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Perfect for gardening enthusiasts at any level, this podcast is your companion to cultivating success and beauty in your own backyard or flower patch. Hosted by Jane Westoby from Fuchsia Blooms Florist and The Hampshire Seed Company.
Each episode is a treasure trove of practical tips, expert advice, and insider flower farming guides designed to help you sow and grow with confidence and harvest with pride. Whether you’re dreaming of rows of neat vegetables or cutting flowers for bouquets all year round, we’ll walk you through every step.
Let’s grow together!
Jane Westoby (00:03)
Hey flower friends and welcome back to the podcast that believes that flowers should be local, seasonal and grown with love, not wrapped in plastic and flown halfway across the world. I'm Jane, the founder of the Hampshire Seed Company and a flower farmer florist who's gone from wedding chaos to seed packet chaos. These days I also help other growers to build blooming good businesses. So whether you're planting your first tray of cosmos or you're scaling up for serious sales, you're in the right place.
And today I'm talking about something that could make or break your flower business, your numbers. Not the fluffy kind, the ones that actually tell you if your business is working. These are the five core figures that I think every flower farmer should know. So whether you're growing from OKs, florists or farm shops or even market stalls. And if you've ever said, I just need to grow more or
I don't know if I'm charging enough. This episode is for you.
So the first thing, number one of five here is the cost of production per stem. So this is the big one. So how much does it cost you to grow a single stem? This isn't just the seed or tuber I'm talking about. I'm talking about compost, trays, structures, netting, water, power, labor. Yes, even if it's just you, that labor counts and losses, wastage because not
every seed makes it to bloom. And if you are ignoring this number, then essentially you're guessing your prices. And I'm guessing that this often leads to undercharging or worse, working hard and still making no money at all. So you need to track your expenses per crop, especially your core crops. So if you divide the number of usable stems you get from them,
That's your base cost per STEM. And you need to know this before you can decide what to actually charge. So you'll need to do lots and lots of research and do the numbers at the beginning of the season. You might have compost, vermiculite, seeds, manure, labour. All of that is part of your cost. And I've written a blog post to go with this where you can see all the maths broken down for you in little charts.
But if I were to go through all of this, let's say compost, vermiculite, perlite seeds, fertilizers like chicken pellets, manure, or liquid seaweed, something like that, and my labor, if I were to add all of that up on my beds, so my beds are one meter by three meters. If I was to add up all of that, it would come to, and I have this in the blog post for you,
I would estimate it to be around 84 pounds roughly for me to produce that one bed of blooms. now I know that I need to make at least 84 pounds off every single one of my flower beds just to break even. So all I now need to do is divide that number, that 84 pounds by the number of stems
that think I can get from that space. Now that does come a little bit with experience, but in my flower farming spreadsheets, I do have approximate stem counts. So if I was growing Ollaya for instance, in that bed, let's say it was a full one by three meter bed of Ollaya, I would space it around 15 centimeters. And so I'd need about 133 plants roughly to fill that whole bed.
and I would be able to cut around two stems off each plant. They do branch, but you'd want to keep some of that branching. But I reckon you could probably cut, I'd say maybe two stems off each. Sometimes you might get three, sometimes you might only get one. So that's an average. So I think you would probably average about 266 stems from that bed of Orlaia. So my 84 pounds, well, yeah, 84 pounds, it's actually calculated at...
£83.97 if you look in the blog but let's round it up £84 divided by my 266 stems that's 31 pence each now that's my cost okay but slight snack here is I haven't added in all of my costs for all of my equipment which is really really important you do need to ensure that all of your costs are covered so in addition to that you will probably need to just have
another little sheet with your general costs in. So things like your rent, your insurance, your garden tools, a shredder, netting, gloves, a wheelbarrow, maybe your greenhouse, all of your plastic trays, your heated mats. So for a full season, I've added up
all of the costs of all of these that I would need but these aren't consumables. These are assets within my business quite often, not all of them, know the rent and the insurance isn't but things like you know the greenhouse and the hosepipe is, you'd keep these year after year. So you don't have to pay for all of that in year one all from one crop. You can actually kind of amortize it out over a period
of time. So something like your insurance and your rent you would have to pay every single year. Something like gloves, realistically you're going to have to buy gloves every single year but you use them across all of your beds. You your hosepipe you're not going to need to buy a new hosepipe every year, you're not going to need to buy new grow lights every year, you're not going to need to buy you know a new shredder every year, you're going to buy it once and then you can choose over what period of time you want
payback on that to be. So you can set that and in my spreadsheet in my blog I've done that at five pounds essentially. I've done that at five years payback and I've done one year on land and insurance and on gloves. Everything else I've done I've calculated a five-year payback essentially. So if I do that and then I divide it by my number of beds so the total
The total number is £4,215. If I then divide that £4,215, so that's how much it would cost you to set up, I'd say a medium scale flower farm. You know, if you did need all of these things like shredders and tools and watering cans and you know, but these are all things and that includes the land as well. That's land and insurance and land is £2,000 of that. If you already have land and you're not paying rent on it,
then you can half that, you you'll probably only be paying about a £2,000 outlay for everything else. And then if I split that all between my payback years in the spreadsheet in the blog, you'll be able to see that. So it's either one, two or five years for each one. It works out at about £2,500 a year for me.
So if I were to divide that by my beds and I have 20 beds, if I divide that by my 20 beds, it's 127 pounds a year for essentially for those extra costs. And remember you can choose how quickly you want to pay yourself back. can be 10, you know, if you know you're going to have your greenhouse for 10 years, well, you can put 10 years against that if you want to. I don't want to be paying myself back forever in a day.
So that's why I've set it at five. So on top of this initial number, I'll be looking to recover an extra £127 per bed per year to truly actually cover my costs. So let's say I can actually get two crops from that bed, because if I've got all liar early season, I'd have something else later season. So let's say can get two crops. So I've got my £168 plus my £127. So it's £295. That's my new cost.
per bed is 295 pounds. So let's say I've got my ore lyre. Let's say I'm also going to put lark's bur in there after the ore lyre. So I'd need around, I'd say 133 plants to cut around 400 stems, I think, of the ore lyre. So now we've got 266 ore lyre and we've got 400 lark's bur stems.
in total to cut from that bed. that's 666 stems in total. So if we step back, the overhead rate, the recovery that we need to break even on that bed is 200 or on my beds is 295 per bed. I'm going to divide that by my 666 stems for that bed. So my total cost of producing that is 44 pence. And again, this is
all in the blog, you can read through it all in the blog. It's really, really simple maths. It's not complicated maths. So 44 pence is my break even number. So if I was to sell those stems at 40 pence each, I'd be losing money. I can't do that. That would not be profitable for me. So this is, remember my labor has been accounted for in here, not I'd say
general other labor, so emailing clients and things like that. I haven't put that in there, which is why you need to make sure you don't just charge your break even number, because there are more, I'd say hours that you would work that you still need to make sure you cover those extra hours within your business. Okay. So don't sell, even don't sell at your minimum price.
you want to be charging more. So for that 44 pence to really truly cover all of the other time that I would put into this, like, you know, recording this podcast, sweeping up all the other little bits and pieces, you know, I'd want to be charging you like maybe 60 pence per stem as an absolute minimum. But to be honest, you can probably get more. That would be wholesale for retail. You know, you're talking over a pound.
So the second thing, second number that you really need to know is what do I need to charge per STEM to actually make a profit? And now you know what your cost is that you can't go below. That's a much easier number to actually put a number against. So once you know your STEM cost, it's time to ask, what do I need to charge per STEM to actually make a profit?
And now you know your cost per stem, working out your stem price to your customer is so much easier.
So you need to decide your profit margin, your market. So are you selling to florists or retail customers? And the value of that flower. So it's rarity value, know, the color, the vase life, all these things have an impact on how much you can sell that flower for. Is it just the most amazing color that everybody's looking for?
Let's take daily as for instance, you you couldn't have two dailyers. Let's say you have Otto's thrill. It's a really beautiful daily. It's a big dinner plate daily. And then let's say you have cafe au lait's. Well, I guarantee you if you put a big bucket of cafe au lait's out next to a big bucket of Otto's thrill, the cafe au lait's are probably going to go first. So you could probably charge more for your cafe au lait's. So your job is to work out where you sit on
this spectrum is not to copy someone else's prices and hope for the best. You need to work out what works for you. So this number, it gives you that pricing confidence and it helps you stop comparing yourself to another grower down the road who might actually be under pricing out of fear. So these numbers actually help you to stop comparing yourself to another grower who's down the road.
who might actually be under pricing out of fear rather than strategy. if you want to read more about this, then do check out my blog, which is called Pricing with Confidence. I'll link to that one in the show notes for you as well. OK, so the third thing you need to know is your yield per square meter or your yield per bed I tend to use because
My space is split up into lots and lots of smaller beds. So how many stems are you getting from each square meter or bed of space? And I've touched on this in the cost of producing each stem already. So this is your yield per meter square and it's vital for planning. So a cornflower, for instance, might give you 200 stems or lyre might give you 89 per stems and ranunculus only 64 stems per bed or per
square meter. And if you're actually growing 10 meters of something that only gives you a hundred stems, but you actually need 500 to make a profit off that bed, then that gap becomes real really, really quickly. You can work that out very, very quickly. You are growing the wrong crop. You cannot get a return on that crop. And this is the number that helps you to ditch the low performers and scale up what is actually working.
you'll be able to grow less fluff and grow more of what pays. So I do have a really simple calculator that can give you all of these answers. It's my flower farming calculator. I linked to it in the show notes for you. You literally just plug in the size of your beds, the crop you're growing. There's an estimate in there for how many stems you'd be able to cut and how far apart to grow them. So you'd able to see how many plants you need, all of that in there.
and then it can spit out a number. It can actually tell you what you'll get from that bed. Okay. And it has all of my costs broken down in the same sheet as well. So you can get that in there too. So that's number three. Okay. So moving on, number four is your weekly on monthly STEM targets. So this is one of the biggest shifts that I made in my own business. So instead of thinking, what should I say this month? I was able to ask.
How many stems do I need to cut and sell each week to hit my income goal? So I had an income goal and then I could really easily work out, okay, what do I actually need to do? So let's say your target will make the numbers nice and round. So let's say your target is a thousand pounds a month on your average stem prices a pound. So that's a thousand stems a month or 250 a week. Let's presume there's four weeks in every month. You can do the maths to work it out. If there isn't in the month you're in.
but now you've got something to plan backwards from 250 stems. Well, okay, that's 250 stems. So how many bouquets would that be? You can then start to just break it down and you can build your sowing and succession plan around this. It will also show you where all your biggest gaps are and when you're going to be swimming in blooms with no customers unless you prep your sales ahead of time. So that's really important.
This one factor, this one number, weekly and monthly STEM counts can actually make a really, really big difference to your business. You're not getting to the end of the season and then thinking, I haven't quite made my target. You know the week you're in, if you don't hit your target, you know you failed, you haven't hit your target. And then you can start to put an action plan in place.
to try and hit your target the following week. So lastly, and number five is the revenue per bed. This is the last one and it ties everything together. So how much money does each bed or block of your plot actually bring in? So you can calculate this by just multiplying your yield per square meter or your yield per bed.
by your average stem price. So let's say, for example, if a bed gives you 300 stems at a pound each, that's 300. Another bed might give you 150 stems at one pound 20, so that's 180. And you can start to add all of this together as a revenue per bed for everything. And you can then average it out. You can then give yourself an average and then you can start to look to say, well, actually, this crop that I want to grow here,
is going to be below my average. Do I really want to have this crop? Or another crop might be way, way above your average. So you're thinking, actually, I need to grow more of that one. That's going to raise my average. So that's quite good. And this will all get you thinking more like a business owner because you're spotting which beds are worth the space and which ones are the passengers. Now you're thinking like a business owner. And this is how you scale.
smartly. It's not about necessarily cramming in more crops, it's about knowing which ones pay the rent. So this is how you scale smart. It's not about cramming in more crops, it's about knowing which ones are going to pay the rent.
let's have a quick recap. The five numbers every flower farmer should know are firstly, the cost of production per stem. Number two is your target stem price. Number three is your yield per square meter or bed. Number four is your weekly or monthly stem targets.
And number five is your revenue per bed. They are your top five. And if you are not tracking these yet, just start simple. Just pick one crop, just one, pick one crop, pick one bed and just do the maths. know, get curious because the moment you start measuring, you will start to make better decisions. And if you want help working this out for your flower farm, then do check out my Excel Crop Planner, which can help.
I'll link to it in the show notes for you, do check it out. And if this episode was helpful then do share it with your flower farmer friends, leave me a review and hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. Until next time, happy sowing, happy growing and keep an eye on those numbers.