My eighteenth farm was Annie’s Flower Farm in Sequim, Washington.

The Farm

Annie’s first name is Sid; she uses her middle name for the flower farm. Sid grew up on a 350-acre farm by Coos Bay, Oregon. Her father milled lumber. Growing up, Sid learned flower arranging from her mother who liked to grow and arrange flowers. Sid always thought it would be nice to have a flower farm. One day opportunity knocked when a You-Cut flower farm was being sold. Sid offered to lease the farm, and the owner accepted.

My Experience

It was a time of transition while I was there. The one-acre established flower farm that Sid had been leasing was being closed. The owners were turning it back to pasture. Sid had purchased the perennial flowers from the farm and was moving them to her new flower-growing locations. The 700 potted plants went to either the new plot of land she was leasing or to her own yard where she was putting in a garden bed.

Sid has a few money streams with the flowers. Wedding bouquets are her main business. Restaurants buy edible flowers. To do a little advertising, Sid makes mini bouquets for table decorations at Alderwood Bistro. In exchange for the flowers, she can put out her business cards and get some pizza from their wood-burning oven. “Table flowers should not have a strong scent,” Sid pointed out to me.

Watering pots is time consuming. It took around an hour to water all the pots in Sid’s backyard. To give each plant a good watering, I needed to give it ten seconds of water. One…two…three… four…five…six…seven…eight…nine… ten… Move on to the next pot. Zen… There were also daily drives to turn sprinklers on and off at the new farm and at a friend’s house where Sid had some flowers.

We spent part of each day at the new farm, getting it set up. There was always weeding, and we transplanted the potted plants from the old garden. The scabiosa were flowering so we cut them to make bouquets.

One day I got an opportunity to learn about making bouquets. It begins with harvesting flowers. Flowers are best harvested on a morning without dew or after five in the evening. Stems are put in a bucket of ice water to keep them fresh. Sid gave the other WWOOFer, Nat, and me one guideline for bouquet making: use three of the same type of each flower in a bouquet. Nat selected flowers and quickly created a lovely bouquet. I put flowers together, took them apart, tried again, and eventually came up with a bouquet about as big as I am. As is typical of my artistic pursuits, laughter had to be stifled and I needed a little help, but I ended up with a photo-worthy bouquet.

Sid didn’t have many flowers blooming yet but orders were coming in for weddings. What to do? We went scavenging. Flowers were growing on roadsides and other public areas. Customers request certain colors for their bouquets. This day we drove around looking for peach-colored flowers. We found them!

Dinners were delicious. Sid is a great cook. And is also a multi-tasker. One evening she whipped up a quiche. I’m used to quiche being yellow and tasting like goopy eggs. Sid’s quiche was white and tasted like caramelized onions and cheese. The crust was perfectly flakey. After making the quiche, she switched to making chocolate chip cookies. While making the cookies, she remembered she had started cleaning the toilet in the morning. She went off to finish that task and returned to bake up the cookies.

My one-week visit was quickly over. I’d gotten a small taste of life on a flower farm and the area around Sequim. In a few weeks it would be July and Sid’s flower plants would be in full bloom. No more scavenging needed.