer are always changing. We farm using organic and sustainable principles. We offer bouquets directly from the farm, at farmer’s markets, we sell wholesale to florists and wedding designers, and we also do weddings and events as well.

DECIDING TO START A FAMILY BUSINESS AS FLOWER FARMERS

What really inspired us to have a family business was our daughter. Chris and I were retail managers, and truthfully, we were not that happy with our careers. We worked constantly and kept very long hours. We both worked early mornings, late nights, and weekends. There were plenty of weeks where we would not get any days off. That is just the life of retail management. We worked opposite of each other to ensure that Averie had one of us with her as much as possible. Even with opposite schedules, because of the hours we worked, Averie still had to spend a lot of time in daycare and with multiple babysitters. I am, of course, so incredibly grateful to the amazing people who helped us through those times and cared for our daughter. It would have been utterly impossible without them! But Chris and I were unhappy with work, and we both just knew that the way we were living was not sustainable for our family. 

Becoming flower farmers was 100% Chris’s idea. It actually took a good year of Chris constantly talking about it before I started taking him seriously. What got Chris thinking about farming was his grandfather’s passing. While he was helping to clean out his grandparents’ home, he remembered all the time that he spent as a kid gardening with his grandfather. It was these simple but beautiful memories that came to him during this time. After that, we started a huge vegetable garden at our house. It was just a hobby, but we got so much out of it. We did not get a lot of family time back then, but that simple veggie garden created some really great memories for us. Turning something that we loved to do together into a business was the launching pad for our family farm. 

 Once I was fully on board, we bought a couple of shop lights, turned a closet in our foyer into a make-shift seed starting room, and tested out several varieties of seeds. After that, we realized just how fun and fascinating all this would be and that flower farming was absolutely something we could do. 

HOW WE FOUND THE PERFECT LAND FOR OUR FLOWER FARM

Something that Chris and I always wanted to do was to renovate an old house. We are completely obsessed with old farmhouses. Chris is extremely handy; I am always amazed at the handyman-type things he can figure out! Having a house that we could fix up ourselves was something that would certainly be the icing on top of the cake if we could find it. What we were really looking for was about 5 to 10 acres of land that wasn’t too hard to get to. We did not necessarily need to be super close to town, but we needed to have easy access to main roads so it would be easy to get our flowers to different markets. Finding land in our price range that wasn’t on the side of a steep hill or in a valley that would flood turned out to be a very tall order! We searched for about 8 months before we found our farm. My dad was actually the one who found it first on his way home from work. We fell in love the second we pulled in to look at it. When walking through the little old farmhouse, Chris and I had just about the same vision for how we could renovate it. While it was only on 3 acres of land, it is almost completely flat and laid out perfectly. Plus, the location, being so close to town, is unbeatable!

RESEARCHING WHICH FLOWERS TO GROW

Long before we even bought our farm, we did a ton of research as to which flowers would be good to grow. We looked for flowers that florists had a hard time getting, or that may not travel well so that they would be better suited for a local market. We also wanted to try things that we thought were interesting. In our first year, we tested about 15 varieties of annual flowers. We took tons of notes and did more research. The following season, we branched into low tunnels to extend our season and entered into the world of cool weather flowers. By year three, we invested more heavily into perennials and bulbs. Now going into year four, the majority of what we grow are still annuals, although we have begun to figure out what we like to grow and what our customers like to see. We are continuing to invest more and more in perennials and bulbs. There is a bit of a delayed gratification when you plant perennials, but we think it is crucial to continue to the growth of our farm.

THE CHALLENGES OF OWNING A FLOWER FARM

The biggest challenge is not knowing what to expect and that the success or failure is entirely on our shoulders. We read so many books on managing and how to manage a business. We knew that we were capable of managing the day-to-day operations of business; that is what we did for years. And of course, we read many books on how to flower farm. Unfortunately, until you are actually doing it, you don’t really know how to do it. Reading about something and living something are two totally different things. The best lessons we have learned have come from our failures. The challenge to overcome those failures is to simply figure it out; there is no corporate office to call for assistance. 

This farm challenges us every day. Being able to overcome our shortcomings or failures is the greatest feeling in the world. The biggest reward of all (and what we cherish most) is all the connections that we make. Georgetown is an incredibly special place, and without this farm, we would not be able to experience that in the way we have or meet all the amazing people we have met.

GETTING THROUGH THE SEASONS

The different seasons on this farm are so dramatically different from each other. The flowers change a lot from season to season. What is available in the spring is not available in the heat of summer. Our workload changes throughout the seasons as well. In spring, we have all this bottled-up energy from being dormant all winter. That energy, mixed with the anticipation of the upcoming season leaves us feeling so antsy! There is a lot of work going on but not as much harvesting. Summer is when we are in full swing. Every day we are harvesting, getting orders together, prepping beds, and starting seeds for more successions. By late summer and fall, you feel it in the air that it is all about to come to an end soon. We are tired, but we work hard to continue to harvest and get the beds ready for the overwinter crop. We definitely feel like we are racing against the clock. Once the first frost comes, everything comes to a screeching halt. Then we are getting the farm cleaned up and the overwintered plants tucked in for the winter. Winter is, honestly, kind of a boring time. This is where we put our plans in place for the next year. 

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A FLOWER FARMER

In the summer, our days start pretty early. I am usually out the door by 4:45 a.m. to start harvesting flowers. Chris comes out after Averie wakes up and picks up where I leave off. While Averie is eating breakfast, I usually try to answer emails and get orders organized. By 9 a.m., we are usually done harvesting for the day. It is best to harvest when it is cool out for a longer vase life. Then depending on the day, Chris either has a lineup of maintenance tasks to complete, we will have more baby plants to get into the ground, and we will have orders getting picked up or deliveries to run. We could very easily work from before sun up to well after sun down 7 days a week. In the early days of the farm, we certainly did do that, mostly because we were unsure of what we were doing! But halfway through the summer of 2019 is when we decided that by 5 p.m. we needed to wrap things up. That way, we can all eat dinner together and have our evenings to enjoy. 

What do you see for Gray Arbor Farm in the future?

This is such a great question because we have been asking ourselves this so much since last season. When we first started the farm, we wanted to be mostly wholesale to florists and wedding designers. We were unsure if we wanted to be in farmer’s markets. Now, the Georgetown/Scott County farmer’s market is the thing we look forward to most every week! We love providing flowers for everyone. A bouquet of locally grown flowers is a sweet, simple, and beautiful way that you can treat yourself each week. They brighten up your home like nothing else can. 

We have partnered with local beekeepers at Bee Happy Honey to provide pure, raw honey from our flower farm. We have learned that it’s the simple things in life that can be the most beautiful. That idea– that a thing does not have to be crazy complex to be beautiful and meaningful– is something that we want to share more and more with everyone.  Raw honey is the essence of that idea. It is simple in what it is but is so beautiful in how it represents the flowers that it came from. 

The support this community shows us has been transforming for us and our farm. The joy on everyone’s face when they pick up a bouquet or a jar of honey from us fills us with so much joy. We want to pour that back into the work that we do and the products that we provide. We hope to create more crafts and giftable products from the farm. We would love to have an online farm store as well for those who can’t make it to the farm or the farmer’s market. Because of this wonderful community, the sky is the limit for where we can take this farm! 

Website: GrayArborFarm.com
Instagram: @grayarborfarm
Facebook: Gray Arbor Farm

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