The objective of this class is to equip you with details on how you can successfully grow flowers in early spring, summer and fall. Michelle will be sharing her favorite flower varieties and other tips she has learned through her farming experience. Whether you are just starting out with growing flowers or you have gown them for years, you will enjoy this class full of so much lover for flowers.

AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

<p>The objective of this class is to equip you with details on how you can successfully grow flowers in early spring, summer and fall. Michelle will be sharing her favorite flower varieties and other tips she has learned through her farming experience. Whether you are just starting out with growing flowers or you have gown them for years, you will enjoy this class full of so much lover for flowers.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive: The Parable of the Flower

Michelle Lesher

The Parable of the Flower Part 1

Dear Heavenly Father, we are so grateful to be here today together in this place.

We know that you have provided all the resources for us to be able to do this.

Lord, we know that you created the flowers, that you have sustained the flowers through all the sin and difficulty that have been in this world since sin was introduced, you preserve them for us to enjoy and we're so grateful for that.

So I pray that you would help me to glorify you in this presentation and thank you in Jesus name, amen.

We're going to start with spring flowers, then we're going to go into summer flowers, and then we're going to go into the fall.

And then the very last class will be how to make bouquets and sort of more about, a little bit more about like marketing the flowers.

So the theme, who here knows the theme of the conference?

They're not just for young people, but they're for adults too.

We continue to learn in the garden so much every day.

So Larry and I have been farming for 13 years.

When Larry and I first met, neither 1 of us were Christians, and the Lord brought us together.

We were married in a Sunday-keeping church, and then we met Adventists.

I was going to graduate school in Seattle, Washington, and that is where Larry first interned on a farm.

And through the process of a wonderful testimony, the Lord introduced us to the Seventh-day Adventist beliefs and doctrine.

So, or God's truth, however you want to say it.

The reason why I tell you that is because all these many years of farming, we never grew flowers.

I toyed with like some bee mix, you know, just to attract pollinators and I put them out and it was great.

I've planted sunflowers maybe 1 or 2 times, but the whole time Larry was working as a farmer, I was a nurse and a dietitian.

So I was, what I would do is I would work 40 hours a week and as soon as I came home I would work on the farm as much as possible, which would be about 24 hours a week or something like that.

So the Lord blessed us and I've been full-time farming for 2 years now.

So we've been growing flowers for 3 years.

And the flowers have been such a blessing in our production on the farm.

It's actually really boosted our income to the degree that we are fully sustainable now.

We do it as a full-time job, the both of us at home.

So our desire is to share with you all the values in farming and gardening and the flowers.

Who here knew that Ellen White loved flowers?

Has anyone read that in Spirit of Prophecy?

She talks about the flowers, it's such a cool thing.

I have just a couple quotes here just to kind of get our minds set in the right place.

So this is a Spirit of Prophecy quote from Review, or Herald and Review, June 1, 1871, Part 2.

It says, our flower gardens are now repaying us for the attention and labor we have bestowed upon them.

The flowering shrubs that live through winter are many of them pleasing to eye by putting out their buds and blossoms.

The seeds we have carefully put into the earth are making their appearance, while others are thirsting for the gentle showers to awaken them to life.

All of the beautiful in nature seems to be upon a strife to see which can vie with the other in contributing to our pleasure and happiness by their buds and blossoms of every hue.

This really spoke to me because flowers are easier to grow than produce.

And I feel like she's kind of saying this a little bit in this message and I'll go into that a little bit more here as we continue on.

This reading is from 7 LTMS and it's 92 and 1892 part 3.

7 Letters to Ministers, LT92, 1892, Part 3.

We have a house separate from other houses.

We have a large garden abounding with flowers.

When we come here 4 months ago, the whole place, about 1 acre of land, was grown up to tall weeds.

In the garden, everything except the geraniums were dead.

The girls went to work in the garden pulling weeds, making flower beds, sowing seeds for vegetables.

It was very dry so we bought a hose and Marian was chief in the flower garden.

Dahlias, the richest beauties, are in full bloom.

I never saw them blossom as they do here.

The geraniums, lady washington's, and immense bunches of the richest colors to delight the eye.

Now the geraniums have mostly ceased to bloom, but the chrysanthemums are in their glory.

I never saw such abundance or a great variety.

Marion has an exercise and something to call her out, and it has done her good." There's so many principles in this quote that really spoke to me.

So 1 is everything was covered in weeds and nothing was blooming except, what did she say?

It's really true, these flowers are pretty amazing things that a lot of times things fail and the flowers seem to persevere.

She also talks about how Marian going out to exercise really did her well.

And this is a personal testimony of mine.

In my background I struggle with depression sometimes and the flowers really help to make you feel better, partially because you're outside, you're in the fresh air and you're exercising, partially because if you just look here at these beautiful flowers, how can you not be joyful?

They're so detailed, the colors are so beautiful, and it really just warms your heart to think about how God created these for us to enjoy.

So Just remember, Ellen White really liked flowers.

This is Larry holding a bucket of my favorite flowers.

And do you see this semi-smile happening right here?

He's holding it back but he can barely hold it back because those flowers are so pretty.

Larry enjoys the flowers too and it's been such a blessing on our farm to have them.

So I thought it was pretty neat I just googled it.

Oh you know 1 thing I forgot to mention I'm really sorry I forgot to mention this.

All of my slides are available on the Ad Agra website, so if you were to go there right now, there's a, on the menu bar, it says, handouts 2020, and those are my lectures.

So they're all available there, you can download them there, or look at your phone while we're going through it.

I thought it would be better not to print them off for 2 reasons, to save some trees, and also because I think we engage better instead of flipping through notes.

Just so you'll know, all the notes will be there for you to download afterwards, so don't feel like you have to frantically take notes about what I have on the slides, because you can easily download them afterwards.

So I looked this up, I just Googled Define parable, Oxford Dictionary, a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson as told by Jesus in the gospels.

There's not a lot of definitions in Oxford that say Jesus in it.

So this picture here, do we look happy in that picture?

Don't we look pretty genuinely happy in that picture?

That's my mother, that's my brother, who my mom and him were separated when he was 3 years old and they got reunited this year in October.

And that is how happy we all are in front of the flowers because the flowers have a part in this whole story.

So if you want to know the testimony, ask me later, I'll go into it, but flowers bring people together in a very special way.

So when I think of parables in the garden you can go pretty simple or you can go deep in your understanding of these things.

So when I pick flowers I think about how uniquely and wonderfully we all are made.

Every single flower is unique and different.

You're not going to be 1 flower that's a carbon copy of another, ever.

And the other thing that I see every day, I will go out and harvest a bunch of flowers and I think I won't have enough for the next day and I go out there And do you know there's just as many the next day these flowers The more you pick them the more they grow with some of the varieties and we'll go into that so to think it's every day there's new beauty growing and we can apply that to our lives.

The Parable of the Flower Part 2

Also, somebody came up and said I want to do this and I'm moving to a new area and we were talking about that and there's A flower farmer in their area.

That's a very big flower farmer and she was thinking Well, then there'll be competition Do you know that less than 1% of our population farms today, less than 1%.

And flowers, or excuse me, farming is a very unique trade because we have new farmers come to farmers market and we embrace them.

We're gonna encourage them, we want them to do it because guess what, if we don't have more farmers in this planet, we're not gonna survive.

We need farmers and so When you're new at the market and you're new at doing this, however it starts, it's really not a competitive field in that way.

We always invite new farmers because we want people to be successful at this because there's a high demand and not enough people doing it.

So this is going to be a little easier than the spring flowers because you don't have to cover them.

They're just going to flourish with all the warm weather.

It's called Peaches and Cream, and we're going to talk all about that.

A couple more quotes just to share that Ellen White really liked flowers, which is so cool to me.

Henry and Edson do not neglect to water the flowers.

Be kind and loving to each other and faithful to Jenny." Isn't that so sweet how she's talking about being kind and loving and she's talking about how they never neglect the flowers, especially the dahlias?

And there's a reason for that because dahlias are amazing flowers.

He connected the work of God's finger in the heavens and upon the earth with the word of life.

From these he drew his lessons of spiritual instruction.

He would pluck the lilies, the flowers of the valley, and place them in the hands of the little children as instructors to proclaim the truth of His word.

So if the flower is used to instruct a child of the truth of God's word, Do you think maybe we should grow flowers?

I mean, honestly, that just gives me goosebumps because it's so amazing.

How that helps to proclaim the truth of God's Word.

And then, what's resurrected out of the dirt?

Do we know anything else that gets buried and resurrects?

That's what's happening with these flowers and the life that they have and the beauty and the love that they have is the love and the beauty that Christ has for us.

And it's so amazing to me how these things have been preserved for our enjoyment.

And the last 1 here, all both young and old should be in the open air as much as possible.

Every family should have a plot of ground for cultivation and for beauty.

Parents, a flower garden will be a blessing to your children.

Your children need active exercise in order to be healthy and happy.

Parents, it will pay to expand a small sum yearly, Excuse me, expend a small sum yearly in purchasing flower seeds and shrubs.

This is the council we have to grow flowers.

So this 1 is the progressive years 1862 to 1876 Volume 2, pages 308 to 309.

Larry did not want me to put this picture on the board because this is the fall when a lot of things are dead.

So here's our farm with a lot of dead things on it.

So I wanted to point out to you where I grow flowers, because in the big scheme of things, I'm not growing very many.

Our house is in the woods here, like right around here.

And then I had all this patch here were flowers.

And we crop rotate some of them and then the dahlias kind of have their spot that they're grown in.

And then our greenhouses here, this is our starts house, we also grow peppers back there, this is filled with tomatoes, this is filled with tomatoes, and my new flower greenhouse is located over here.

So when I was putting this presentation together, I realized I could not do any of this without Larry.

He doesn't pick the flowers and he doesn't put them in bouquets, but he helps me prep the ground, he builds my greenhouse, he helps me plant them, he helps me decide what varieties I want to grow, and so it really does help to do this as a team, to have help and support.

We're a veganic farm and there's not a lot of farms that are veganic.

So what that means is, is we use no animal waste.

We don't use any blood mill, no feather mill, no fish emulsion.

So we don't use anything that comes from an animal on our farm.

And that is a marketing thing for us as well.

We did it because it was our first really push for doing that is because we wanted to avoid GMOs and a lot of animals are fed GMO feeds that manure is composted then they can call it organic because it's been composted and we didn't want to contaminate our ground with anything that could potentially be a GMO.

And then just our animal kingdom in the, of course some people raise animals in a good healthy way, but the majority of this is being done in a way that the animals are more sickly, they're being given a lot of antibiotics or hormones and things like this so obviously their waste would not be the best thing to put on the ground anymore.

So we decided to try it and it is working for us so we're sticking with it.

Again I mentioned we're primarily a vegetable farm.

So the whole farm, basically we have, you know, it goes a little bit farther over this way, and then it cuts here, and it goes up like this and like this.

So this whole thing is 16 and a half acres.

We planted 20 fruit trees along the driveway last spring But the flower farm, excuse me, the produce is about 1 and a quarter acre, I'm sorry, 1 and 3 quarter acre, and then the flowers are only an eighth of an acre.

So I'm not growing a huge amount considering the space we have.

So this is something that I really want to share with everyone that I just learned becoming a flower farmer.

Why it's so important to buy local flowers.

So before you go to the grocery store you see a bunch of flowers are pretty inexpensive you're smelling them you're touching them these are great.

If you look it up online they spray flowers a lot and because we don't eat them there's pesticides and fungicides and herbicides and all these things that they spray on them that are even more toxic than the ones that they put on the food because we're not ingesting them but we're touching them and we're smelling them so it's important to know that if you have little children, You buy flowers, you want to make sure either they're local or if you buy them from the store make sure they're washing their hands after they touch them because then they're going to put that in their mouth.

I would go to the grocery store, so I'm selling, most of the Bouquets I sell at market I sell for $20.

And I would go to Trader Joe's or somewhere like that, any grocery store, and they're selling these big bouquets for like $3, like pennies compared to, and I'm thinking no one's gonna buy my flowers, you know?

But there's a market, and I'll try to touch on this a little bit more later too, you don't want to go out there and selling your flowers for really low when they're valued at something higher.

The Parable of the Flower Part 3

My absolute favorite thing to do is to make bouquets.

So a lot of people grow flowers for florists, for wedding designers.

I started off with just making bouquets for farmer's market and that's still my favorite thing to do.

They just bring me so much joy, picking the different color schemes, the different flowers.

And I'll tell you, I had 0 formal training.

I never took a class on how to make a bouquet, so I'm no expert.

My flower bouquets are quite different than most people's because they're just kind of my own thing.

So you're going to develop your own style, which is really cool because everybody's different and unique and your eye for something's going to be different than mine and the colors that you like together are going to be different than the colors that I like together.

So I would encourage people that it doesn't have to be like this textbook perfect.

I have you know a certain amount of this kind of flower and a certain amount of this kind of flower and a certain amount of this kind of flower to make this perfect bouquet.

Some people work better under that kind of structure and if that works better for you, that's fine too.

But for me, I'll just tell you a small testimony.

I struggled with, you know, usually in school, you have a class that you're good at, like, oh I'm good at math but I'm not good at English, or I'm good at social studies and I'm not good at math, but for me I was bad at everything.

There was no like class that I was good at.

I mean, I was 1 of the only girls doing it at the time.

I always felt like just sort of an average person, which is perfectly fine.

But then I started growing flowers, and I never thought of myself as being artistic.

I'm just not really that great at artsy stuff, even though I like it.

Then I started making these bouquets, and people are saying, wow, your bouquet is really lovely and I like the colors that you put together.

And I really feel like at 43 years old, I finally found the thing that I really feel like is a strength, like a gift.

And so I think that's pretty cool that I might have had to have waited 43 years, but I'm really thankful that I started growing flowers because I feel like I'm artistic now, which I never had that ability to do anything like that before.

Growing flowers and making bouquets is an art.

His name is Monty and he died this past fall, but he picked flowers with me every day.

Out in the morning, he was right there with me, walking the beds, always with me when I was picking my flowers.

Every cat we've ever had has been like that.

They love to kind of walk the beds with you when you're picking.

So, supplies for picking flowers, we talked about the, I put clippers there, but technically they're called snippers, snips, so that you want to have this really pointy nose.

That's why they call them snips, not clips.

We already talked about good times to pick dawn and dusk and the different flower types which ones you want to wait till they're fully open and which ones closed.

I just wrote again on here and for those that you have missed it You can access all of these slides at the Ad Agra website under 2020 handouts on the menu bar.

So you don't have to write all this down, but the cooler varieties that do well are Dahlia, Cosmos, Sunflower.

We've got straw flower, celosia, and gonfrena.

We have produce on the shelves and the flowers on the floor.

And it gets pretty packed in there in the springtime.

If you're able to have a cooler, it really makes for a longer life of the flower.

It's hard when you don't have a cooler if you're wanting them to last a long time.

Some supplies for making bouquets, rubber bands.

You can get it at Lowe's, you can get it on Amazon.

We also had these stickers printed off that have our farm logo.

It has the Bible verse where we get our farm name, Genesis 2, 8, and the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

This becomes a witness for us, that every bouquet purchased has a Bible verse on it, and people look at that, and it's kind of a neat way to witness to people.

So when I started off, I always harvested flowers and put them in jars and transfer them to market in jars and sold them in jars.

It is hard to transport all these little mason jars with all these flower bouquets.

And I was just so set that that was the way I had to do it.

I was not interested in doing it this way at all my first year.

Then Kirsten Dysinger helped me because I struggled so much with how to wrap a bouquet.

You would think it is so basic, but it is not basic.

So I'm looking online, I even messaged Stan and E Farms, I'm like, show me how you wrap yours and all this stuff.

So I've come up with a way that it kind of is the easiest, quickest way to do it.

So I'm gonna show you that in just a minute with this.

You can wrap them in paper and then put a ribbon or twine or something to make it look pretty.

Some people, you'll see at the booth I have, I've hole-punched cards with twine.

The unique style that I have which is very different than a lot of people is I say my bouquets are all flower with no filler.

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Series

Intensive: The Parable of the Flower

The Parable of the Flower Part 2

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Flower Farming

Dahlias: From Tuber to Bloom

55m

Session 1

Behold the Beautiful

41m

AdAgrA Kids

Blossoming Beauty

24m

Intensive: Growing and Selling Cut-Flowers

3. Growing and Selling Cut-Flowers: Bulbs, Corms, and Tubers

55m

Flowers

Exploring, Growing, and Marketing Flowers on a Small Plot

1h

Intensive: The Parable of the Flower

The Parable of the Flower Part 3

45m

Sound Doctrine