Even though I’m a bit late getting this out, I still wanted to keep up my yearly tradition of doing a recap of our last year as a whole, as well as share all of the photos we took every Sunday throughout the whole year (something we’ve been doing since 2018!). It’s so valuable for me to look back on these to see how much changes from month to month, and it’s always kind of insane just how packed our years seem to be when you look back at them from a birds-eye point of view.
Looking back, 2024 will forever be the year that we went all in on the flower farm and had both of us going in on it full time for the first time. Taking a business from a part-time side hustle to something that will fully support your family is no small feat, and we definitely ran into plenty of hiccups and missteps along the way. However, 2024 also will forever be known as “The Year of Manna” for us, because we SO CLEARLY saw God’s hand at work in the daily details of our lives, whether that was from getting *just* the exact sale we needed in the nick of time or getting in touch with *just* the right person or customer or sales outlet that we needed to keep moving forward.
The farm definitely kept us constantly busy throughout the year, but we still managed to squeeze in some fun family outings and memories. We also had ups and downs in other ways, but such is life, and all in all, I’m grateful for all that 2024 taught us!
Here’s a breakdown of our year month by month.
January
As we started off our year, our biggest focus was on how we could financially make it work with taking the flower farm from a part-time thing to a full-time thing. This meant taking full advantage of the slower pace of winter to look into sales outlets, expansion plans, and our planting schedules. We met with a potential investor about a piece of property in the next town over, and things were progressing pretty well . . . until they weren’t. He basically started ghosting us out of the blue, but before that point, we had made some good headway in figuring out options for USDA loans and funding and such, which should help us down the road if we ever find some land to buy. We also contacted quite a few landowners about if they were willing to sell. It didn’t come to anything, but hopefully we sowed some seeds for future possibilities.
Matt and I attended the Utah Flower Conference together at the end of the month, which was fun and always worth attending. They usually make it equal parts about both growing and running a business, with a floral design demo always thrown in, too. The two of us also took an online class together (the Floret flower farming course), so January held a lot of education! Speaking of education, I also started teaching a second section of my cut flower gardening class at the local college, which meant I was teaching every Tuesday and Wednesday night throughout January. Some of the students in those classes would prove pivotal later in our season, when we were needing some extra help and outlets for the farm.
Another important thing that happened in January was that the guy I’ve been going to for years to help me with my back injury (and who basically gave me my active life back thanks to his specialized deep tissue massage therapy that totally fixed my back pain) asked me to do some marketing and website work for him in trade-out for my monthly sessions. This allowed me to not only get all of my massage therapy covered for the whole year, but it also gave me some great experience with marketing, social media, and websites in general, which only helped inform my own business further.
February
In February, we definitely started feeling some serious winter restlessness. Luckily, we had a decent number of mild days in the month so that we could start prepping the farm, which was especially good because we expanded our grow space by about 8X what we were doing before. I finished up teaching my cut flower classes, and I started having a lot of brides reach out to our farm about our DIY buckets for their weddings, several of whom ended up booking with us. We also were contacted by one of the largest floral wholesalers in the state wondering if we’d be willing to partner with them, which opened up a months-long conversation that would eventually lead to us selling some of our stems to them later in the season.
We celebrated Valentine’s Day together as a family (a day late as always, to take advantage of all the deals in the stores), which the kids love. Matt and I don’t bother too much with the holiday for ourselves, but it’s fun to get little chocolates and trinkets for the kids. One really fun thing we attended this month was a family party with my side celebrating Chinese New Year.
Church-wise, Matt’s calling changed (in our church, we voluntarily serve in different capacities, depending on where those in leadership feel inspired that we should go), and he started serving in the Elders Quorum presidency. Throughout this whole winter though, we had to take turns about which one of us was going to church and which of us would stay home with Naomi, since her doctors had warned us to keep her away from public places as much as possible.
The beginning of the month was hard because we were feeling the definite slog of winter, but by the end of the month, we felt like we were gaining serious traction with the farm, and it helped that we were enjoying a lot more sunshine by then, too.
March
At the beginning of March, I finished up the marketing work I was doing for my friend, which meant I could fully devote all my resources and energy on our own business. March was a big month for us, as we opened up our mushroom compost sales to the public and ended up hitting our sales goal for the month, too. We did have some harder things come up in the business as we started to get a bit of pushback from certain people in the community, but all in all, it was a really solid start to our sales year, and we felt a distinct sense of momentum for what we were trying to do.
On the family front, Naomi went in to get ear tube surgery, which ended up being even more of a blessing than we thought. Not only did it solve the frequent ear infections she’d been getting, but when they went in to put in the tubes, they ended up draining off a ton of super thick liquid that had pooled in her ear and that had caused her to never have been able to pass a hearing test since birth on that side. After the surgery, she fully passed the hearing test in both ears, and it was so fun to watch her over the next few days as we could definitely tell she could all of a sudden hear so much more!
We also had the most amazing opportunity to get a private tour of the Manti Temple before it opened to the public at large, and it was incredible to get a behind-the-scenes look at this historic building built by pioneers. Our family also enjoyed doing our annual “Green Feast” for St. Patrick’s Day and setting out “traps” to try and catch a leprechaun. We also celebrated Easter at the end of the month with our usual egg hunt through the city, as well as the egg hunt we do for the kids in our backyard.
April
In April, our cut flower season officially opened, and sales were stronger than the previous year from the get-go. Some outlets didn’t get off to a smooth flow at the beginning like we’d expected (like certain wholesale outlets), but we ended up opening up a self-serve cooler in our garage as a sort of honor system farmstand, and it took off immediately. Our bouquet subscriptions also started going out in April, and when we opened up Mother’s Day subscriptions for the first time ever at the end of this month, those ended up being a decently strong seller, too. When we also hit our sales target for April, we were feeling pretty elated — us going full-time was really going to work!
It wasn’t all rosy on the farm, though. We lost our most expensive crop (about $6,000 worth of ranunculus) due to a terrible aphid infestation at the first of the month, and we were about run ragged with the amount of planting that needed to be done…thousands and thousands of plugs. We also had to figure out how to balance both the planting and the selling with the regular household stuff we still had going on, which was a new balancing act for sure.
In more fun news, both of our girls celebrated birthdays in April. Our oldest, Raven, turned 9 in the middle of the month, and Naomi, our youngest, turned one at the end. We celebrated both days by having grandparents over for dinner and cake. The kids had their spring break at the beginning of the month, which we kept low key by taking the kids to a park and out to eat during the week, since we had to focus most of our time on planting out our hardy stuff at that same time. At the end of the month, Raven started her third season of softball.
May
The pace of May was truly insane — Matt and I were both putting in 50+ hour weeks on the farm between all the planting, harvesting, and selling. I took on my first large custom order for the local college (ten centerpieces for an event) the same week of Mother’s Day, which was bonkers, for sure. On the actual Mother’s Day Sunday, I was honestly feeling like I never wanted to look at a flower again, especially because we had all the Mother’s Day subscriptions to deliver on top of keeping our new farmstand stocked. It was absolutely wonderful to have our sales so strong on our first real attempt at “doing” the whole flowers-for-Mother’s-Day thing, but MAN, that week was intense.
Of course, all of that farm craziness also coincided with all the end-of-school programs and graduations and whatnot, plus Raven still had her softball games. I guess it was a good thing, really, because it meant we weren’t focusing on farm stuff ALL the time, but it also meant we really never got any breaks. Matt and I had our 13-year anniversary on May 7, and we celebrated it by doing…nothing but farm stuff 🙂 This was actually the first year in memory we didn’t do anything to celebrate, and it was just a testament to how 2024 really was for us as we shifted our business to a full-time venture.
During the same week as all the Mother’s Day hoopla, Naomi had to go in and do a sleep study about 90 minutes north of us. Matt was the one who ended up taking her in overnight, and he and Naomi both spent a very rough night with her taped up to all sorts of beeping machines and other apparatuses. We found out that she does indeed have mild to moderate sleep apnea, which explained some of the oxygen dips we kept seeing at night.
At the end of May, I experienced one of the most terrifying moments of my life — Naomi had been sick for a few days and only seemed to be getting worse, and her oxygen levels and heart rate started dropping like crazy. We took her to the clinic to make sure it wasn’t just our machine that wasn’t reading things correctly, and they immediately called an ambulance. I ended up spending the next three days with her in the hospital, where they finally tested her for strep throat at my urging, which came back positive (they hadn’t bothered testing her for it before because they said it would be “highly unlikely” that a child of her age would have it). As soon as she started antibiotics, she started showing rapid improvement, but the end of May was very, very stressful as I spent that time with her in the hospital.
Luckily, at the same time we were dealing with an unexpected hospital stay, my dad flew out from Missouri to visit, and he was able to come help us with childcare and take us out to eat to give us a bit of a break. Having an unexpected hospitalization did remind us though of how wonderfully supportive our community is, and we experienced a lot of generous acts and little miracles during that time.
June
We finally had a slight let-up in pace come June, when we celebrated all the planting being done by going out to eat at our favorite burger place and taking the kids to the nearby park. We had expected our June sales to be a little lower than May’s (since there was no Mother’s Day holiday, obviously), but we hadn’t expected them to dip quite as much as they did. Thankfully, I got my paycheck from the college for the class I’d taught in winter that month, which helped shore up the shortage we had.
I took on some more new challenges in the business in June by saying yes to arranging for my first wedding, as well as saying yes to my first funeral arrangement. I’d never done either before, so it was a big step forward for me to accept and go forward with it. Both were reasonably good experiences and also taught me a lot about how I would (and would not) want to do take on those kinds of commissions in the future.
Raven finished up her softball season (she showed soooo much improvement this year, largely because we actually had time to practice with her this year unlike last season, when Naomi was in the NICU the whole time). Mathias also turned 6 in the middle of the month right after Father’s Day, and we had a pool party here at the house with grandparents coming over for presents and ice cream.
On the 24th of the month, our friends’ son, who was almost the exact same age as Mathias, ended up passing away after a failed transplant. I spent a lot of the last week of June trying to help where we could there, but I was devastated for them, and I shed a lot of tears at the end of June. It helped that the day after his passing, I attended the temple with my niece, who was going for the first time as she prepared to serve a mission. It gave me a chance to have a good talk with my sister (who also lost a child) and to remind me that families can be eternal, which is a core part of our faith’s beliefs.
July
In July, the major wholesaler who had reached out to us in February finally started sourcing stuff from us, which wasn’t a minute too soon since our July sales hit a major slump, which I now know is quite common in the floral industry. The sales were still low enough though that we had to scramble to find another option as we were composting hundreds and hundreds of stems a week, so we worked out a deal with a friend to start selling our flowers up north at a large farmer’s market, and we also agreed to do a special farmer’s market ourselves for Pioneer Day, which wasn’t in the original plans. With all those efforts, we were able to scrape together what we needed to cover another month, but it was definitely financially stressful, and it showed us how up-and-down our numbers were likely to be in this business from month to month, and how we subsequently needed to be super careful about how we managed all the finances.
Our three older kids went up north to “Grandma Camp” for a few days to allow Matt and I some time to get some farm stuff done and spend a few quieter days at home with the baby. That coincided with the 4th of July holiday, so when we went to pick them up from my mom’s, we also went to her annual 4th of July brunch at the same time. The older two kids also did swim lessons in July (Hyrum’s class was all sold out by the time I got around to signing up), and we also celebrated the Utah holiday of Pioneer Day on the 24th and went to Lamb Days, which is a fair that one of the towns in our county puts on every year. We were joined by my friend who had just lost her son, which was good. To round out the month, we (just Matt and I) also went to the wedding luncheon for my stepbrother and his new wife and got a chance to catch up with some people I knew from way back in the day when I was a kid. It was nice to finally get in a better balance of fun things along with all the usual farm work.
August
August. Was. Insane.
We provided flowers for 8 weddings in the span of just 3 weeks, hosted our first u-pick event (which we got really positive feedback from), did a farm tour on another night for the informal garden club I’m in, and we kept sending out hundreds of stems weekly to all our outlets, not to mention constantly restocking our farmstand (where sales definitely started to pick up once school was back in session).
Matt’s brother Luke also got married in August, and we provided all the flowers for that. It took two full, overflowing car loads to deliver it all, but it turned out so beautiful. Raven was a flower girl for the ceremony, and Matt gave a speech at the end with the rest of his brothers. It was a wonderful day, and it’s what the picture at the top of this post is from.
In the middle of the month, Raven and Mathias went back to school (Raven starting 4th grade, Mathias 1st). It was Mathias’s first time going to all-day school, and he LOVES it. He’s the only kid I know who cries whenever there’s a holiday! Naomi started crawling in earnest in August, which meant she could start to get into Trouble-with-a-capital-T. We also went to a fun pool party hosted by our ward (church congregation), which has become a yearly tradition, and which was Naomi’s first real time going swimming. Oh, and I was asked to give a presentation for one of the nearby county’s Chamber of Commerce luncheons and ended up getting food poisoning literally 10 minutes before it started, so that was interesting. Luckily I was still able to give my presentation, and it went well enough that I was actually immediately asked afterward to give another presentation at one of our own county’s Chamber of Commerce events a few months later.
August was filled with so much beauty, but it also had an intense pace that couldn’t be sustained.
September
To the surprise of no one, I felt pretty burned out by September. I’d been putting in 40-55 hours a week on the flower farm pretty much since March, and with all the new school stuff going on in September on top of everything else, Matt started to have to take over more and more of the typical things I usually did (like harvesting and arranging) so that I could still continue to do the sales and marketing. Matt was asked to be a judge at a local business pitch competition in September, which was a good experience that we’ve now both had (and that we were happy to do since the pitch competitions I won in 2023 were instrumental in allowing us to take our business full time at all).
In early September, just after Labor Day, Hyrum started his second year of preschool, which he was more than ready for. His first year, he wasn’t too enthused most days, but this year he has been a lot more animated about it, maybe partly because he misses his older siblings when they’re at school and wants to do whatever they’re doing. One of the sweet things about it just being him and Naomi at home most days though is how sweet their bond has gotten. He is so good with her, and he loves having a playmate around (esp. a playmate who’s younger than him, for once!). And Naomi will follow Hyrum around wherever he goes, and she definitely misses him when he’s gone at preschool a couple times a week.
In the middle of the month, we’d planned for a second u-pick night because so many people had requested that we do another one. Unfortunately, we got hit with a freak frost the night before the event, and we had to refund all the pre-sold tickets (hundreds of dollars worth) PLUS we hadn’t harvested in any of the stems we could have dried before the freeze came and killed them (thousands of dollars worth), so that was all money down the drain. Hard, hard lesson learned. Fortunately, we’d booked a super last-minute wedding the day before the frost, which used up a lot of our highest value flowers and that brought in a decent chunk of unexpected income, so I guess it all kind of evened out.
In medical issues, we had it confirmed that Naomi has scoliosis, which explains why she crawls the way she does. We don’t know yet if it’s infant scoliosis (which she could grow out of when she learns to walk) or if it’s more permanent, but we’ve been working with her physical therapist on doing what we can to help straighten that out. Mathias also went in for allergy testing in September, just because his seasonal allergies are soooo horrific. Sure enough, he showed severe allergies to literally almost every last thing they tested for (other than dogs and a few other animals), so we started talking about the possibility of him getting allergy shots for the next few years to help mitigate his body’s reaction.
To help with my mental health and just because it’s our family tradition, we started going on weekly family hikes in September whenever the weather was good on a Sunday afternoon. It is one of our favorite things to do as a family, and it definitely helped give us some rest and recuperation after months of craziness from farming.
At the end of the month, Matt and I both turned 38, and we kept the celebrations small by going out to eat at our favorite burger place and then going on a particularly amazing hike nearby. Low-key and simple, just like we prefer!
October
We still had some frost-hardy cut flowers that had survived the frost in September, so we still had flowers to sell until about mid-October. Once a hard frost hit in earnest though, it was game on to start all the fall prep, starting with the digging of all the dahlias. October was also when we made a HUGE decision for our flower farm and decided to join a growers co-op up north. It was something we’d *almost* done at the beginning of 2024, but we wondered if making the drive every week would be worth it. After lots of conversations back and forth with the co-op’s board members, we decided it would likely be a good fit for both of us, and we officially signed on for 2025. What that means is that it gives us a physical market location to sell our stems at weekly, as well as a built-in customer base of florists (in a much larger city/metropolitan area, too). We’re really excited about this new partnership, and we think it will open a lot of doors for us.
Since we decided to join the co-op, it meant that we had to sever ties with the wholesaler we had been selling to this season. We would have been willing to give them more of a chance, except for the fact that they weren’t sourcing nearly as much from us as we’d been initially led to believe, and the communication wasn’t great. Basically, we needed an outlet where we could send up everything or most everything we had, and the co-op basically provides that chance. It might not all sell every week up there (and I know there will definitely be a learning curve), but it should give us a much more steady flow of income throughout the season.
I was asked to judge a local FFA competition in the floral design category in October too, which was an honor. I liked getting to do it with two of the florists who buy from our farm, and it was fun getting to know them better and learning from their expertise.
We had a cardiology appointment for Naomi this month, and I was a bit blind-sided when the doctor told me that not only did he think we were going to have to operate much sooner than we’d been originally told (when Naomi was 3-5 years old), but that she also might need open heart surgery, possibly as soon as the end of the year. We were always told she would likely be a good candidate for the less invasive catheter heart procedure, so this news came as a shock. The doctor was largely going in a more aggressive direction because Naomi wasn’t gaining weight as expected, so we asked for him to defer his final decision until we’d met with some feeding experts and dug around a bit more into her eating habits.
We rounded out the month with Halloween celebrations, starting with my mom’s annual Halloween party for all the grandkids and ending with our city trunk or treat party and the traditional trick or treating the actual night of.
November
We needed to inject some fun into our lives (esp. since it had gotten too wet/muddy to hike), so we surprised the kids with a zoo day the first week of November. We pulled them out of school, my mom came with us, and then we finished off the day at Pizza Pie cafe, one of the kids’ favorites. It was exactly what we all needed, and we really lucked out with the weather AND with the price we were able to get at the zoo. We’d never seen the animals so active, and we all had a blast.
It was a good thing we had some extra fun in the month, because the rest of the month ended up holding a crazy amount of medical appointments, almost all of which were at least 90 minutes away. We decided to go ahead with allergy shots for Mathias (and actually for me, as well), so the two of us had weekly appointments an hour and a half away to do cluster shots for those, which basically put us on an accelerated schedule. We kind of turned it into a “date” for the two of us, and we’d treat ourselves to Chick-Fil-A after each shot. Poor Mathias was getting 6 shots a week (3 in each arm), and while he’s gotten better at tolerating it, it’s still not his favorite.
We were also trying to figure out the eating/weight gain thing with Naomi, which took us up north plenty of times, too. After doing a swallow study (her first), we discovered she’d likely been aspirating as she ate, which was probably a major contributor in her bad reflux and in her very sensitive gag reflex. We immediately started thickening her liquids, and we saw almost immediate improvement. We also started meeting with a feeding specialist and a dietitian, and thanks to them and the thickening, we started seeing some definite forward progress.
In November, Matt’s church calling also got changed, and he ended up in the Primary (teaching Hyrum’s class, actually). This means that our whole family is in Primary for the second hour of church, since I’m the pianist 🙂 I kinda love it!
We had a small Thanksgiving celebration at my in-laws’ house, which was promptly followed up with all of us getting sick with some kind of flu-like nonsense. We opened up 2025 bouquet subscriptions that same weekend, and it was a good thing I’d done so much pre-marketing for them because I was in no shape to do much more than open them up and send out an email. Sales were decently strong, which gave me hope that we could do this another year, especially since our compost sales were much, much lower than they had been the previous autumn. They were low enough, in fact, that we started to discuss in earnest the idea of Matt taking on a job in the winter, even if just part-time.
We rounded out November by completing all the most urgent fall farm tasks, including planting our high tunnel, creating and planting a new trench for all our spring tulips, and putting in thousands of daffodil bulbs to perennialize. We also were selling bulbs and peony roots to the public throughout the month, which helped offset the lower-than-expected compost sales.
December
Basically the first half of December was all sickness. We had something like influenza left over from Thanksgiving for the first little bit, then all of us passed around a horrendous stomach flu bug for about 10 days after that (I actually got it TWICE). That would have all been bad enough, but in kind of a good news/bad news thing, Matt did secure a part-time job for the same guy I did the marketing for back in the spring, which meant he actually needed to stay up at his parents’ house during the week since the job is over two hours away. So while the kids and I were all horrendously sick, he wasn’t around as he’d started training by that point, so I was on my own. It was pretty rough, I won’t lie. Definitely some of my hardest weeks of the year.
In kind of good news/bad news, both Mathias and I ended up having negative reactions to the very end of the cluster shot therapy when we were nearing the max dose of our allergy shots, which meant that we could no longer get multiple done at once but that we could also start doing them at the clinic right by our house. While this meant we couldn’t continue with the accelerated process, we had already saved ourselves about 4 months by doing it for as long as we had, and it made things a lot easier logistically to switch it over to our local clinic rather than always having to make the 90-minute drive. Mathias was also super relieved to need only two shots per week rather than 4 or 6!
Near the beginning of the month, Naomi went in for a sedated echocardiogram since the last one we’d gotten in October hadn’t given a super clear reading because she was so wiggly. The sedated echo largely had positive news — it showed that we might be able to go in and do the catheter heart procedure after all (although we won’t know for sure until we’re doing the final decisions for closing the hole in her heart), and because her weight gain had been better since thickening her liquids and trying what the feeding therapists suggested, her cardiologist decided to put off any more decisions until she turns 2 in April.
On the same day Naomi was in the hospital getting her echo done, I got an email telling me our farm had won a small grant I’d applied for, which would cover the cost of a more heavy-duty walk-behind tiller. It was wonderful news to get on a high stress day, and the tiller will be a huge help in the spring when we’re prepping beds. Other than the grant, there wasn’t too much going on with the farm in December, as it’s really the only month we let ourselves mostly take off from farm work (other than social media posting and some housekeeping things here and there).
We celebrated Hyrum’s 5th birthday up at my in-laws’ house in the middle of the month since we were already up there for other Christmas parties. And speaking of parties, we were actually able to attend all or almost all the usual Christmas parties for the first time in a few years, between COVID throwing things off and then us not being able to take Naomi out in public last winter. It was a lot of fun, but it meant our schedules got crazy out of whack since we were making 4-hour roundtrip drives multiple times a week, so by the time we were at the last week of December, we all just crashed and basically did nothing at home all week. (Glorious!)
December was the month where we got hit with a lot of big expenses, many of them unexpected. On our way to a family party just before Christmas, our van just totally died, which ended up being a $1,000 repair. Then, just a few days after Christmas, our water heater went out, which was another $1700 repair we couldn’t put off. Remember how I talked about how 2024 will forever be known as “The Manna Year” for us? Well, angels showed up in multiple forms and in multiple ways for this too, and we ended up being able to cover all the expenses. God is so good, and people are too.
Christmas was wonderful, as it always seems to be with small kids. Our oldest did finally get let in on the Santa secret this year, and I was worried how she would handle it, but I think she was ready. She said she was a little sad but that she figured that’s what it had to be, and I think she liked feeling a little more grown up since we let her in on some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Santa ended up getting our kids a Nintendo switch for Christmas, which might have been a giant mistake, ha ha — we’ve definitely had to put time limits and boundaries on it pretty strongly from the get-go. The kids love it though, and it’s been a fun way for us all to unwind together a night or two a week.
All in all, I went into the end of the year feeling both reflective and grateful for all the year had taught us. Matt and I know we can’t do another farm year like 2024 (it was too many hours on both of us with too much financial uncertainty), but we think we are well-positioned now in 2025 to have a much more stable year financially. We actually are planning on hiring our first part-time employee just before the season starts, which should be a massive help if we’re able to swing it.
2024 was definitely another landmark year for us, which I feel like I’ve been saying every year for the past 7 years. Even though it was intense, we also were able to see that we could, in fact, have success in flower farming full-time, and as more and more doors have kept on opening over the past twelve months, we’re hoping it’s only going to get better.
I would love to know how you would sum up your 2024 year if you had to choose just a word or a phrase to describe it! Comment below and let me know if you feel comfortable! 🙂
