"I can feel that love passing through me."
Have you ever wondered who writes the messages that go with flower deliveries? What's it like to be privy to these private notes of affection and concern? We find out.
Name: Heather Smith
Hometown: Berrien Springs, Michigan
Current Residence: South Bend, Indiana
Living Situation: Large house with five housemates
Age: 30
Occupation: Micro Urban Farmer at Golden Hour Flower Farm, Local Grocery Purchaser at Purple Porch Co-op
Photo caption: This is me in my South Bend garden in June.
Two years ago, a South Bend farmer offered you two small beds in a lot a few blocks from your house. You used seeds you had saved and planted two flower beds. Now you have a 16-bed micro, urban farm and are offering a weekly bouquet subscription and delivery service this year. That’s incredible progress in such a short period of time! You predicted that “2020 would be the year of great expansion.” Has it so far met your expectations, despite the pandemic?
Yes!
When I first started the two beds in 2018 I was working 40 hours per week plus occasional overtime at my local co-op. I was only at the farm during the “golden hour,” so I kind of started calling my micro-farm “The Golden Hour Flower Farm”, but I only shared the name with myself that first year. Ironically, I had just moved to South Bend after a really hard time in my life so when I googled “golden hour” read that this is “the first hour after the occurrence of a traumatic injury, considered the most critical for successful emergency treatment,” I just thought that it was funny and ironic; that my little garden farm is like my golden hour for decompressing things that happen during the day.
In 2019 I grew from two flower beds to seven, and grew specifically for a dear friend’s wedding. I knew then, even as I prepared in the spring, that I would continue to grow my garden so that I can share it with more people in my life.
This past winter, I sat down with two local chefs that I know, Chefs Lauren Berry at The Elder Bread and Hans Westerink at Violet Sky Chocolate, and planned out some vegetables that I’m now growing for them. I also decided to launch a bouquet CSA, which has been very fruitful.
At first I was only going to have subscribers pick up at local markets, and wasn’t planning on offering a delivery option, but it just felt right after the pandemic closures started in March. I wanted people to feel like flowers and beauty were easily accessible even to those who are not able to go out and buy them for themselves. I was very surprised at the responses, but people are so excited to have something to look forward to, to have something gorgeously fresh delivered to them or someone they cherish!
Photo caption: Chefs Lauren Barry (The Elder Bread) and Hans Westerink (Violet Sky Chocolate).
What do you think flowers mean to people right now?
This is where I’m going to get really mushy!
I think that flowers are always filled with all sorts of emotions whenever people give them to another person, whether it’s a gift of love, a gift in honor of someone’s passing, or even a sweet little boutonniere that you pin on at a wedding. They’re always filled with so much meaning, and it’s always very sentimental to someone.
Most of my farming career has been vegetable-based, so this flower thing has been just me exploring that world. I’ve never worked in a floral shop, I’ve never arranged lots of bouquets and written notes out before. My previous experience working with flowers has come from helping florists set up weddings and receptions a handful of times, and creating bouquets for myself. So I really wasn’t expecting that this bouquet delivery subscription would make me privy to some really poignant personal stories. I have a handful of subscribers who have reached out to me with stories about things that their parents are going through, like buying a subscription for their mom that has cancer or has lost her partner, or somebody whose son died a few years ago and is still working through that grief. It’s really great because those sorts of subscriptions are actually mostly anonymous, the receiver doesn’t know who bought them the flowers. I think that it’s really sweet that these people are just going to get a random bouquet every week for ten weeks. Another subscriber is sending me handwritten letters from family members to give each week with their bouquet.
It’s really beautiful, and it’s also kind of heavy to be the bearer of so much love and affection. It’s a serious responsibility to write messages of love and hope from one individual to another, but I can feel that love passing through me, which is so nice and in a lot of ways very affirming and hopeful.
Photo caption: A recent bouquet I put together.
I read an interview where you described a previous experience managing a vegetable farm for one season as the following,
“I learned how to run heavy machinery with tractors, how to take care of goats, how to manage a few employees myself, how to plan and prep, and prepare and track and collect data. I learned how to be flexible, how to use my imagination, and how to be patient with myself if something didn’t work out...Running that 4-acre farm was amazing and scary and fun and difficult and taxing.”
I gotta say, you sound like a total badass, and the job sounds thrilling and hard. So, how do we get more young people like you interested in farming?
It’s really amazing to see a lot of young people becoming more interested in agriculture and finding ways that they can be outside. For example, at the co-op where I work we hired a woman who is a teacher in Boston, and came home to South Bend for the summer. She has spent her summer working on a small urban farm on the campus of a Montessori school, and also working at our local food co-op. It’s exciting to see young people seeking out ways to incorporate that kind of thing into their life, even if it’s on the side of other jobs. There are also a lot of programs that help people link up with farmers all over the world, like the WWOOFing program.
Photo caption: Another recent bouquet for the subscription program.
What do you wish that people knew about farming but don’t?
I wish that they knew that it didn’t take a lot of land. You don’t need a lot of space to produce a lot of high-quality food.
When a lot of people think about farming they think about tractors and hay and corn, but when I think about farming I see small, well-managed areas. It’s not so much about size as much as what’s realistic and reasonable given what you want to produce, and that takes a lot of focus.
There’s actually a farmer near me, in Goshen, Indiana, named Ben Hartman. I call him my farming hero; he wrote a book called The Lean Farm that’s all about how to maximize a small space of land to get the most efficient harvest and profit with less work so that young farmers have more time to spend with their families. He’s quite successful and produces a pretty large amount off of only one or two acres with a very small team.
I also wish people knew that it’s all about logistics. You have to keep track of so many things: when to seed, when to transplant, when to harvest, how much you sell at each market and to every wholesale customer. It’s so easy to spend one’s time out in the field(s), but taking the time to process and understand the data that you generate from your harvests, sales, and so on makes it so that you can spend your time enjoying being outside more efficiently.
You’ve talked about the extreme, singular focus that farming requires, as well as your passion for sharing food among communal gatherings. How have you been able to reconcile these two experiences, especially as social interaction has become limited due to the pandemic?
I feel like my experience during this pandemic has been different than many others because I live in a house with other people, so it’s really hard to ever truly be alone. I also work in a grocery store, so I didn’t really get the time off that other people might have had; I’ve been working very hard in person with customers and locally procured goods. I’ve really had to look for moments and ways to give myself that time for singular focus and dedication to the micro farm in the past few months.
It’s funny because I think that this pandemic has let me make connections and use my community in a lot of new and different ways. People are hungry for the feeling of connection and to be social. I’ve made new relationships with people in my community that I’ve seen for years, but they’ve reached out to me recently to dye up some face masks for them or deliver a bouquet. A lot of it is contact-free, but it is still very intimate and personal-feeling.
I’ve been dedicating a little bit of time each week to be outside with a friend, since I don’t see any of them regularly anymore. Little walks and bird watching here and there, while catching up, is a new and slow way for me to maintain these dear personal relationships at a safe distance.
Photo caption: This is me with Kristy Robinson, the General Manager of Purple Patch Co-op at the beginning of the pandemic closures.
What do you want to take to the other side of this?
That’s hard to say! I’m not someone that’s hopeful that this will be over in a year; I think it’s going to take quite a few years and many months of rethinking how we do things. But I guess that I hope that I take away the amazing ability that we have to adapt. It is very painful to change our routines and our habits, but we can and we should embrace it because this is a chance to rewire how we see things, to change our perspective on our relationships with each other and the natural world, even our food, even the flowers that show up randomly at our doorstep. We have to look for what seems like new ways to show and tell people exactly how we care for them, and I’m so happy to be a part of that process for people in my community.