News
An Interview with Lindsay and Tater from Bloom Beat
December 13, 2024
I’m sure many of you reading this newsletter have heard of Ball Publishing’s Bloom Beat, written by co-editors Lindsay Daschner and her four-legged companion Tater. Lindsay and Tater are the owners of Forget Me Not Farms in Ottawa Lake, Michigan, a wholesale flower operation catering exclusively to florists and event planners.
Lindsay’s journey with Tater is a reminder of the passion, spirit, and creativity it takes to succeed in the floral industry. At the American Floral Endowment, we’re dedicated to supporting growers like Lindsay by providing research, resources, and educational opportunities tailored to the unique challenges of flower farming. Whether it’s funding groundbreaking studies on crop production, offering webinars and other resources to help optimize production systems, or connecting growers with industry-leading insights, AFE is here to help you succeed and be profitable. To learn more about our resources for cut flower farmers, click here, and explore the tools and programs designed to support your success.
I caught up with Lindsay and Tater as they were preparing to spend the night at the farm in their van during a winter storm, keeping a close eye on the greenhouses in case the power failed!
Laura: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today! How did you and Tater get started at the farm?
Lindsay: I’m a Michigan State graduate, and I originally had two options for my career path: either go into landscape design or pursue graduate school with an assistantship. During winter break of my senior year, I came home for Christmas and thought, ‘I need something to do—I can’t just sit around.’ That’s when I found a greenhouse nearby that specialized in cut lilies, and the rest is history. It completely changed the trajectory of my career. My original plan was to be a landscape designer in Ann Arbor, but that stint at the greenhouse opened my eyes to the world of flower farming. By the time I graduated, I had scrapped my initial plans and decided to dive fully into the flower business.
While I was working at the lily farm, I was also starting Forget Me Not Farms. I noticed that the lily farm would sell out of anemone, ranunculus, and dahlias every week. So Tater and I started growing them and other niche specialty flowers and marketed them. Eventually, we had more than we needed to supply our initial clientele and Tater and I would load up the truck with flowers and visit new flower shops to introduce ourselves. I’d walk in with a bucket of flowers in one hand and Tater on a leash in the other. I’d say something like, “These are the best flowers ever—please support Tater in the lifestyle she’d like to be accustomed to.” It worked surprisingly well! If someone didn’t want to interact with her, I figured they weren’t the kind of florist I wanted to sell to anyway.
Laura: What would you say your greatest challenge was this year?
Lindsay: Definitely staffing. The job description says you must be able to be on your feet for 8 to 10 hours, crouch, stoop, you know, be able to lift 40 pounds. I outline it, basically saying this job is very physical.
But people see the videos and images on social media, and they think, ‘Oh, I’m going to be wearing a sundress with a wicker basket, and I’m just going to be casually cutting these flowers and frolicking through the fields.’ [Laughs] It’s like, no, if you can’t cut ten stems of dahlias in less than two minutes, that’s not winning. We also get people who have worked in flower shops, but working on a farm is very different than working in a flower shop. If you’re coming to work on a farm in June or July, it’s going to be sweaty, it’s going to be hot. We’re going to implement some new strategies to try to have better recruitment. In 2026 we’re going to be doing H-2A.
The biggest thing with H-2A is housing. And we’ve just solved that problem. You have to make sure you have good housing in place before you invite people to stay. It’s a lot of work to set up, but these workers will be like family.
Laura: If you were starting the farm again with the knowledge you have now, is there anything you would do differently?
I’d say the best advice I can give—and what I’ve learned—is to begin with the end in mind, including your intent to keep scaling production. Invest in the best infrastructure you can afford, even if it seems excessive at the time. For example, we’ve built all our greenhouses above grade with proper drainage and snow load ratings. It’s more work and money upfront, but it saves so much hassle in the long run. We laid extra water lines and used materials that would last, like copper wiring instead of aluminum.
And don’t just start with the intent of building just one greenhouse if you know you want to have acres of them. Do what you can afford. Looking at the cost of a greenhouse kit, you should plan to roughly double the price if you’re building it yourself to include labor, water, electric, and gas, as well as everything you need to furnish it. After that, reinvest the profit into building more infrastructure. It’s a long-term game. You’re investing a considerable amount of money and time with the hopes that it will pay off in 10 years. Also, be aware that greenhouses are crazy expensive to buy new, but the resale value is nothing. The greenhouse only has value if you can operate it right.
Also, knowing your own goals and personality is key. I think people need to look at themselves in the mirror and decide, ‘Do I really want to manage people? Or do I just love the flowers?’ There’s a difference between loving being a technician – the person actually planting, growing and cutting the plants, versus being the owner of the farm and the business. It takes that soft skills piece to have a successful operation.
Laura: How do you determine your crop timing, especially in Michigan, with the specialty crops that you’re growing?
Lindsay: It’s a little bit challenging, because the flowers we grow aren’t researched as well since they’re so niche. It’s hard to program crops to hit specific holidays when we don’t necessarily understand what the flowering mechanisms are. For crops like anemone and ranunculus, a lot of that cultivation information is proprietary.
Roberto Lopez at Michigan State did some preliminary LED research on anemone, ranunculus, and dahlias, and I think he got funding from AFE. So, thank you, I appreciate it! Investing in LEDs makes sense in Michigan, where everything’s so cloudy. Our daily light integral in January can be something like three moles per day, but the flowers like 15. The difference between 3 and 15 is huge! Being able to justify the investment in LED lights requires careful calculation. The challenge is determining the return on investment when we don’t fully understand how much faster anemones or ranunculus would flower under those lights. Without that data, it’s really difficult to make an informed decision.
Laura: I recently went to a conference that had a “Best New Ideas” session where growers shared the best ideas they implemented this year. What is your “Best New Idea” for 2024?
Lindsay: Last season, we grew about an acre and a half of outdoor flowers and then we doubled it this season. We were dying planting stuff by hand, digging these dahlias by hand — and a light switch went off. I was like, okay, we gotta figure out how to mechanize this. But the challenge with flower farming is that nobody makes equipment designed for what we do. So we adapted a water wheel transplanter, which is usually used for tomatoes or vegetable crops about 8 to 12 inches apart. Well, for flowers, I like them to be about 4 inches apart. So we put in extra paddles to double the holes, but we didn’t realize how much faster you have to go – 4 inches comes fast! You’d be amazed at how hard that is, but overall it worked. Then we bought an Italian potato digger to harvest dahlias. We found it at auction. I think people forget there’s a lot of overlap between vegetable production, bedding plant production and cut flowers. There is something to be learned from other production systems. Buying this potato digger was a major, life-changing thing because we had half an acre of dahlias this year. That boils down to 20,000 plants, give or take.
Labor and time are always the handicap and anything we can do to enhance the job satisfaction for people that work on the farm is important. Your best asset is your people, hands down. And when you mechanize the things that can be mechanized, that opens up our time to do the things that have to be done by hand. Not only does it boost your profitability, but it boosts your employee retention too.
Laura: Where do you get your information? In addition to AFE, what resources or events do you think are a must for cut flower growers to check out?
Lindsay: One of my major deep dives recently is how to be a better boss. One of my favorite things to read is the Harvard Business Review. They have a lot of really great articles every month and you can get two for free each month. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek is one of my favorite books. And Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And I also love Gary Vaynerchuk on Instagram. He’s got some really good ideas about business and being tougher than everyone else and just plowing through.
As far as plant culture and production, the best thing that I did was go work for somebody else. I always tell people, if they want to know something, just go and do it somehow. Trying things with someone who knows more than you do is invaluable.
Another thing I’ve found is when I want to learn something about something really obscure, I look at older books. Sometimes the art of something has been lost because you just lost the people that did it. A lot of the things that we’re doing have been done before, but they went out of fashion and we’re just now getting back to them. Gloeckner in particular had some really outstanding production guides that they would send with their salespeople. And it makes me smile because the history of the industry is quite fascinating. But yeah, everything you’re trying to do has been done to some degree, in some way. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it better.
Laura: Last question – are there any trends you’re seeing in cut flowers and floristry right now? Do current trends influence your decision-making?
Lindsay: Honestly, I just ask people what they want. That was one of the nice things about early on when Tater and I were doing all the deliveries, I could just say, ‘Hey, if there’s something you would like us to have that we don’t, just tell me and we’ll try it.’ The biggest thing is don’t assume – ask. But that doesn’t mean that if you have something in your heart that you really want to try you shouldn’t do it. For me, that was pansies. I was like, I’m just going to do this and put it in my buckets every week, and eventually it’s going to stick, right? So it can be a two-way street, especially if your customers trust you.
The thing that people don’t realize is that people buy you as much as they buy your product. When people make the decision to buy flowers from our truck, it’s not just buying the flowers, it’s buying something from Lindsay and Tater. And I’ll tell you, I’ve never had any trouble with collections or anything because it’s like, man, you do not want to be known as the person who took food out of Tater’s mouth.
Something that also helps us now is that local flowers are in, and we’ve been lucky to be ahead of the curve. Local flowers are riding the coattails of the local food movement. So we’re kind of in the driver’s seat to some degree because local flowers are so popular right now. And I hope that’s going to last. But ultimately, it’s just knowing the people who buy from you and what will make them money.
Laura: Thank you and Tater so much for your time. Good luck tonight!
Lindsay: Hopefully, it’ll be uneventful. I’ll tell you one last story. I think this was Christmas 2022, around December 23rd. We had a polar vortex in Michigan—wind chills hit -20°F, and it was brutal. The power went out at the farm, and while the generator kicked in, when the power switched back to the grid, one of the heaters failed. The motherboard fried, and we lost an entire greenhouse full of plants. I spent Christmas Eve calling in every favor to find a new heater, scrambling to save what I could. I was running back and forth, covering plants with plastic in the freezing cold, and my face hurt so badly from the wind. It was one of the most miserable experiences, but you do what you need to do to keep things running. Farming in the winter, especially in a northern climate, is a whole different ball game. You never know what you’re walking into, but you just have to be tougher than the circumstances you’re facing. And Tater and I are tough as nails.
By Laura Barth, AFE Research Coordinator
