How Getting Away Really Helped Me, Putting Profit First & Why Annuals Are Not Working Out For Me

Hello, it's Tuesday 16 June 2026.

Normal service has been resumed (no more moaning tonight!). Thanks for bearing with me as I yakked on and on about what a dreadful week I had in the last episode. 

Growing cut flowers is an absolutely wild ride: equal parts fun and sheer terror, and it's a very fine line. I find it really hard to look at the 'big picture' cut flower work I'm doing when my hands are in the soil and my head is full of 'to-do' lists. Tonight I'm sharing the three revelatory things I realised in the last 48 hours because I went away for the weekend and the break really helped me to look at the bigger picture. I hope you find these insights interesting.

Here's the book I'm talking about tonight: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

https://mikemichalowicz.com/profit-first/

Do come back and join me for the next episode - you're always very welcome.

Connect with me

If you like what you hear, please follow/subscribe to this podcast so that you're the first to hear new episodes when they become available every Tuesday and Friday. And if you enjoy this episode, please take a minute to leave a review because it really does help more cut flower-lovers just like you to find the podcast. 

Follow me on instagram @henhillcutflowers for a behind-the-scenes look at life on my cut flower plot. And you can find my website at www.henhillcutflowers.co.uk and my email is lydia@henhillcutflowers.co.uk.

Join me on my journey through a year of growing and selling cut flowers in England. I'm giving you the low-down on what it's really like, how I'm getting started, what you do and don't need, what I do when and why, the successes and failures, and just about everything in between. All in real time. With guest appearances from my chickens every now and then. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, welcome to my podcast, Becoming a Cut Flower Grower. I'm your host, Lydia, and I'm here to share my year of growing and selling cut flowers. I'll be giving you the lowdown on everything I'm doing and sharing all the highs and lows, the good times and the inevitable disasters, all in real time. Join me on my cut flower journey starting right now. Hello and welcome to the latest episode. It's Tuesday, the 16th of June 2026. And a very warm welcome to you. Thank you very much for joining me. Now, if you listened to the last episode on Friday where I moaned non-stop for about half an hour, and you are still here, thank you very much and welcome back. I really did have a shockingly bad week last week, and that episode was a bit of a dump about everything that's just gone wrong last week. Now, special thanks to Jenny for sending me a really, really lovely message. Jenny was extremely positive and cheerful, and she sent me strength in my time of need, which is exactly what I needed, and she was very quick off the mark sending that message to me. So thank you so much, Jenny. Also, thanks to Debs for getting in touch. Turns out Debs is a local grower, and we are now connected and scheduling a phone call, which is not easy with our schedules at the moment. So thank you also for Debs getting in touch. It's so great to hear from you, and I can't wait to chat to you. I am just happy to know that you're there listening, quite honestly. If you thought about sending a message and then didn't, or even if you didn't even think about it at all. I'm just so glad that you're here and thank you for your support. Also, a shout out to Sylvie in Belgium who sent me a hello on Spotify. So that was lovely as well. I love hearing from you, so thank you. Now, after a pretty dreadful week and a staggeringly enormous, overwhelming number of jobs to do, I went to the beach over the weekend. I'd really had enough, and to be fair, it was planned anyway. We were going to go away that weekend. And thank goodness, because it was just what I needed. Now I've I'm I'm hearing all over the place from lots of podcasts that I listen to and other business-related material that we need to spend time on our business rather than just in it. Uh, Jenny also told me this on the six-figure flower farming podcast that I did last year, and I kind of I hit heard it all the time and just totally ignored it because there's just so much to do at this time of year, and there has been ever since I started all the seed sowing in March, and it's really hard to get this sort of I don't know what you call it, like a bird's eye or a helicopter view when you are literally in the weeds doing stuff and there are just lists everywhere and jobs everywhere, and it feels like things are just kind of falling over all over the place, and you just I just feel like I have to just keep going, keep weeding, keep planting, keep keep sowing, keep staking and netting and watering and uh you know, just everything. There's just so many jobs to do, and it's really hard to get away from it. And I don't like going away, like I do when I'm there, but I find it almost impossible to leave, which is why we didn't take a holiday last year. Also, because I didn't have any money because the flowers didn't make any money last year. Well, they did, but not enough to go on holiday with. So I do find it incredibly, incredibly difficult to prize myself away, and it's also a logistical nightmare with the chickens, like they have a babysitter. Um, but you know, something nearly always goes wrong, and then when you've got a whole field of flowers, it feels downright irresponsible to go away, to be honest. And if you were listening to the podcast last year, you'll know I went to Cornwall for a week, and that was actually quite terrifying because we had rain every day in Cornwall, and then we had like dry, heat wave, hot conditions back here, so it was very stressful with everything. And you might think that June is like the worst time to go away for a weekend because of the water and the pressure and everything there is to do, but I am so glad I did it. Stepping away for just 48 hours was exactly what the doctor ordered, and here are the three things I realized when I came back, and I was so excited to come back, but I had the most amazing weekend. I went down to pool, uh, sandbanks, Bournemouth. Um, it was just really, really lovely. So, here are the three things that I learned this weekend. Annuals are really not my bag. Now I came back and everybody was fine. There was no watering done over the weekend. It was warm but not hot, and the soil is just really moist. We had so much rain last week. I honestly didn't think anybody would suffer. And any little seedlings that I had left over are all in trays, and everybody was fine, so that was great. But I really looked at the field and I just thought, yeah, annuals, I just do not think this relationship is going to last, to be honest. I do them because they are really cheap to get going. The packets of seed, I mean, some packets have you know thousand seeds in or something, or two hundred or five hundred or something ridiculous, and really the cost is extremely small for actually sowing, not necessarily in the labour costs because you then have to transplant them. And sometimes I know other people pot things on which I don't bother doing, they sit in their trays till they go out in the field and that's it. But it is a super super cheap way of doing it, especially if you compare it to having to buy perennials because the price of those is pretty horrific, and also certainly compared to things like shrubs or roses or anything like that, so they are great, and also you can really get the volumes, you know. You you you might buy sort of 20 perennials or something, but you can get 200-500 seeds sown really quick and easy for not very much money at all, so you can get the volume in that way. Whether I've got enough space for everything that I've sown is a completely different matter, and you've also got lots and lots of choice with the annuals. Now, don't get me wrong, there's obviously you know thousands of perennials that one could choose from as well, but when you look at the choices that you have for the annuals, there are lots of lovely things, and it's almost like it wouldn't the field wouldn't be complete with some annuals, so I don't think I'm gonna step away from annuals completely. I just got back and thought, oh my goodness me, like this is just way too much. The reason being really is that they are just too time consuming for me. I realize that I'm just too busy for them, and they just need so much care and attention. I mean, months have gone by since I've sewn some of these guys, and I'm still fussing over them now. Whereas there are perennials on the field I just literally put in the ground and they're just doing their own thing, they're flowering, they're really happy, they don't need watering. And obviously, the labour costs that I've just mentioned of starting things from seed, it's super attractive and it's great. But unless I get supposed, unless I direct sewed, which I'm going to do a little bit of that, then all of this faffing around with seeds and seedlings is just really making the labour costs seem unattractive when I price everything up. They're also incredibly resource hungry for my situation. So if you listen regularly, you'll know I'm on an off-grid plot. I've got no electricity, no water, no borehole. I've got three of the large IBCs, the water storage tanks, which take a thousand litres each, and I've got about 1500 litres at the moment, which considering it's June, I feel thrilled about, but that is just testament to how much uh rain we've had. But you know, the annuals I looked at them last night and I just thought, yeah, you guys are all running a little bit lean, and that's because I've been so tight on the watering, and it's I mean, I don't want really lots of vegetative growth, I don't want great big bushy things with like little tiny flowers, I don't want them to waste their energy on just excess greenery. But I did sort of look at them yesterday and think, oh, you all look a little bit lean, and the they're planted, you know, right next to perennial beds, and the perennials are just super lush and lots of greenery and not struggling, not struggling, not that the annuals are struggling, they just they just don't look how the perennials look, which I guess is because they haven't got time to put their roots down and like in the same way the perennials do, and the weather has played havoc with them this year. They can't decide whether they should be flowering or should be growing. Some of them are panicking and just kind of bolting. Um, some of the sapinaria from a later batch actually started flowering over the weekend, so they were in flower when I got back, and they've only grown about 15 centimetres, which is ridiculous. They're going to have to be pulled out, and which is great because the bed can go for something else, but then it's a wasted crop, it's all the time and energy, uh, mostly time, that's the only thing really that matters, that's gone into producing that whole succession, which I'm gonna rip them up and put something else in there. And I just look at the annuals and think if I can't give you the start that you really, really need, then you're probably not gonna be suitable for my field. Now, contrast this with the vegetable garden. Went in there to see what was going on, and everybody is just absolutely great guns. They don't seem to suffer in the same way as the annuals do from the way I treat them. So the vegetables also have a minuscule amount of water, but they've put on loads of growth. I mean, just they're incredible. I've got I've got rose and roses spinach out there, which I'm harvesting and eating, and then I've got other spinach that's for the chickens, and they're harvesting and having that. And the leaves are just huge and full of water and just absolutely gorgeous, and so they're managing really well. So it's really just the annual flowers that I just feel I can't give them as much resource as they want. They're also very slow to get going, and uh now the answer to that of course is that I autumn sew everything, which I'm going to somehow get my brain, I still haven't got my brain onto that yet, uh, because it's the first time I will ever have autumn sewed. Um, so that is the answer to getting things up and ready, excuse me, early and lush. So everything that autumn sewed itself last year that just self-seeded, so the Orlaya, the cornflowers, a few other bits and pieces, they're really huge, really huge, very lus. Obviously, had all winter to get themselves settled down and they're just going great guns. So the answer I guess is to try the autumn sewing this year and see how the annuals turn out next year. But I'm I just yeah, if I sew them in the spring, they are just really, really too slow to get going. They're also so dependent on the weather conditions, the annuals, in a way, in the way that the perennials just are not. So we've had really strange weather this year. And if you're in the UK, you won't need me to remind you about the cold and the hail storms and then the sudden heat wave at the end of April, and then just wet and warm, and it's just all been really bonkers, and now I think we're going into another really hot spell, and we've got two weeks of pretty dry weather conditions, so it's all been very, very variable. Now the perennials don't seem to give a monkeys about that, they've just been plowing on through. They've they seem to have had the same rates of growth regardless of the weather conditions, they've just got on with it. Whereas the annuals have been very stop start. Oh, we're gonna do something this week, oh no, it's too hot, we're not, oh now it's too cold, so we're just gonna wait. And they've just been up and down, and I've just been, you know, watching them like a hawk and kind of going with them on this journey, and quite frankly, it's exhausting. Like I am just mentally exhausted from looking at these guys and watching them stop and start and stop and start, and um, so yeah, just far too dependent on the weather. And a cold spring is really not good, um, and it's just just yeah, set me back. Uh I'm I don't know where well, we'll get to the end of the year and I'll do an assessment of how much it was me that messed things up and how much it the weather had to play. And also any annuals that aren't repeat flowering, they're really not a good idea for me. I I it's the first year I've grown agrestema and I'm I need to look up what happens with them. I'm sure they're cut and come again, but I might be wrong. I hope I'm not wrong. Some things like the snaps, obviously, I've pinched them, so they're gonna be multi-stem, so that is fine. But anything that is just a single thing, not a good idea. Although I guess the only exception is going to be the panicum frosted explosions that I'm growing this year for the first time ever. They're gonna be a one-hit wonder, I believe. I might be wrong. No, I'm sure they are a one-hit wonder, and they well, we'll just see. We'll see. I haven't spent very much time on them. They've actually been super low maintenance and they seem very happy. But generally speaking, the rule for me needs to be multi-stems off one plant, otherwise, the labour cost of dealing with them doesn't make it worthwhile for me, anyway. But I've been looking up which perennials I'm going to focus on in 2027 and how I'm going to get the money together to buy them. I would love to buy a whole load of plugs in the autumn, and that is something that I will probably save up and do that. Just a question of finding suppliers that have the varieties that I want. I've bought plugs in the past from Jay Parker's, and they are great plugs, and the plants are doing absolutely fantastically, but they're not exactly like the fanciest ones, not knocking them at all. I mean, the Achillea is lovely, it's absolutely lovely, it sells, it's great. But sometimes the choice is limited in terms of what I would be looking for on the field. I saw a post over the weekend from Rachel at Green and Gorgeous. She does lots of perennials, and she did um like a carousel reel with these photos, and helpfully she listed all the varieties on there, and they were the most beautiful perennials, and I thought, ah, that is what it looks like when you grow proper perennials with the right varieties that you want, rather than just getting plugs from a catalogue that's a little bit more mainstream. And there's nothing wrong with that. Again, I'm a huge fan of Jay Parker's, I love all their stuff. Uh it's just I it's just not got the florist varieties, I think, is what I'm getting out. It's perfectly fine for the garden, and some things are great for cutting, but it's um it's the list that Rachel's got is pretty awesome, and I ought to splash out and buy her book because she's done a fantastic book, apparently. Uh, she's big on perennials and she does roses as well, so that was my thinking about coming back to the field. The only good thing was that my first agristema flower opened over the weekend. I mean, I'm here all the time. They literally waited until I drove off, and then everyone's like, Yeah, let's flower. But the agristema flower that's out is stunning, and the others are just about to open. They're at that pre-bud crack stage. Someone needs to come up with a clever name for that. Um, and it's one of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen. I just keep staring at it and taking photos of it. It's just gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. So the second thing that I realized or that I learnt over the weekend is that I really need to be focusing so much more on profit. Now, I took a couple of books with me this weekend, and I also took a notebook to write down all the thoughts that I had over the weekend. Um, my other half was pretty horrified at the amount of um business book reading I did over the weekend. He kept saying it's supposed to be a holiday, it's supposed to be a break. I'm like, yes, but this is a perfect time to read all these business books that I don't have time to read at home. So I took and read a fantastic book called Profit First by Mike McAllowitz. I'll put the link in the show notes. It's really eye-opening. It's quite an old book. I think it's, I don't know, well over ten years now. I got mine secondhand from World of Books, couldn't find it on Amazon. And it's made me rethink really the way I run my finances in life as well as on the field. So the one of the key principles of the book is that you take your profit out of the business before anything else. So you what you need to do, and I'm going to explain this in the most simple basic way, don't quote me on this. Definitely get the book and read it, although you can probably ask Chat GPT to summarize it for you as well. Is that the theory is that you, as soon as money comes into your account, you allocate certain percentages to it and you shovel that money off into other accounts. Now, this is something that uh Jenny Marks taught us about on the course, and the idea of really, I think in in the States you can obviously have multiple bank accounts, and I remember saying to her, we'd never be allowed to do that in the UK, like they will not give me five bank accounts. But when I set up my new business bank account and my accountancy software, I chose the bank account to uh give me the free software, the free accountancy software. So my business bank account is with Metal, M-E-T-T-L-E, which I think is a spin-off of Netwest. And if you open this bank account, you get free free agent software, accountancy software. So that's why I did it to save money. And what I discovered is that you can set up these individual set kind of pots within your main accounts with Metal. And I understand now that other banks like Starling and Monzo also have this kind of pot system. So within your main bank account, you have these sort of pots where you can actually allocate or just put money into it. It still stays under the umbrella of the main bank account, but it's kind of just sits there, and the money's kind of ring fenced unless you transfer it back out of those pots into the main body of the bank account. Now, my account with Metal lets me set up transfer rules and percentages so I can hive off anytime I like a certain percentage of whatever's in the main body of the account and put it into these separate pots. Now, if I want to access it, I can just move it back out of the pots into the main account. But the idea is that you don't do that. So, as part of the profit first thing, you set up a pot for profit, for owner's compensation, for tax, you could have one for capital expenditure, and you work out percentages. Now it's very complicated. I'm not even going to try and murder it by talking about it any further, but the point is I have set up these pots in my bank account. I've set up the transfer rules and the percentages, and I've already kind of pushed the button and made all of this stuff happen, which made the main account dip dramatically in uh funds, because of course the money has then popped off into these little pots and they're just sitting there. And you know, for my whole life I have understood profit to be sales minus expenses. That is the way we kind of learn about it, that's just the way it is done. And when you read the profit first book, it's really, really interesting, makes a lot of sense to me. You might find it interesting or not, but I definitely think it's worth at least googling it and see what you think about it. And I'm just about to apply all of these principles to my own household finances as well, because I do keep wondering, and I have pretty much my whole adult life wondered where all the money goes at the end of the month and why it sort of comes in and then just completely vanishes. And now I understand because I have not been allocating the money to separate things. Now, the principle really that profit first is kind of like the simplest way to think about it is like old-fashioned envelopes. So if you were ever a person that just had like an envelope that you would put, I don't know, holiday money in or clothes shopping money or plant shopping money or anything like that. I mean, I love an envelope. I love stashing stuff in envelopes and just it's I find it easier to save with envelopes so I can physically see what I'm doing. But you know, it's not the safest way of doing it in case you get burglarized or your house burns down or something, you know, not a good idea. So probably safer to keep it in the bank. But I'm definitely going to apply these principles to my own personal finances so that I can just be squirrelling away more than just having a savings account because I have a savings account and things don't always make it into there either. But this way, this profit first way, looks really, really Interesting. So I haven't finished the book yet. Um, it gets a little bit more advanced towards the back of the book, and I had to pause so my brain didn't explode. But that was the second thing that I learned this weekend. And the third thing I learned this weekend is that it is now finally time for a marketing push. I've been waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting until I actually have stems ready before I do this. I didn't want, I didn't have the confidence to contact lots of florists and say, Yay, I'm here, but I don't have anything. Because I just thought that's just ridiculous. And um, so I have waited and it is now finally time to put my big girl pants on and actually contact them and really push my flowers. I need to finish and promote the Shopify store that I spent ages building in the winter, and I think it's finally now that we're actually this is the Royal Weekend, me, now that I am actually seeing what's ready, what's cutting, cuttable, what the next few months are going to look like, I feel an awful lot more confident about just pushing the button and getting that working because I can see how it's all going to look in my mind, and I've also wanted to just have a bit of time to let let everything sort of percolate through because it's one thing designing it in theory in the winter, it's quite another putting it into practice in the summer, and I just feel that now is the right time, and you know, I'm much more comfortable growing, like if I could just spend all day on the field and not have to sell anything, I would be so happy, I'd be so stress-free and relaxed, and it would just be amazing. But unfortunately, a huge part of growing and selling cut flowers is actually the marketing and the selling of them. It's not the growing. That is actually one of the simplest, most straightforward parts to be honest, despite the fact that I sound like I'm making the right meal of it over this year. So it is finally time to go hard on the marketing. And also the fourth thing I learned this weekend, which has nothing to do with cut flowers, but I'm going to share it with you anyway, is that being spontaneous when you go away for the weekend in the UK is all well and good. We didn't book any accommodation before we went. I I had real decision fatigue, and I'd literally got to the point last week where I couldn't make a decision to save my life. So I said to my other half, we're just going to be spontaneous. We're going to get in the car and we're going to drive wherever we feel like going. Like we did have a rough idea of where we were going to go. We're going to drive there and we're not going to book anything. We're just going to turn up, have an amazing day on the beach, and when we come off the beach, we will just find somewhere. We've both got phones, we've got all the apps, we've got all the technology, we can do it, it'll be fine. And what happened? We got off the beach about 6 30, and everywhere was either fully booked or extremely expensive because there was a conference in town that weekend, and every single bit of budget accommodation had been booked. So that is the fourth thing that I learned this weekend. Uh, sometimes it does pay to be organized and book in advance. Now, I hope you have a great rest of the week. It is only Tuesday, and we've got another few days until the next episode when I shall be carrying on with a plant profile series. I will update you about all the ceilings and the numbers that I've got in the ground. I finally got my Asters in my um flamingo at sunset, which I cannot wait to see them. Nice, robust little plants, those. So I'm gonna update you on all of that on Friday, and um we'll just crack on with the rest of our week and drink plenty of water and be careful in the sunshine because it is really, really hot when it comes out. Um, and most of all, we'll have fun, we'll have an enjoyable, fun week. The positivity is back, we have absolutely got this. So I'll catch up with you on Friday. All the best.