The Homesteader's Guide to Cut Flowers

“A charming handbook for growing, selling, and crafting with flowers […] Blessing’s passion for growing flowers is contagious […] This wide-ranging how-to will appeal to novices and seasoned gardeners alike.” —Publishers Weekly

From urban patios to rural homesteads, learn to cultivate versatile flowers that beautify your space while doubling as culinary herbs, healing plants, and craft materials.

Flower farming has seen a recent surge of interest, largely due to social media and the presence of idolized flower farmers, such as Washington State’s Floret. Most home gardeners already grow several types of flowers for landscape and ornamental purposes, so the thought of having fresh, beautifully displayed, homegrown bouquets for sale and offering You-Pick flower operations on a new level is enticing to many home growers.

Most cut flowers have multipurpose qualities—gardeners and homesteaders can choose varieties that are not just aesthetically pleasing but also useful as culinary herbs, medicinal tinctures, and pigments for eco-dyeing and in dried arrangements for decor, art, and jewelry. Many of these plants can also be easily grown in pots for flower lovers living in the city. Joanna Blessing of Olde Soul Acres invites readers to dive deeper into intentionally growing cut flowers and enjoying the fruits of their labor. She covers the ins and outs of planning a garden that will promote a thriving, sustainable ecosystem, as well as how to harvest and arrange cut flowers and how a home gardener can scale up to bring a monetary profit to their homestead. Chapters cover:

• Assessing your garden space and resources
• Selecting versatile varieties of cut flowers
• Building relationships with local markets and florists
• 21 recipes for edible flowers, tinctures, floral teas, desserts, and more
• 18 crafts and projects using your flowers

Joanna Blessing’s passion for cultivating a well-rounded homestead goes back to her roots on her family’s farm. An agriculturalist at heart, she has long grown gardens of heirloom vegetables, getting her hands in the dirt whenever possible. Joanna expanded her professional knowledge by attending university for agricultural sciences, where she dove deeper into topics such as horticulture, crop systems, and farming as a business. She soon found herself, along with her spouse, Eric, settling into a small farm of their own known as Olde Soul Acres in eastern Pennsylvania. They have worked on turning this century-old farm back into a thriving business by utilizing different aspects of the landscape for growing livestock, crops, and most recently flowers. Visit them online at oldesoulacres.com.

Jennie Love, author of the foreword, is creative director/owner of Love ‘n Fresh Flowers and host of the No-Till Flowers podcast.