Gosh is it June already?! Spring has flown by!
Lovingly Gathered by Rachel
Hi, I’m Rachel and I’m leading Regather’s journey into growing cut flowers. I’ve been working at Regather since 2016 and you’ll often find me in the office doing the finances or helping with box packing. But I’ve had my eye on flower growing for a while and I previously attended a cut flower growing course that was really inspiring. For 2022, we’ve decided to take the plunge and add organic flowers to our growing site and Sheffield flower deliveries are now available across Sheffield.
It’s quite early days but we’ve made a lot of progress and we’ve got our first 50m bed of annuals all planted up. The Farm team: Doug, Abigail, Dave, Pippa and our amazing volunteers have helped me raise the hundreds of seeds we’ve sown for 2022. Next on the list is establishing some perennial flower beds.
I’ve always loved flowers and grow lots at home in my garden and allotment, and I often felt that the flower bouquets that I see available are not quite the kinds of things I like – my absolute favourite bouquets are wild and natural looking. And as I got more interested in floristry I started to read a lot more about the environmental impact of cut flowers. In “How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything” Mike Berners-Lee describes out-of-season cut flowers as one of the most “carbon-unfriendly ways of getting rid of your cash”. I also recently had a chat with a local florist in Sheffield who described experiencing symptoms such as rashes from handling flowers that have been sprayed with chemicals.
So just as we believe in something better for our fruit and vegetables, so too we can imagine a better alternative for flowers. Local flowers, grown in season with organic principles, and that support us to attract insects to our land – sounds idyllic!
One of the things I’ve loved about delivering posies and bouquets for customers across Sheffield is bringing them a gift that truly represents the season in all its glory. The other great thing about growing on our farm has been all the additions available to me that I haven’t sown specifically for cut flowers – so utilising the green manures that are so vital in organic growing, or the fact that we will leave our coriander in the polytunnel to go to flower because they attract certain beneficial insects for the other crops. Herbs like dill and oregano bring scents to bouquets that are not that common, and certainly rare in your supermarket bunch.
With mid-summer fast approaching we will be seeing good quantities of flowers very soon and I’m hoping to start offering buckets of flowers for sale to local florists and possibly pick your own buckets too. Other ways to buy our flowers include medium or large bouquets, jam jar posies or even flower subscriptions.
For those really keen here’s a bit of a list of the flowers you can expect to see this summer from us:
Nigella, Snapdragons, Sweet peas, Cosmos, Gypsophila, grasses, lots of sunflowers, Rudbeckia, Verbena Bonariensis, Chrysanthemum carinatum, Amaranthus tricolor, Calendula, Dhalias, Tagettes, and herbs like oregano, apple mint, cinnamon basil, and dill.
If you are a florist and would be interested in buying our flowers wholesale, please do get in touch via email to rachel.boyce@regather.net. Alternatively learn more about our Sheffield flower delivery service here.
Want to stay up to date with all things flowers? Follow our new Instagram account @regatherflowers
