Heatwave...! Orders Going Out, Sweetpeas Are Flowering & Calculating Crop Gross Profits

Hello, it's Tuesday 23 June 2026.

Lots to tell you about tonight whilst recording from my very hot field. Even a peacock interrupted me (it's not mine!). We're in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK at the moment which is a teeny bit stressful. So far the seedlings are coping, but the water levels in the IBCs are taking a hit.

Orders are starting to head off the field - more details about them and the upcoming weddings this weekend. 

I also want to share some business jargon with you tonight: gross profit, gross profit margins plus direct and indirect costs. I've started to crunch some numbers to work these figures out now that the seedlings are all in the ground and although I don't have a complete set of data to work with, I'm too impatient to wait. I'll also be discussing the surprises I discovered with a couple of my crop germination rates. 

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

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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 23rd of June 2026, and I'm talking to you from the epicentre of the heat dome in the UK right now. It is unbelievably hot. I have no idea how hot it is right now, but it was at least 33.34 earlier today. Very, very hot, and it's really, really muggy this evening. I'm recording what time is it? It's half past nine. I thought I'll do it on the field. And I had so many other things to do that I've only just got round to it now. So the chickens actually um I let them out onto the sort of the grassy area during the evening when I'm up here, and I've got them in one, two, three, three different enclosures. Four different no, three different enclosures, and they come out and they all do a bit of mingling, there's the odd fight, and they rummage through all sorts of things and pick up bugs, and it's just nice for them to be on the grass, really, because they don't have much grass in their enclosures. And the ducks come out and have a bit of a bumble around as well. But trying to get them all back into their respective houses is a logistical nightmare, and every time I forget that it's just really not actually worth the hassle. I mean, I'll always do it obviously for them, but it is a nightmare trying to get them back in, and um, they have watermelon and spinach in this weather. I mean, they have spinach all the time anyway, but they've actually got watermelon at the moment, which they just absolutely love, so much fun. Lion has got a parasol over his enclosure as well. He had a bit of a heart attack when not literally, but figuratively had a heart attack when we put it up because he thought it was a giant blue eagle coming to get him, and he had a bit of a meltdown over that. The only one that's not allowed out is Roland, uh, because he could get to his son's lion and moly, and we would have a diplomatic incident if he got out. Um, so they're all back in to bed now. Thank goodness. Now, thank you for your suggestions and comments about plug plants. In the last episode, I talked about growing things from plugs because I kind of got to the end of my tether with growing things from seed, and lots of you wrote in with suggestions and links to places that do it. And thank you if you were one of those people. Very interesting to hear what they do in the States. The pricing is quite interesting over there, and I had a look at some places in the UK, and I think unless you're doing it on scale, it seems to me that the prices just don't work out. Now, I guess they would for perennials, but I could do I don't mind doing perennials, it's just the sheer volume that you have to do for annuals, it just really puts me off. Anyway, thank you very much for that. Now, also, in addition to the last episode, uh, my mother actually let me know that Ascot is also on the Saturday, it doesn't end on the Friday, it carries on until Saturday, but there were definitely fewer helicopters anyway. And also, bindweed is great for nighttime pollinators like moths, so that is wonderful. And I hope they enjoy the bindweed that I haven't managed to get out that's up these 10-foot poles at the back of the field. Now, I've been supplying flowers this week. I had an order going out yesterday in the heat. Um, beautiful, beautiful colour palette of pinks and purples, and it was going to go on a funeral casket, which is really lovely. I can't think of anything nicer than having fresh British seasonal local flowers on your funeral casket to say goodbye, and they were absolutely beautiful. I had um uh what did I have? I had salvias, lavender, some stilby, a stranchia, some mint pittasporum. It was absolutely gorgeous. I put a reel on Instagram because I was just so blown away with it, and it's a funny one because uh I grew a lot of purple last year and I couldn't give it away. Nobody wants it, and it doesn't it's not that common in the weddings from what I've seen so far. So it was actually nice to be able to supply something uh for a funeral. Um, now I've got an order going out, I've got a couple of orders going out this weekend for weddings. White weddings this weekend, very nice. For some reason, everything on the field is pretty much white right now, and I can't remember what happened last autumn, so I may have planned it like that, but I don't know. Could just be good luck, I'm not sure. I I definitely remember going for a whites and pastels theme overall, so there's lots of agrestema, there's white cornflowers, uh, the ammy's not ready yet, and I'm not sure if that's going to be a wedding vibe anyway. But the Orlaya's also been amazing, so the field is just looking pretty white at the moment, but very, very nice. So there's lots of stems going out for that. Everything did get planted over the weekend. I did say to you I was going to do it, and I did manage to do it, and pretty much anything that hasn't been planted at this point is probably going to get composted because I am at my tether with it, and I just want it to be done. And there's just a few tiny little bits that are left. Some of them I got given by people, and um I mean, if I have time later this week, I'll just pop them in somewhere. But the priority was getting all the seeds, the big ticket stuff that I sewed myself in the ground, and thank goodness they are all in, including some dahlias, which I found lurking in Kylie's room, and they'd obviously just been popped there and they'd sprouted, so that is great. Uh, and they've gone in the ground as well, um, which I did have kittens about because of this heat. I mean, it's just mental. Dahlias obviously got so much leafy vegetative growth on them. You just think, Oh my goodness, these guys are going to collapse. But we had a lot quite a bit of rain last night. Not, I was gonna say a lot, it wasn't a lot of rain, but it was a decent amount of rain, and it was quite unexpected. Like I didn't see it on forecast, which doesn't mean it wasn't there, I just missed it. And it was amazing, and it really dropped the temperature, it was quite amazing, it was lovely. So I was up here in the rain last night, it was just magical, and um meant that just lions stayed out longer because, of course, he's got this whomping great parasol sort of thing that you put in your garden. The only reason I don't use it anymore is because it's broken, so he has it. Anyway, I digress. The rain was amazing, dropped the temperature by quite a few degrees, and obviously just replenished everything. So it meant I got a night off from watering last night, which I was very excited about. Uh, what else to tell you about? Oh, so the sweet peas are finally flowering, they've been quite slow off the mark, and then literally in the last 24 hours, a whole load of them have opened, and they are absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. We've had the same royal we again, it's just me. I've had the same issue that I had last year where the ducks have pinched some of them out for me. Not planned that, and I thought I'd covered everything up, and one of the panels that I'd put up to stop the ducks reaching through and eating the tops had fallen down, so they've pinched out a few of them, and I'm trying to think which one. I think it might be Emily that they've had the tops off, so they'll just flower later, it's not a problem. What I've got flowering now is King's Ransom and Castle Wellon, and these recommendations I got from the Sweeppea Queen in the States. I think it's Meren Mathis, I think. I may have got that wrong, but if you have heard of her, you'll know who I'm talking about. She's written an amazing book called The Sweepy School, and I was literally driving along, and she was doing a podcast interview, and she was asked to list her favourite varieties, and King's Ransom was one. So I did an emergency stop and pulled over and wrote that down, ordered them, and they are absolutely drop dead, gorgeous. Oh my goodness, if you haven't seen them, definitely Google them. They are an introduction into the UK, I think. I bought mine from English Sweet Peas, which used to be Roger Parsons, and the stock was quite limited, you couldn't actually buy that many, so and they were expensive as well. So I only bought 50 just to see if they were actually worth the hype, and they are 100% worth the hype. Only it is, of course, sods law that the two weddings I have this weekend are for whites and not pinks. And Jo came up yesterday and she was like, Oh, that's a shame. I thought, yes, that is the understatement of the year because these guys are absolutely gorgeous, and of course, they smell incredible as well. So, uh, yes, I should be picking those, but they will not be going off to a wedding. Now I'm running quite low on water at the moment. Uh, my other half has been on at me about this for weeks to make some kind of plan, and I kept kicking it into the long grass and just saying, Oh, we'll worry about it nearer the time, and it looks like that time may have appeared. So I've got about well, I don't know, 12 to 1500 litres on the field. Some of it though is in inaccessible places. So I've got the three IBCs, one of which is up by the stable in the feed room. Two IBCs are down on the field, right next to the beds where they need to be, and they're the ones that are running very low. And then I've got water butts scattered all over the place, including four off the back of the duckhouse. But I'm gonna have to run a gutter from those guys to actually get the water down into the plot. So I've got a very, very long piece of guttering which I've been saving for just that occasion, and it's been inside uh the enclosure for ages, and we were moving stuff around uh yesterday, uh, sorry, over the weekend, and um I just turned round to see my other half throwing it like a javelin over the six-foot fence panels, and I watched it crash into the grass outside the fence panels. At which point I very nearly ripped his head off. I was absolutely furious, and I have told him that if he's cracked it and it's broken and unusable, then he'll have to buy me a new piece of guttering because I had been saving it. Uh, yeah, never mind. The less said about that the better. So it's going to be a question of decanting water from A to B, which is just the sort of thing that I would end up doing in a heat wave. Now the roses are all flowering as well, or 90% of the roses are flowering, the climbers have been a bit slow off the mark, but all of the shrub roses are flowering. But a bit of a disaster there because the stems are really short. So I think I was expecting them to not do very much, and I wasn't really planning, I was hoping in like my fantasy world of being able to cut them this year, but I did I did realise it would take them a while to get going. What they've decided to do is instead of just grow this year, they've just decided to just flower their socks off. So they all are flowering beautifully, and Chandos Beauty is literally like drop dead gorgeous. I don't even have words for how incredible that is. If you haven't seen the rose Chandos Beauty, definitely, definitely Google it because it's incredible. And they are, but they're just also incredibly short, so everything is 20-30 centimetres tall, which is embarrassing. I'm embarrassed to tell you that. But at least it gives me an idea of whether I actually like the flowers on them and whether anybody is going to get kept in the ground for next year. And the good news is they are, and I hope they just spend the winter putting on some growth. Well, actually, they won't because they're all going to get cut back, but I'm probably not going to hard, hard cut them back, or I'd end up with nothing. And fingers crossed, next year they will be nice and tall. Uh so what else is on my list? I have to make a list, honestly. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm reading from a list, but I do have to jot some things down because I constantly think of things to tell you, and then you know what happens as soon as you press record, everything mind goes blank. So, what I've done this afternoon because it was actually too hot to move, so I sat in the shady part of my garden, which is affectionately known as Slug Alley, and that is because it's literally it's not an alley, it's the pathway from my gate to my front door, but it is under the shade of an enormous magnolia tree, and so it's beautifully shady. Now there are trees in my garden as well, but this bit is just the cool shady bit to be, and the sun doesn't hit it until about I don't know, six o'clock, something like that, quarter to six, six o'clock. By then the shade of the magnolia kicks in and it's just incredibly cool. And what it means is damp as well. So, what it means is that every slug and snail within a 50 mile radius moves in and has been there forever. Uh, and I I don't mind, it just means I have to remember not to put anything precious out that side of the building, which is annoying because of course that's where the shade is, but it can't be helped. Last year I forgot I put all my spider plants out, and they all just got absolutely ravaged. So this year they have to go somewhere else because it's too hot inside for them. So I spent the afternoon in Slug Alley doing some numbers because what I realized was after I got the main bulk of all of my crops in the ground over the weekend, there are just stragglers left that people gave me. I could do an interim cost of production analysis and see how things were looking for a couple of varieties to double check whether my pricing was okay this year because I have put my prices up by about 25%, something like that, because I didn't know what I was doing last year, didn't have any data to build my decisions off. I was benchmarking all over the place, and it was ridiculous. And I also had a bit of a confidence issue, so I've changed things around and just decided no, I'm gonna work on the data that I did collect last year. I'm not gonna be benchmarking against imports because I just we can't compete on those prices, and I'm gonna be a little bit more confident, and now that I've built more of a brand and a sort of ethos around the business, I'm going to put my prices up. And so far there hasn't been any pushback, but I'm touching wood because I might be speaking too soon. So, anyway, what I have got figures for is the amount of time that I spent sowing the seeds, obviously, the cost of the seeds and any materials, the time I spent planting out, the time I've spent doing bed prep, staking, weeding, um, potting on, any anything and everything, basically all of the direct costs associated with producing these crops. I have got those figures now. And the only thing that needs to be added on for later in the year is going to be the cost of harvesting. So that's my time. I never count water. I probably should count watering, but it's just something I do when I'm up here at the hens, and I've got to be up here anyway. It's like my donation to the field. So I donation to the business rather. So I don't count that, but anything else, and I think also you're supposed to charge labour time for when you uh take the crop out and get rid of it as well. Uh, assuming there's going to be another crop going in afterwards, I'm guessing. Anyway, the point is I've got like 99% of the direct costs, and I thought I would just have a quick whiz through them, and I thought you might be interested to have a listen as well. What I was aiming to find out was the gross profit. So after you've done all your calculations with your direct costs, that's anything that's associated with actually producing a flower. So seeds, materials, labour to pot them, plant them, etc. Indirect costs are the costs that you have just for oh goodness, somebody has actually got a peacock. That's so odd. I don't know if you could hear that on the microphone. I heard it the other night and I thought I must be imagining it. Who would have a peacock here? But no, there it is. Um, indirect costs are everything that are that the business has to uh have just to uh keep it running. So things like the cost of uh rent, um insurances, um signage, marketing, um anything that's not related to an actual crop, basically, it's just the running costs. Even if you never sold a single flower or sowed a single seed, how much would it cost you to keep the business going? And they are the indirect costs. Now, in order to get your gross profit margin, you can do it with your direct costs, and once you know your indirect costs, you take that off your gross profit and you end up with a net profit. Um, ideally, as I say, I would do this at the very end of the year when I've got all of the most up-to-date accurate information because I do need to know how many I actually sold, so what the revenue figures are, and how many I harvested for my own use or just gave away to people, and how many I composted in terms of stems to get the most accurate figures. But I'm impatient and I couldn't wait. So let me talk you through a couple. I've just got two crops here. I'll talk you through these briefly and then and then you'll know what where my thinking is at. So the first one that I did, I've only done two. So the first of the two is Agrastema. This was an entirely new crop for me. Uh, it's white, it's very pretty, and I thought it would fit in with the whole weddings thing. Uh, it was a bit of an experiment, this one, because I was to say, I've never grown it before, didn't really have a clue what it was going to be like. And I think I'm along with Ascabius, I'm most proud of this crop. It has done extremely well and it looks beautiful. It's one of the first ones that I got in the ground, and it's all netted and it's all growing upright, and the spacing could be closer, but it's not a disaster. And they are flowering their socks off at the moment. They are the most beautiful, beautiful flowers. So I did four sowings: 3rd of March, 16th of March, 3rd of April, and the 20th of April. I sowed a total of 190 seeds and I've planted out 123. So that is a 65% success rate, or if you're a glass half-empty kind of person, a 35% failure rate, which I was quite disappointed, actually. I'm really going to look into these um success and germination rates because I've been quite gung-ho, as you know, about the seed compost and oh, I'm good at sowing seeds and everything germinates really well. But actually, the reality is those figures are not high enough. Now, it could be I'm being a little bit hard on myself, and it was actually the seed that is the fault, I don't know. But I would definitely want to have better germination rates than that next year. So that's why all this data collection is really interesting because I was sowing, you know, what I thought was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands, and then when you actually come to the field to plant out, you're like, Oh, I've got four. Like, how did that happen? So it took me a total of 45 minutes to sew all of those four individual batches, and uh the labour cost for that came in just under 15 pounds. Now I charge myself as my labour rate is 20 quid an hour for the cut flowers. That is a lot lower than my rate for the gardening, but I'm not about to start charging myself out at that rate because it's slightly different work anyway, and um, I don't want to cripple the business financially before it even gets off the ground. So £14.92 worth of labour to do all four of those sewings. Now I planted them out. Um, I can't, well, I can't remember whether I did it all at once or in stages actually, but it took me 35 minutes to plant them all out, which comes in about £11.50. Uh, there was eight minutes worth of staking time, quarter of an hour worth of weeding time, and eight minutes of potting on. Now that was really interesting because if you'd asked me if I'd potted anything on, I'd have swore blind I didn't pot a single thing on this year. Do not remember doing that at all. That's how crazy it was in probably April time. I spent eight minutes potting those guys on. Thank goodness I wrote that down. So that's a total of 31 minutes, which is about 10 pounds. My seeds cost £3.60, and I got £250 seeds. Not quite sure why why I only sowed £190 in that case, but never mind. So if you add up all of those direct costs, that's the labour for sowing them all, the labour for planting them out, staking, weeding, potting on, plus the cost of the seed comes in about £40. And that is the direct costs for producing those plants, and that is a total of 123 plants. Now I'm assuming because I'm going to cut these agristema for the longest stem length possible, that I'm going to get one cut per plant, which I have been yakking on about not wanting to do that because it's not viable cost wise. So I may have to revise that. I did kind of think when I was doing it that I would get multiple stems from them, but I'm seeing so much now that the stem length, the longer the stem length, the higher the sale price. So I was like, oh, I'm just going to cut these long because I think when florists see something that's 60 centimetres, it's a lot more appealing than if it's 40 centimetres. So that's what I've thought about. So if I sold every single one of those 123 stems, effectively one stem per plant, for a pound each, I would get a revenue of 123 pounds minus my costs of 40, which gives a gross profit of 83 pounds. And that is a 63.5% gross profit margin. Uh, and it works out that it actually costs me three sorry 32.5 pence per. Stem to produce each one of those. It's really, really interesting to actually go through the numbers because it's so deceptive with seeds to just look at the packet price and say, oh, £3.60 for 200 seeds, that's amazing. I'll make loads of money. And it's not until you grind through all of the numbers. It's absolutely eye-opening to me. Um, and um, yeah, grind through all of the numbers to understand actually how much it costs to produce, and of course, those figures are gross figures, so that is just with direct costs, that is not taking into account all of the indirect costs, which is also known as overheads, of the business, which all need to be subtracted from the gross figures in order to come up with the net figures, and that is kind of like the take-home that you get. So you can see how you can. I started off with such enthusiasm. Oh, it's only £3.60, and I'll have 200 plants, and I'll have five stems from each plant, and all those fantasy calculations in my head, and the actual reality on paper is it's nothing like that. So there we are. That is the figures that I've come up with, and I thought you might find it interesting to have a listen to those. And um I'd I would love to know if you were collecting data. I really, really would. I can't I can't I can't believe I'm the only person that that's doing this. Sometimes it feels like it, and I really hope it's not the case because it's so important to get a handle on these numbers, and it also makes life so much easier when it comes to pricing, because you can price with so much more confidence if you know that something costs you X amount to produce and you know how much profit you want to make, and therefore you have a selling price. And if it turns out that you can't get that selling price because nobody will pay for it because it's too much, then you've got to look at how much it's actually costing you to produce that stem, or just don't sell it at all because it's just not financially viable. We're not aiming, or I'm not sorry for the rule we I'm not aiming for any kind of break-even pricing here. There has to be profit in at every single point because if I was just breaking even, I'd be running to stand still, and we can't be doing that. So there you are. It is um getting dark now, and I'm actually having trouble seeing the page, so I don't think I'm gonna be able to tell you about my costings for the Astor Flamingo at sunset. If you're interested, um send me a message and I can talk about it in a future episode. That was actually an even worse germination success rate, which is very disappointing. Uh, but the gross profit margins are higher, which is very interesting, and that's because I understand that you can have more than one stem per plant. So swings and roundabouts. I hope you get through the rest of the week. If you're in the UK, it's gonna be baking for a couple more days, and um we're just gonna have to get on with it and cross our fingers and toes that everything makes it through to the other side because this, like everything else, will pass. So I hope you have a wonderful week and um please come back and join me on Friday for the next episode. You're always really welcome. All the best.