The Cut Flower Podcast

Growing Cut Flowers as a Side Hustle or Business

• Roz Chandler • Season 1 • Episode 110

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Text Agony Aunt Roz with your Cutflower Questions.

Hi, I’m Roz Chandler, and welcome to The Cut Flower Podcast! This January, I’m excited to bring you a special five-episode series all about the benefits of growing your own cut flowers. Today, I’ll share how to start growing flowers as a side hustle or even transition into a full-fledged business.

Episode Summary
In this episode, I share my journey from starting with three raised beds to managing a thriving five-acre flower farm. Whether you’re looking to sell at local markets, supply florists, or offer DIY wedding buckets, I’ll guide you through the first steps. I’ll cover how to start small, grow sustainably, and set the foundations for a profitable venture.

Key Takeaways

  1. Start Small: When I started, it was just three raised beds. Even a small garden or a 1-square-meter plot can yield significant results with planning.
  2. Plan Your Flowers: Choose customer favorites like sweet peas, dahlias, and cosmos. Think about who you want to sell to—florists, markets, or DIY brides—and tailor your choices.
  3. Sustainability Matters: Growing your own flowers reduces reliance on imports and eliminates the need for harmful pesticides. It’s a great way to protect our environment.
  4. Profitability: With the right approach, even a small plot can be lucrative. For example, by rotating tulips and dahlias in the same space, you can double your yield.
  5. Community Support: Join my Cut Flower Kickoff 2025 Facebook Group, where you’ll find free guides, live Q&As, and plenty of support from fellow growers.

Steps You Can Take Right Now

  • Start prepping your soil with compost or manure.
  • Browse seed catalogs and choose flowers you love.
  • Plan for successional planting to maximize your blooms.
  • Begin sowing hardy annuals in March or later in the season, depending on your setup.
  • Brush up on basic floristry skills to create beautiful bouquets.

Join Me in the Facebook Group
If you’re excited to grow your own cut flowers, join our Cut Flower Kickoff 2025 Facebook Group. It’s full of resources, including free guides on setting up a side hustle, creating a cutting patch, and more. Plus, we’ve got live masterclasses coming up in February.

Starting a side hustle can feel overwhelming, but I promise it’s worth it. If I could do it—without any horticultural experience—so can you. Let’s grow beautiful blooms together!


[00:00:00] Roz Chandler: Hello, and welcome to the cut flower podcast. So in January, we're doing a series of five different podcasts for all the benefits Of having your own cut flowers and we've covered we will be covering wedding flowers growing your own wedding flowers Flowers for mental health and and all the reasons that for your own mental health and well being why you should grow cut flowers We'll be talking about growing in small spaces and container gardening.

[00:00:26] Roz Chandler: We'll be talking about having, cut flowers as a side hustle, or actually going into a business. And finally, we'll be talking about the top 10 tips for having your own. cutting patch. So I hope you'll join me on this series in January as we kick off on our cut flower season for 2025. So today we'll be talking about growing cut flowers as a side hustle or even in growing it into a fully fledged business.

[00:00:55] Roz Chandler: But in the meantime, do jump over to our Facebook group. We have a Facebook group that we have every January that kicks off the season, and this year it's called the Cut Flower Kickoff 2025. And I'll put the link in the show notes. And what we do in there is we have live Q& As, we have fireside chats, we put all of our resources.

[00:01:15] Roz Chandler: So from this podcast, we will be writing a guide, for instance, on starting a cut flower. business as a side hustle or being a fully fledged flower farmer. So you can go and look at our top 10 tips resources in our Facebook group. So do join us over there in our Facebook group. That would be lovely to have you.

[00:01:35] Roz Chandler: So, as I said, that's what we're going to talk about today. Growing for a side hustle or for a business. So, the first steps in growing cut flowers is a side hustle or even a fully flegded business. What are they? What do you need to do? Well, I think I would think, why are you doing it? A lot of people start growing cut flowers for their own pleasure.

[00:01:57] Roz Chandler: And then it becomes very addictive, and they decide that they therefore want it to pay for itself and have it as a little side hustle. So they might be selling flowers at the end of the drives, they might be doing some local flower markets, and then that might extend further. Into, a bigger business, but I would always say to anybody who was kicking off to think about growing flowers for profit in that they should really think about having a transitioning period.

[00:02:25] Roz Chandler: So growing from not doing it at all. So there's nothing there and no, you know, nothing on the ground or the land or anything, and then moving, you know, a lot of people are employed. So moving from being employed to being self employed and running your own flower farm should actually be a transition. It's very difficult to give up a job on Friday and start flower farming on Monday.

[00:02:48] Roz Chandler: Because flower farming is one of those things that build up. You know, you need to put the foliage in the ground and you might not be able to cut it for two or three years. Peonies can't be cut for two or three years. It's a slow process and there's only nought to three years of running a business. But certainly as a side hustle in 2025 and to kick off your business is a really good thing to do.

[00:03:11] Roz Chandler: So why? Why do it? Why grow as a side hustle? So it's like, I mean, growing cut flowers takes time, it takes resources and it takes investment. But if you do it on a small scale as a side hustle, then that's a really worthwhile thing to do. And you learn so much and you learn what you like doing or what you don't like doing.

[00:03:33] Roz Chandler: So it's what do you want your life to look like? How much time do you want to contribute to growing cut flowers? So why do it? Come back to that point again. It's creative and rewarding. You get to work with your hands, you nurture plants and you bring beauty into people's lives. There is not a better job, hand on heart, there is not a better job than growing flowers and bringing joy into other people's lives.

[00:03:58] Roz Chandler: So whether that's through weddings, whether that's through just providing DIY buckets for people to arrange themselves, whether that's providing bouquets, whether it's selling an assortment of flowers at a market, any of those are bringing joy into someone's lives. You can grow sustainably. So growing your own flowers means that we'll have fewer imported blooms and we won't have to bring them from Kenya, Ethiopia, and Columbia.

[00:04:25] Roz Chandler: We'll be growing our own flowers so it's sustainable and we don't need to use pesticides and we don't need to use anything that will harm our environment and we can grow our own blooms. It can be profitable. With careful planning, even a small growing space can yield significant returns. I've calculated that a one metre squared can provide an annual revenue of 50.

[00:04:51] Roz Chandler: And what I mean by that is you could start off with that plot, that one metre by one metre, and you could have tulips, and you might pull those tulips out and therefore then put your dahlias in. So you, you're double using that plot, which enables you to maximize your investment on that one square meter.

[00:05:10] Roz Chandler: So even as a side hustle, it can be profitable, extremely profitable, and that helps you work out what you want to do going forward. Of course, it's good for your mental health and wellbeing, and we've had a podcast on mental health and wellbeing. And I hope you get a chance to look that one up as long as, along with the very, I mean, probably 20 other podcasts we've done on the subject of mental health and well being.

[00:05:35] Roz Chandler: So I would say we're starting as a side hustle in 2025. Think small to begin with. You don't need acres of land or huge investment. You just need a modest garden or an allotment, or even a few raised beds just to get you started. This is when after that you decide whether this is something you want to carry on, and you've fallen in love with, and then it becomes bigger and bigger.

[00:05:57] Roz Chandler: I just want to say that when I first started my flower farm over 15 years ago, it was really just three raised beds, three meters by one meter. I had no horticultural knowledge at all. I didn't know what I was doing. I'd read a few books. I'd gone on a half day course, and then decided I could grow cut flowers.

[00:06:16] Roz Chandler: And 15 years later I'm obviously a flower farmer growing over five acres, but that's not how it started. It started as, well, this seems a really nice thing to do. And I'd love to have my own flowers to be able to cut, to bring them indoors. And then it turned into a side hustle because I was still working full time.

[00:06:32] Roz Chandler: And then it turned into a fully fledged business. So it was a, it was a movement over time. So what's the foundations for success? So to grow flowers as a side hustle of a business, you need to have the right foundations in place. And here's what I'd recommend. Number one, you start with a plan. What flowers will you grow?

[00:06:53] Roz Chandler: Consider customer favorites like Sweet Peas, Dahlias and Cosmos. Who are you selling to? Really, really think about this. Think about local florists, whether you're going to do markets, or even friends and family. Do you have access to a market to sell to? And is it a wholesale florist that you know? Or is it that you're just going to sell from your house?

[00:07:15] Roz Chandler: Or you're going to have something at the end of the drive? What, how are you going to sell your flowers? It's really important to work it out. Because then you can work out what you're going to grow. Work out how many stems you can grow with the space you have. And when you plant, timing is everything, especially in the UK climate.

[00:07:32] Roz Chandler: What are you going to plant and when are you going to plant? You've got time to work all that out. Then you need to prepare your growing space. Improve your soil with compost or manure. Plan for successional planting to maximize the amount of flowers you're going to get. Consider investing in basic infrastructure like netting, fleecing, or a polytunnel.

[00:07:54] Roz Chandler: Understand your market, you know, what's the demand. Talk to local florists or explore your local market scene. What do people actually want to buy? It varies per market, so if we're taking flowers into retail, Florists in London, they have very specific needs. You know, it needs to be tall. It needs to be different.

[00:08:13] Roz Chandler: It needs to be striking. Um, and that's very different to somebody that we'd be selling flowers to as DIY buckets for weddings. They'd be more interested in colour and scent. And so there are different markets have different needs and that's what you need to work out which market you're going for with your side hustle.

[00:08:34] Roz Chandler: Learn to arrange. If you're not creating bouquets for customers or present, or presenting them, it's always a good idea to start to do some floristry skills, you know, so that you have a well arranged bucket of flowers will sell much better than a jumbled one, or a really nice put together bouquet will be much better, so and well thought through.

[00:08:54] Roz Chandler: So learn to do a little bit of flower arranging if you're going to do bouquets. Practice makes perfect always. There's nothing wrong with starting to make a bouquet and using the spiral method for instance and then realizing that actually it's not perfect and putting it all down and starting again.

[00:09:12] Roz Chandler: There is nothing. The whole thing about floristry and flower arranging is all about practice and we'll be putting all of that together in our top tips in the Facebook page. So I would suggest we're now in January and the growing season is just around the corner. Here's what you need to do right now for your success.

[00:09:33] Roz Chandler: Join our Facebook group of course, I talked about the cut flower kickoff 2025. Do join that Facebook group. There's loads and loads of resources, advice and support in there that you'll need. It's a community of like minded growers who are always happy to share their tips. And cheer you on.

[00:09:50] Roz Chandler: Download the free guide that we've got in the Facebook group. There'll be lots of them. They'll be having your own cutting patch. They'll be setting up a side hustle business. They'll be growing for your own mental health and well being. Growing in small places. There'll be all of these in resources in the Facebook group.

[00:10:07] Roz Chandler: Prepare your soil. You can do that early on. So you can add, I mean, if you're certain, if you've got clay, you'll be adding compost into your soil, just to get it more aerated. January is all about sitting on the sofa and looking through the seed catalogues and just working out what you'd like to grow.

[00:10:26] Roz Chandler: What, what, I always say to people, grow what you love. Start growing your hardy annuals undercover in March if you have the capacity, either in a polytunnel, a greenhouse or on a window ledge. If you don't manage that, you can do direct sow towards April or May. Then just get ready, prepare your growing odies so you're ready to plant it out in the spring.

[00:10:46] Roz Chandler: So, people always say you put your garden to bed in the winter and there's no such thing, I'm afraid. Winter is when we do all of our prep, for the, for spring. We're just ready to get everything ready for spring. And just learn, learn and plan. Our Facebook group will give you lots of learning and we're holding three masterclasses on the 6th, The 7th and 9th of February, all about having your own cutting patch.

[00:11:09] Roz Chandler: Come along, learn then. So in the first instance, join the Facebook group and everything will unfold. So starting a side hustle or, you know, fully fledged business can be overwhelming, but I did it and if I can do it, anyone can do it. And don't forget, I didn't have any horticultural or floristry knowledge at all.

[00:11:28] Roz Chandler: I was actually in marketing. It was completely unrelated. and moved into this business. And it's the best thing I did and I would recommend it to anybody. But I would recommend doing it slowly. So having a side hustle to begin with is a really good thing to do and it can be highly profitable. 50 a square meter if you just work that one out.

[00:11:50] Roz Chandler: So I hope that you will join us and that you will come over to our Facebook group and that I will have a chance to meet you and that we can talk more about growing cut flowers as a side hustle.