Our Ethos
The ethos of Common Farm Flowers
If you look after the invertebrates, the rest of the food chain will look after itself.
To this end I run a business focused around three activities
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We grow flowers for sale
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We hold workshops and webinars to encourage others to run similarly creative businesses or to undertake creative activity, which make a positive impact on their local ecology
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And we are content creators - by which I mean I am a writer, vlogger, someone who hopes to inspire and enable others to create more, and consume less, through their work and their daily lives.
What kind of flowers? Where do we grow them? Do we sell them all?
We grow on a seven-acre patch between Bruton and Wincanton in Somerset. Most of our crop is sold in the months between April and October as DIY wedding flowers.
Why DIY wedding flowers?
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Partly because we get on best with the kinds of people who like to spend their budget on mixed buckets of locally-grown flowers, and then get creative themselves dressing their event, with friends and family helping and making magical memories for the future.
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But we also sell most of our crop as DIY wedding flowers because this is an efficient way to distribute what we grow both in terms of time spent harvesting, and in packaging. Our packaging budget here at Common Farm Flowers is almost non-existent. Our customers collect their flowers from us, ‘wrapped’ if you like, in sturdy buckets and clean tap water. Those buckets are all returned to us and used again and again and again.
No we do not sell all the flowers we grow.
From about a thousand running metres of metre-wide beds, a band of trees and shrubs, and maybe an acre of wild flower meadow and another of orchard, we cut about 60,000 stems of cut flowers and foliage a year. Much of what we grow is left because it’s ripe on a Monday and we’re harvesting on Thursday, or because that week’s wedding couple want white, not pink.
Do I mind that we don’t cut all our crop? Not at all. Imagine the pollen and nectar we leave for the invertebrate population here when we don’t harvest all that we grow.
Why teach webinars and workshops?
Again, two reasons:
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Firstly, if I can encourage others to grow flowers, whether for sale or for pleasure, to practice creativity by focusing on sustainable floristry, to run businesses which inspire the founder on a daily basis to leap out of bed with enthusiasm and focus, then I will have done a good thing.
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Secondly, I’m a good communicator and I know my subject well. I believe strongly that if one knows a good deal about one’s activity, and one can share that information in a way which others can understand clearly, then one must share what one has learned. We will all die. It’s mean to keep useful ways of thinking to oneself.
Why call myself a content creator?
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Because for the moment that’s a phrase people understand. But I am not selling face creams or muesli for other brands.
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The content I create is about encouraging people to think differently about their lives. We’re often taught that one way is THE way. We are told we can’t, or that things won’t work. My job as a content creator is to help people problem solve by making the most of their own particular circumstances, so that they can step towards objectives they had thought impossible for them.
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What kind of problems do I help solve? I help people feel cleverer. I help people know that they are allowed to try do things they had thought they couldn’t. I remind people that we are all creative: some are just more practised than others.
Our ethos
So, there’s our ethos: to make a living doing something which puts more back into the environment than it takes out, and to help others step towards making similarly meaningful lives, lives which pay the bills and do not cost the earth.
Our eco-friendly ethosRead more
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