Micro flower farms can flourish in city
Flower fever. It’s a bug that afflicts a lot of us, once we start gardening — but the outcome can be disastrous. Who hasn’t been guilty of buying far too many plants in spring, then cramming them into a small, shady yard, where they produce no flowers at all?
It happened to me years ago in Toronto — and was one reason why I left. Fantasies of huge, flowering drifts, both perennial and annual, kept entering my dreams. So I wound up moving to the country north of Guelph, only to discover that those dratted drifts take colossal amounts of back-breaking labour — and, alas, the weeds often wind up winning.
Yet look at Sarah Nixon. She came up with a brilliant, far more practical idea. Realizing that she’d never have enough space to grow all the flowers she wanted behind her house in the Roncesvalles area (her front yard, like a lot of city lots, was too shady) she scouted around for sunny spaces in local gardens that the owners weren’t using.
And the end result? Fifteen years later, she’s the owner of a flourishing micro flower farm called My Luscious Backyard. It’s located smack in the heart of the city and all her “crop” is grown on other peoples’ land.
Nixon and an assistant sell bucketloads of these fresh cut blooms by subscription to customers (who sign up for a weekly or monthly bouquet). Others get used in floral arrangements she undertakes for weddings and other events.
And she makes the whole enterprise sound deceptively easy.
“It kind of happened by accident,” she explains. “My garden was full, and I noticed that my neighbours had lawns they weren’t using. So I just walked around Roncesvalles and Parkdale asking people if I could use their lawns to grow flowers instead.”
In most instances, the homeowners were only too happy to say yes. Now, about 10 gardens are under Nixon’s care, where she’s removed the lawn, improved the soil and got busy with flowers suitable for cutting.
Everything is grown organically. She nurses along some perennials, such as peonies, foxgloves and Japanese anemones. But many others are annuals such as zinnias and new varieties of Echinacea (she starts the seeds in a shed behind her home in late winter) and dahlias, which must be replanted every year from tubers, then dug up and stored in fall.
Dahlia cultivation can actually be quite time-consuming. Besides being started early in pots, the tubers need plentiful amounts of compost added regularly. Then their tall, top heavy blooms must often be propped up with stakes.
Yet Nixon doesn’t mind the work. And indeed, her specimens look truly spectacular. They were what impelled me to get in touch after I recently spotted a tall, surprising swath of dahlias reaching skyward from a front yard on High Park Blvd. “I love dahlias,” she told me happily, while carefully checking their huge, spiky flower heads. “Dahlias and I have a great relationship.” It certainly shows. The owner of the property, Pam Hyde, appears to have a great relationship with Nixon, too.
“When we moved in here, there wasn’t much of a garden,” she says. “I love sitting on the front porch every morning, looking at Sarah’s flowers.”
One of Nixon’s goals with her mini flower farm was to help other urban dwellers connect with the plant world — and the wildlife that depends on those flowers.
“We’re all stewards of the environment, whether it is through caring for a small yard, the park down the street or the urban tree canopy,” she writes on her website.
She also points out that she grows not just traditional flowers but unusual varieties too, many of which would be impossible to find at a conventional florist’s, because they don’t travel well.
You can reach her at mylusciousbackyard.com.