How Profit First Is Already Working For Me, New Perennials & I'm Trying 'Relay' Planting

Hello, it's Tuesday 30 June 2026.

Temperatures have finally dropped - thank goodness! That heatwave was intense.

In tonight's episode I'm talking about the perennials I've just been planting on the field and how I bought them guilt-free, thanks to the new technique I've adopted, called Profit First. I've put the name of the book below in case you're interested in reading it. I'm so motivated to see that I have already made a profit this year, and I can't tell you how exciting that is!

I'm also talking about another new technique I'm trying called Relay Planting. This means establishing a new crop in a bed with an existing crop, before the existing crop has completely finished. It turns on its head the idea that you have to wait for a crop to finish (and clear it away) before you can start the next crop. I'm hoping that this technique will make my planting spaces work much more efficiently for me, so that I can maximise every square metre of bed space. If you're working in a small space, you might be interested in this: check out The Living Soil Handbook for lots more information on relay planting. 

I hope you have a great week - please come back and join me for the next episode.

Books I talk about in tonight's episode:

Profit First by Michael Michalowicz

The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost 

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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 0:02

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 cutflower journey starting right now. Hello and welcome to the latest episode. It's Tuesday, the 30th of June 2026. I hope you survived the heat dome if you're listening in the UK. It was pretty epic, I have to say, and I thought it was finishing on Friday evening, and Saturday was going to be nice and cool. I mean, still warm, but you know, not heat wavy. And it really wasn't, like the temperatures held around 31 degrees here, so it was pretty stifling and quite humid. Lots of very frustrated little insects whizzing around. And um, all the plants are absolutely fine, but I honestly don't know how they do it because I was really flagging. I think it's just cumulative, isn't it? I just got sort of tired and tired as the time went on and everything. There was just so much watering to do everywhere, and keeping an eye on shade and all the rest of it. And um yeah, but I'm just amazed that the plants can survive in those heats. I mean, obviously they can, but some of the annuals are really small, just really get go getting going and to be tethered in one place under that kind of intense sun. Bless them, they did really, really well. Now it has meant that now that obviously the heat wave has finished, that I've been able to take Lion's giant parasol down that he thinks is a massive blue eagle. Once it's in situ, he's quite comfortable, but he gets very stressed if it moves around, and it was quite windy on Saturday, so I have decided to take that down and and he will be fine now. So that's all sorted, and the chickens came through it absolutely fine again. I think I mentioned on a previous episode I just don't know how they do it because they're so feathery, but they have so that is great, and um, it has meant that most of the agrestema crop is ready to go, and I don't have a market for that. My white weddings were last weekend, and um so yeah, they're kind of ready, but they're all at sort of slightly different stages. Um, so that's been quite interesting to see how they've behaved. It's the first year I've ever grown them, and um so I'm not I'm not overly concerned about it. I'm I'm interested in what they actually do. And the other thing that I did, which I wanted to share with you, was um as an experiment, well, during the course of this year, what I'm doing is is cutting flowers that don't get sold, and rather than just giving them away or taking them home, I've been leaving them in a vase up at the field and just literally just leaving there, leaving them up there and watching what they do over the course of a week. Now, a week ago on Saturday the 20th of June, I cut a whole selection of whites because there was some excess that I had left over. And I cut some agrestemmas, I had some cornflowers in there, I think I had a couple of scabius, there was some Dianthus, there was some Crospedia. It was a sort of yellow, pale, buttery lemon and um whites, and I think actually that might be the one that I did a reel about. Anyway, it was like such a pretty colour combination. I really loved it. Anyway, they've just been sitting there in the feed room all week, and I've been, you know, rushing in and out like a crazy person and not really, really looking at them. And last night I was really looking at them. And do you know the only ones that have survived and look absolutely pristine is the Dianthus. Now, this is the um the Petrel Station Carnation, which I did a plant profile on, I think a couple of weeks ago, because I have got a few of the plants as perennials, and I really, really like them, and I I keep offering them out on my availability lists, and nobody wants them. Um I literally can't give them away. But just to prove the point that these things have such an incredibly long vase life, these dianthus that are in the vase are the only thing that have not wilted, not gone crispy, not dried up completely, not shed all their petals, not collapsed at all. They still look almost exactly like when I put them in. And they have been in the feed room, which gets all of the afternoon sun. Every single other stem has either just collapsed or wilted or whatever, and these guys are still going. So if anybody or really wants a plant that's gonna just survive a heat wave and just keep going regardless, these are the ones, and that you know they've they've got a lovely little scent to them, and I just think they're so so pretty. I really hope there's a way of making these flowers trendy or cool or desirable again, because I think it's a bit of a wasted opportunity, especially within bouquets. Now it's not so important for the florists that I'm supplying to who are um wedding and event florists, and therefore they only really need things to be good for maybe one day maximum two. But if you want to put anything in a bouquet, then Dianthus, definitely the way to go. So, since the heat wave cooled down, I have been planting out perennials that I've just bought. Now, once I've had some orders that have been paid for, I set up this new banking account and set up these sort of rules where money is transferred out of the main account into these kind of savings pots. Now, I talked about this in my episode on the 16th of June. There's the words profit first, I think, is actually in the title. And what it means doing this new technique, because obviously the longer I do it, uh the more I can tell you about it because it's very new to me. Because the money is basically diverted out of the main account where it comes in, it goes off into these other little tiny accounts, so I can actually clearly see what I have left to spend in the main account, which is basically like the operating expenses. So that's what I've got to spend. Now I don't have to spend all that money, but it is there and it is available, it is allocated for expenses. So if I'm going to go and buy anything, that money in there means that I can go and do it. Now I've actually um set up a pot for uh profit, and I've also set up a pot for my um owner's compensation, which is like the money that I would pay myself, and then I've got other ones like capital expenditure and everything. So I can actually see in the profit pot that I have made some profit this year. Now, this is really, really eye-opening. It's a real twist on the way things normally get done because I have always thought that I would have to wait until the very end of the year to know if I've made any profit or not. Um, you know, the standard way of doing things is revenue minus expenses and what's left is profit. But by doing the profit first technique, and you're gonna hear me talking about it every now and then because it really is eye-opening, means that the out of the orders that I've had paid already, the profit has been taken off and put into one of these pots and it's sitting there staring at me. So every time I open the banking app, I can see the number that's in the profit pot. And I have to tell you, it's very motivating to see this. Really, really motivating and also wildly exciting. And the money is in that that little pot, it doesn't get moved unless I physically move it out, and now I can see it there, there's no way I'm touching it. Now, the other pot I have is called owner's compensation, and money is being automatically transferred in there because the rules that I set up sounds a lot more complicated than it is. The app is dead, dead simple to use. So there's money sitting in the operator's account or operator's uh compensation, which again I'm not touching, but I can just sit there and see it. And what I can see is that I've already made enough money to cover the labour costs that I occurred when I was doing all of the seed sowing earlier in the year. And again, that's a really, really nice thing to see because again, I wasn't expecting to get any of that money back until you know right at the end of the year, and I would have looked in my account and seen how much money there was and then divvied it all up. Well, if you do that calculation at the very start of the year and it's just always in place, that money will get siphoned off from everything that you make or from everything that I make, and then it sits in the pot entitled earners compensation and it's will just accrue all year, assuming I keep selling, obviously. So it's just sat there. So that's also a really fantastic feeling. Kind of uh you can have a bit of a sigh of relief because you think, okay, well, I spent all those hours doing all the seed sowing, and that money has now been repaid out of the orders that I've already had. Um, so I do think it's this profit first technique is a great thing to even just to to read the book and have a think about it and see if it might work for you, because I am absolutely loving it. I can't I can't really explain how um terrif terrifying and stressful and insane and what a wild ride it is growing cut flowers, just normally. Just normally as a normal human being, as a beginner, it is quite quite terrifying. And then when you add into that the fact that you don't know whether you're going to make any money at the end of the year or not, by using this technique, I have already made a profit. Now let's be clear, it's not a profit that I can quit the cut flowers and go around the Caribbean on. It's not like a living profitability, as in the business has made so much money that it can support me and I can just sit around all day and and just you know relax. It's not like that at all. It's literally just a percentage of the sales is already allocated to profit and a percentage of the sales already added to owner's compensation, and what is left in the operating expenses account is what I can go and freely spend on the business, which in itself is a very liberating feeling. Because if you're anything like me, I make purchases and I think, oh, that was really naughty, maybe I shouldn't have done that, and then there's some kind of guilt associated with it, or you think, Oh, should I not have done that? Should I have waited or whatever? But now, by siphoning all this money into these different pots, and what's left in the operating account is money that is to be spent. Now, I have to say again, I don't have to spend it, but it's nice to know that it is there and that it is available. So, with that, I went and bought myself some perennials the other day, and I have been planting them up on the field, and they're looking really nice. And the the wonderful thing about perennials, I mean, I'm always going on about perennials, as you know, I love them, and I really wanted to move much more onto perennials going forward because they're just so much easier to look after. And once you've put them in, a little bit of watering to start with, depending on the time of year, and then you can just pretty much leave them to get on with what they're doing. Uh, but they are much more expensive than doing annuals. Although I want to actually qualify that statement by saying until I get to the end of the year and I work out exactly the production costs for all of the annuals and then all of the perennials, which I will have data for, it may actually work out quicker to just go out to a shop and buy, or rather a wholesaler, or anywhere online actually, and buy a perennial and stick it in the ground and then walk away and forget it is done. Rather than the enormous hoo-haw that goes with the annuals. So I say things and then I'm actually like, you know what? Maybe I will wait till the end of the year when I've got all the data, and then I will actually tell you what it looks like in real life. So that's what I've been doing on the field. I do highly recommend this book. It's called Profit First. It's by Michael McAllowitz, and you can get it online. Um, definitely, definitely worth a read, even if you decide it's not for you and you don't want to do it. The concept is really, really clever, and I can tell you that it's actually working. And on that basis, actually, I was so excited about how well it's working for the business. I've gone and got myself a whole new personal bank account. I've been with my existing bank since I was 13 years old, and they don't do any of this um fancy, clever ways of running your account. It's it, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. There is an app and it's fine, but they don't allow you to have these sort of pots or mini savings accounts that sit within your account. And the app is really, really old school, the dashboard is all really old, even though they've updated it, it's just not the same. And if you start using some of these sort of spin-off banks like Monzo or Starling or Metal, Metal's actually only for business, then you can really see the difference in how these um new kind of banks are making things more visually attractive. And I'm a very visual person, so I much prefer to have a really clear dashboard and be able to see what I'm doing and you know, to be able to see what's in these savings pots. And so on that basis, I went and opened a personal bank account with um uh who's with? Oh, Monzo, yeah, Monzo. Um, and they are all legit, they're all regulated by the um financial authority, and there's compensation if they go bust and you lose all your money, which God willing won't happen. But I'm adopting the techniques that I've done for the cut flower business to my own business, and I'm hoping it will be as revolutionary as it is for the business. Now, the exciting thing I wanted to talk to you about tonight is drumroll, please, relay planting. Now, are you doing this? Maybe I'm the last person that's discovered this. That would be awful. I'm presenting it to you as something really amazing and you already know all about it. I hope, well, I hope you do actually, because then it would be great if we're all doing it. Relay planting basically means putting in the next crop before the current crop has completely finished. Now, I read about this in The Living Soul Handbook by Jesse Frost, also another book that I highly recommend you go and read. It's amazing. He's a market gardener, he and his wife in the States, and the techniques in his book are absolutely brilliant. It's kind of on the line, the same kind of line as Charles Dowding. So if you're a fan of him, it's this it's the same kind of thing. It's um market gardening and productivity, it's all about soil health. And one of the techniques, obviously, that we've all known about is intercropping and it's growing one crop within another crop. Now, this is quite popular in market gardening, apparently, because well, for lots of reasons, and I'm not a market gardener, so I'm not going to start waffling about that. Excuse me. But the beauty of this technique called relay planting, and it's basically like a spin-off on a relay race, is instead of waiting for one crop to be harvested to clear that plot, the bed prepped for the next crop, then you've got to sew the next crop and then wait for it to be harvestable. You basically overlap the two crops. So crop number one just carries on doing what it's doing, but it might start to, you know, go over or be finished. And then crop two actually gets a head start while crop one is still finishing. And um, as I say, um, it's something that market gardeners are doing a lot of, especially apparently when they do salads, um, and also if they're growing on a really small piece of land and they need to garden um grow much more intensively, then that is the technique that they are using. So rather than thinking about the field as you know, one crop, I have to wait for it to finish, and then do all the bed prep and then get the next one in, I have done an experiment with my agrastema bed to see whether it will actually work. So I've got this agristema bed, I've got quite a few meters of it, and um I've planted sort of if you can imagine, like from left to right, basically. So the seedlings that got sown first have gone into the left, and then as you move along the bed to the right, it's the younger and younger agristema. So you it's it's the very definition of succession sewing, and my agristema bed is like my showcase for this to remind myself that I can do it, that succession sewing actually works. So on the far left hand side, there's things that were sewn on the the agristema sewn on the 6th of March, then we go to the 16th of March, and by the time we get to the end, we're ending up in April. So you get this sort of cascade of the plants being slightly different heights, different stages of maturity, different flowering, etc. etc. So by the time the first guys are finished, the next succession will be flowering, which it already is, and then and then it carries on as as the bed moves along. So, what I decided, having read this Living Soil handbook, that I would give this technique a go. Um, so I've put in quite a lot of my seedlings. This was part of my panic planting last week when I had to just get everything in the ground as quickly as possible, and I thought, well, relay planting is going to be a great technique for this. So, at the foot of the agristema, uh in the gaps between the agristema uh seedlings, I have popped in selection of my seedlings. Now I've put quite a few of my Asters in there, I've got some scabius in there, and I've got some other bits and pieces that, as I'm talking to you, I actually can't remember what they are. And my notebook is in the back of the car. So those are the two main ones, but basically I've managed to put in about 10 or 12 rows of seedlings amongst the agristema. And one of the advantages of doing this is that they the agrestema is actually giving a little bit of shade already. It's it's like cushioning the worst of the heat off these baby transplants. The soil is a little tiny bit cooler. I mean, in it's all relative because obviously we've just been under this heat dome, so everything is actually quite hot already out there. But there is a little tiny bit more protection for these little transplants. There's a fraction more of a humidity in that bed because the plants are there and they're transpiring all the time. They basically create their own environment. Now, the agrastema were not these scrape big um bushy things that I was expecting them to be. They have run quite lean this year, which I'm gonna have to look that up and see if that's normal, to be honest. But they have still created this little tiny environment for themselves. So they're offering a little bit more protection for the guys that have just gone in. And so instead of just you know clearing all of this agrastema out, I've popped these transplants in. So what's gonna happen is that as the agristema finish and the plants are no longer usable, and because I haven't done them before, I don't know exactly when this point is going to be. Um, I'm just cutting that, I'm cutting them, they're so tall that I'm able to cut them not down to the ground, so and then still have a like a 60 centimetre stem to sell. But when I get to the point where the plant isn't going to be growing that tall anymore, I will be cutting them for sale at ground level, but not digging the roots up because where possible I like to leave the roots of the plants in. The only time this turned out to be a mistake was when I decided to do it for my sunflowers in my trial beds in 2024, and I cut them off as close to the ground as I could get them, but I left these little stumps that were about one inch tall, and then all I did for weeks and weeks was trip over them, and I nearly killed myself a couple of times falling over those guys. So that was really dangerous. So I did actually have to take those guys out because unless you can cut right down level to the ground, you really don't want to have any more trip hazards on the field than you already have. It's dangerous enough at my place as it is. Um so the technique is generally speaking, yeah, as I generally speaking, with a few exceptions, like the sunflowers being one of them, I cut plants when they're finished at ground level and I leave the roots in because it holds the sword together, it supports them, and when the roots will die, obviously, because the that they haven't got anything to support them, they can't photosynthesize. But the roots will break down in the soil, which just is another way of feeding the soil. So I am going to be cutting the agrestema when I've finished harvesting the plants at ground level, which will then give the new transplants space to kind of just grow up, they will grow into the space. And one of the advantages of doing this is that you don't have this kind of a gap of a week or a couple of weeks, or depending how long you get round to clearing your beds out. Because normally, if you do the traditional technique, you've got to wait for the crop to finish. And some people actually take their crops out when they're sort of coming to the end, but it hasn't technically finished. I was Definitely, I'm definitely in a more ruthless mindset this year. Last year I did leave things in longer than I should have done when the quality was no longer there. This year I've pulled things out, even if I just think uh you're not good enough at this point. Never mind waiting for them to actually try and flower. So it just means that there's none of this sort of bed prep at the end. You don't have to wait for everything to finish. I don't need to go in and clear the bed out. Uh, don't need to faff around preparing anything, I just wait for these transplants to come up through the aguastema. Now, there are some downsides that I have understood about this. Uh, we'll see. One of the things is obviously the risk of competition and seedlings being what they are, it's important, you know, they get enough light and they get enough, they are spaced properly, but a bit of competition, uh, it could be well, I listen, I'm gonna have to do it, aren't I, and then tell you. I'm I'm expecting there to be some competition issues, but whether that works out to be a positive or a negative, I'm not sure. Cut flowers are supposed to be grown really, really close together. This is something that I am getting better at, but still have not cracked yet. And sometimes they do really well with a bit of competition. Um, the plants obviously can sense certain factors like the proximity to their neighbours, overhanging shade. They can sense all these things. Now, sometimes they it means that you get really, really tall stems because they're just vying to get to the light. Sometimes it can just mean that they're really unhappy and they just sit there and sulk and they don't like it. So there's also going to be competition for water and nutrients in the soil. Um, but but I'm wondering whether the nutrients that are already in the soil for the agrastema are actually going to be much more accessible for the new transplants precisely because they are sharing that space. Well, we'll see. Now, the only the major downside what it was enormously fiddly to do this. So I think my timings for planting those transplants are going to be higher than if you just literally had a bare empty bed to plant into, which is super super quick. You can literally just pull all of the um plugs out of the trays or whatever, whatever, however you've grown them, and then plop them all on the ground, and then go along with the horri horri knife and just put everything in, and it's super super quick. When you're doing the relay planting and you're effectively interplanting in between rows of existing plants, it's a little bit fiddly and you have to be careful. And I also had I think I've got one row, one layer rather of bean and pea netting down. So I was I must have looked a bit like a crazy person. I was trying so hard to um to do it without snapping any of the aguistema, which I didn't to be fair, but there was some leaning over the bed, um, which was a bit unnerving uh on a slope, and also trying to do this planting, you know, through the delicate stems of the aguistema and through the netting as well. So definitely not the easiest access whatsoever. But on the plus side, um, I don't have to calculate any staking or netting timings for this uh load of transplants because they're basically going to use the stuff that's already set up for the aguastema, so that's another win. Um, yeah, so I'm just gonna keep an eye on them and see what happens. So far, they're doing absolutely fine, they really are, and um I shall keep a very close eye on them, but I think it could be really, really clever, and I'm already thinking about how I can do it in the veggie garden, which it was, you know, relay planting was set up for that. Um, but I'm thinking, I'm casting an eye over thinking where can I do this in other places to maximize productivity? And certainly I think in well, intercropping into perennials is a different issue. This is relay planting, which is starting one crop off before the last one has finished. Um, if you're interested in more details about that, do get a copy of the Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost. Uh, it's a great, great book. Right, that is what I wanted to talk to you about uh this evening. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week. Do please come back and join me on Friday for the next episode. I'm going to be doing the plant profile, uh, which I missed last week's, so I hope you come back and listen to that one. And also, I am um going to be answering some questions, so that might also be of interest. Anyway, do come back and join me on Friday for the next episode, and um I'll catch you then. All the best.