Massive Mothers Day Tulip Sales Transform This Farm?

I have tulips everywhere. These are my tulips, but these aren't the only tulips that I have. I have tulips in the cooler, I have tulips in the field, I have tulips in the farm stand, and it is a good thing because this is Mother's Day weekend and I need all the flowers I can get. The busiest day of the year for florists is Valentine's Day, which doesn't help us because we live in Canada so we don't have anything to sell then. But the second busiest day for florists is Mother's Day and we can definitely sell some flowers then. So our goal is to sell all the flowers this weekend. We are going all out, as many bouquets as we can get. We have a mountain we're going to be sending down to the farmer's market, we have a mountain we're going to be filling the farm stand with, we're doing $20 bunches, $30 bunches, $40 bunches. Our goal, our conservative goal, is to sell $2,000 this weekend and there's a chance we could do even more. To make $2,000 we have to sell a hundred bouquets and I don't know if we can do that. This is our first market of the year and there's lots of things that could go wrong. The roadside stand has only been open for a handful of days. People just aren't used to pulling over there yet to buy their flowers. So I have some real doubts as to whether we can make $2,000 this weekend. These flowers that I've given myself are nice but the real Mother's Day gift I expect from you Ian is to make it happen. Look at this cat. Look at this cat thing. Look at this cat thing. The walk-in cooler is packed. It's completely filled up with flowers. I have some pre-made bouquets. I worked last night to put together a bunch so that I have them to just keep putting out onto the farm stand today. The other thing I need to do today though is I need to turn all the rest of this into bouquets. Today is go time. Last night I also got some of my cases of flowers. I opened these up and they have tulips just with the ball. So I took these put them into a bucket of water and now now they're looking really good. Whatever is kind of still looking fairly closed and looking fairly tight is stuff that I can use to sell. So this is really gonna bump up my numbers and also bump up my options because um you know there's only so much that's out there. This case I'm especially happy to see that I got some of this. These ones here, colors on these are so beautiful and I don't really have anything anything like that. But what we need to do right now there's only two bouquets out of the farm stand so we need to take some of these pre-made ones get them out there so that we can make some money. Those look pretty good. They look pretty good. I love these color combos. Hours! Gotta get them in here and get them sold. We need to keep a close eye on this hand today because this this is when I anticipate the bouquets are going to start disappearing quite quickly. We're just kind of starting into that time when people will be stopping. It's a balance. I don't want to put too many of the bouquets out here. You know we we have more in the cooler. I could bring all those up. The only problem is even though we have our air conditioner on it still gets warm in here and as it gets warm the tulips open up more and more. So I'm kind of only wanting them to be on the stand for the day. I want to sell them. I would rather sell them and only have eight on display at a time than to put out 20 have it look decadent for anyone who stops but actually end up with you know 10 left over at the end of the night that you know are just kind of giveaways at that point. We have the farmer's market tomorrow morning so anything that doesn't sell here we're bringing down to the farmer's market as well and and if I just bring more down there there's going to be so many customers at the farmer's market. Part of the reason why I'm so strict about selling them the same day is tulips don't have the best vase life. I specifically choose my flowers for flowers that are going to have really long vase life. Tulips are probably one of the things that we sell that have the shortest vase life but you know they're so special and there's nothing really else at this time of year so you know I'm happy to do it but tulips is kind of like five days you know these doubles seven days is what they last so when I sell them I want the singles to still be closed the doubles I want them like opened up a little bit but I don't want them like totally blown open this is the beginning of the season this is the beginning of the year I want to be building happy customers I don't want people to come by buy a bunch of tulips and then be like yeah that place their flowers don't last very long what's up next now we harvest the system that I've come up with I pull them and I separate them out the ones with the bulbs and then the ones with them not and then I have to come in here and I need to wash and prep them and this is one of the things that takes a lot of time I've been picking them by color and then I've also been picking them so that they are with like their color friends so when I go to like fill a bucket this is also going to be kind of what I'm working with to make the arrangements the stems are so long on these that I've been pulling the bottom leaf off which also makes it a lot easier to clean makes it a lot more space a lot more easier to work with and then they wash up really nice because honestly like these two there's almost too much stem you know that's kind of that's a better length I have a feeling that this is going to be a traditional farmer's market night for us one of those late night affairs well I am not staying up till four in the morning because I also have to get up and go man the farm stand um but but yeah I do want to make a thousand dollars worth of bouquets for going down to the farmer's market it's been really fun to be selling again you know because half the half the fun of growing is to make these like mountains of flowers and mountains of food you know like like why would you ever go and harvest a thousand flowers for yourself if you're like a home gardener like that's just that's silly unless you're like it's my wedding you know but so to get to go out and you know just make these armfuls of of tulip bouquets over and over and over again it's it's decadent it's always decadent you don't get that kind of abundance and decadence when you're just doing it as a hobby so it's it's always fun where the tulips rank on your favorite flowers list my favorite is hellebores I'm not necessarily like oh let me list off my top 10 favorite flowers um I always joke my favorite flower is is money but this this I can honestly say we've always had tulips in our home garden you know I always spent the money and put in the effort to plant plant tulips you know in in all of our different homes it's not like we only have tulips that are growing in the farm we have tulips in our landscaping and I'm not picking those because those are for me and I love them obviously I like tulips so how many bouquets do you think this big bucket of tulips will make not actually that many the bouquets have 10 tulips so what I've doing is I've been doing five doubles five singles so you know this will need a like a bucket to go along with it of singles seven seven bouquets per bucket right so we need to get a lot of these buckets if I'm sending you down with 50 to the farmer's market I have enough for the farmer's market but if we want to sell 100 because we're also going to do 50 at farm stand um then I'm kind of dependent on us being able to pick more and also more opening up over the next day or two okay let's go get some more so it's been about an hour since we went up and checked the farm stand so we're bringing some reinforcements because I suspect we've had some customers money this one doesn't sell I'm bringing it in for me I saw that one you know what I thought oh yeah because it's an all-white bouquet I was like that one ain't selling but I I never regret the all-white bouquet not selling because I love an all-white bouquet we are doing a little bit more than just digging up tulips today because we are going to be making bouquets what we've been doing up to this point is bunches of tulips I've been including you know like a kale with the yellow tulips um you know a tree branch with the other colors but to do the bouquets I need more greenery so more of this kind of stuff I need flowers other flowers to add to the mix which means we're gonna have to do a little bit of scrounging because there isn't very much at this time of year but I need more than just tulips to make these bouquets special what are you doing we are harvesting hellebores for our fancy mother's day bouquets the leaves are growing in now at this point so you know the the flowers aren't super visible and this is the point at which they keep really good once they've made these little pods we cut all these out and use them up we're always sampling some of our grasses finest finest locally grown grasses don't throw that in the bucket water pouring out of it okay let's go to the front a little bit more flower get some of this they're so perfectly straight you got enough stuff nope we have the most important thing of all we've been growing this since june in anticipation of this weekend kale flowers from our overwintered what do you want oh i'm so excited tomorrow is the first market of the year and in news that will surprise absolutely nobody who follows our channel we are behind it's late at night and you know i haven't even started packing my truck i haven't even started looking at the stuff to pack into my truck yet which is fine because this market is going to be only flowers and so normally you know the bulk of the work to go down to the market is prepping all the veggie stuff they take up more space you have to wash them in you know like blah blah blah it's a lot of work without veggies just bring down flowers it'll be a lot easier on me serena she is starting to work away at uh the bouquets i think she's about to get started on those so let's go uh let's go surprise her and see what she is doing are you on guard duty you want guard duty hello how's it going are you feeling are you feeling on the ball no because it's very late and i have made zero bouquets i never said i didn't want to work at night i just said i don't want to work till morning at night you know here's our problem we're night owls yeah i'm a night owl so i don't mind working at night yeah you know as long as i don't have to get up early in the morning which ian has to so that's why i stay up late and ian goes to bed and then does the market what time do you think you're gonna be up till tonight i mean i have to get the stuff ready for the market so i'm gonna do my best to be efficient and get her done we didn't we didn't really sell very much today so after i smack talked about how we were gonna have such an amazing weekend now i'm starting to kind of double guess myself so i'm like how many do i need if i send the million down to the down to the market and they don't sell well i think that they will sell at the market i think we'll sell a lot tomorrow from the roadside but i think sunday will be slow sunday's mother's day though is it yeah oh so last year last year we did good because people were going to mother's day lunches and so you know that was that was the day when it was good to be out there earlier kind of like 10 to noon and we actually sold a ton of people being like oh i saw you and i thought i should grab a bouquet to bring with me on my way to see my mom or my wife or my daughter whoever it was they were buying it for you know what you're getting for mother's day well i already told you two thousand dollars worth of sales make it happen i was gonna say flowers i got a kitten too the very first bouquet that i'm gonna work on is something with these beautiful red orange and yellow doubles i'm gonna put together a bunch of these these look amazing so instead of pulling everything out of the cooler i'm just gonna work with these i'm gonna turn them into bouquets and then i'm gonna get them back in it's getting close to midnight and i'm done for the night serena she is i don't know she's like less than 10 bouquets into it but at least she's got it all set up and she's starting to pound through them now but she definitely has a late night ahead of her i have to go to bed though so this is where i say good night it's market morning it's about 5 30 now i have to pack up the flowers and get going i'm just excited at this point to get to the farmer's market get this all set up but first i need to load that truck up well that was pretty easy it only took me about 20 minutes to load the truck from start to finish i think that's a new record so i'm gonna hit the road and you know get down there get set up for this first market of the year farmer's market is officially open and it's raining but i don't think that that's going to slow this market down it's mother's day weekend people are coming rain or shine i'm bracing for impact i think i'm gonna sell basically everything today we're off to a pretty good start we've sold five bouquets that's a good start and lots of people are stopping by and commenting on how beautiful they look hoping for a good day we are selling so many flowers today we're already at 700 and it's only an hour and a half into the market we haven't even really hit some of the big rushes of the day yet and and i don't know if i'm gonna have anything left for it it's really exciting news it's 10 30 now and it's official we're sellouts we only have one bouquet left we came with like 60 bouquets and they all sold so fast we're only halfway through the market and we're already sold out and sold over a hundred dollars worth of dried flowers today it's really excited about you know like starting the season with such a great market first farmers market of 2022 is in the books we sold somewhere around $1,250 which is amazing because that's entirely flowers so it's not our biggest market ever but it is the most we've ever sold in flowers before serena has been selling bouquets from the farm stand uh so this isn't the only money that we made today time to go home and i'll help serena out with the uh with the farm stand running out of flowers last night when i went to bed at 4 30 the cooler was filled to the absolute brim with flowers we literally could not fit any more flowers into there um and as of now it's like i'm running out this is this is basically what i have left there's a couple buckets down here um which looks like a lot but you know this isn't very much it's pretty incredible how many flowers we've sold i did a rough count okay there's i think we've sold 35 from the road stand at least really actually it's a lot that's a lot that makes sense why we're running out of flowers because i figured i had enough flowers to do 50 50 bunches um here as well as the 50 that i sent down to the market you know the problem with that is it's not even mother's day yet tomorrow's mother's day um so we still have another day of selling but um most of the mother's day selling happens in the morning so i'm just gonna keep going i'm very tired and my back hurts um and i don't normally complain about those things so that means that i am actually very tired and my back actually really hurts um but no rest for the wicked i'm gonna go i'm gonna get every single tulip harvested turned into a bouquet so that we can stick them into the roadside stand and sell them all tomorrow morning almost a two thousand dollar day pretty impressive i'll celebrate on monday when i am like farm stand closed due to being a big old sellout you know what ian said to me today he said you better buy more tulips because we only ordered as many as we had this year and it's definitely looking like we could use even more i love you okay i need to make more bouquets so flower farmers party on a mother's day saturday night still making bouquets homeward stretch i just need to turn everything in this room into bouquets and then i don't have to do any more until tomorrow i wanted a two thousand dollar weekend we did a two thousand dollar day you know everything we sell tomorrow is gravy this is the last bucket of tulips that need to be processed and after this it's just bouquet making this means the everything is processed and like going to be sold tomorrow from the cooler which is crazy i have all the bouquets done up that i'm going to do tonight still fairly late it's 12 30 but that is also my actual bedtime i got 27 bouquets for tomorrow so you know if we if we can sell them then that's definitely hitting that 500 600 dollar point the plan was to have a lazy morning having 27 bouquets made just keeping the farm stand stocked but it's you know only 11 o'clock now and we are almost sold out so what i'm doing right now is i'm getting out there i'm harvesting and i'm desperately making more bouquets and the more i sell this weekend the more money we make which is super exciting i could stop i could say that we're sold out but i still have lots of tulips out in the farm this is the weekend when people want to buy flowers quite often people are burnt out on flowers next weekend so this is when i want to sell them if i can't don't those look gorgeous together i love how dramatic these colors are all right four more for the stand let's go up there and see if there's any left we still have a few up here which is good you'll never hear me be like thank god we didn't sell out um but now now we're nice and stocked now we got a good number mother's day is always crazy like we said earlier mother's day is the second busiest flower day of the year um so you know i'm definitely feeling it i've been i've been going hard since you know thursday morning type thing but it's so satisfying to see these all disappear it's so exciting you know i don't i don't care if we sell every single tulip and i have nothing to sell for another two weeks um seeing them go seeing you know everyone be so happy and excited about them feels pretty amazing we're still going it's still busy i got up here and there was two people looking at stuff um we you know we got four more on the stand i think there's nine now i suspect it's gonna start slowing down soon so you know maybe one more round and we'll be good for for me to be able to take a little bit of a break this is what i have left this is what hasn't sold today every single tulip that was available on the farm anything that i could have harvested out all got sold what i said i wanted to do was to have a two thousand dollar weekend i wanted ian to go down to the farmer's market sell a thousand dollars and then here while i was running the farm stand i wanted to sell a thousand dollars myself ian was unsure if we were gonna make it he was a non-believer in the two thousand dollar number and in the end we sold three thousand dollars worth of tulips this weekend which is insane i was like oh no don't let it go everywhere we're rich rich we're rich so serena was the best kind of right the kind of right that results in us making more money than we thought uh so i don't feel bad about doubting on the two thousand dollars i'm just super stoked on the start of this season this is a really awesome way for us to start so here's the numbers in total we sold over 150 bouquets and some of those were 40 bouquets so worth even more at the market we sold twelve hundred and fifty dollars here we sold one thousand nine hundred and eighty five dollars so altogether over three thousand it's you know it's pretty incredible just saturday sunday yeah just saturday sunday i am very tired and very overdue for you but the excitement about the tulips isn't over i was out in the field and i think there's another 1100 tulip bulbs there that will be ready for this coming up weekend so that means we're going to have the ability to do another saturday farmers market and you know that easily could become 100 bouquets this is the test this is when we learn you know what we can sell in tulips when we're not selling mother's day bouquets