From Suburbia to Farm Life: Our Farm Story

The Journey of How We Went from Neighborhood Living to Farm life

        Hey Flower Friend! If you are new to my page, I am Kara Jamison- owner of Blooming Joy Flower Company and cut flower grower enthusiast! I would love to share my journey with you of how I got into growing cut flowers and a little about how we built out farm from the ground up!

The journey of building our farm in Tennessee from the ground up began in the summer of 2016 with a 6 and a half acre patch of undeveloped land. Really though, our journey began long before that to get to the farm point. Back in 2008, when my husband and I had our first child, he had the urge to start his own vegetable garden. We were living in our first home on a 1/3rd of an acre.  Neither of us grew up learning how to grow gardens or farm. My only memory of a vegetable garden growing up was my grandfathers  but I was never taught how to grow them. We dove into anything we could find to learn and YouTube was very helpful for us to learn the basics! My husband loved to start the seeds and tend to the garden and I really loved harvesting the produce and making our son's baby food! We started out with all the usual summer vegetables: tomatoes, squash, zucchini and added in basil and peach trees too!

Fast froward a few years later, we moved in 2012 to a new house with a half acre of land. Our previous house sat on one-third of an acre so our minds were dreaming of all the outside projects we could do. One of the first things we did we begin to build out a new garden.  I will never forget when my husband came home with a truck load of cow manure and he scattered it in our backyard over the new garden area. At the time, I had no idea about building soil and using well aged materials like animal manure to grow plants. If I am being honest, I was pretty mortified to see all of the manure being spread near our brand new house! I can still remember this feeling even over 10 years later! LOL! My how times have changed because I happily collect it now for my cut flowers! It was also this home that we got our first ever livestock animals. We started with a handful of chickens and 2 goats. We loved walking to the coop and collecting eggs each day and taking care of Daisy and Violet, our goats. Our kids really loved the animals too! 

My husband and I were not raised on a farm. In fact, I grew up going to a private school in Nashville, Tennessee. Pretty sure a career in Cut Flower Growing was not an option ever talked about. Fast forward a few years,  I went to college and majored in Social Work, changed majors again and decided I wanted to be a nurse. Switched colleges. Worked full time at a large Nashville hospital, met a very nice man (my husband!), got married, graduated and became a Registered Nurse. I worked several years in Oncology/ Med-Surg nursing and had 4 kids in 7 years.

This is the part where my story starts to get sad but also where cut flower growing began. 

After a few years of being in that home, my husband kept telling me he wanted 5 acres of land to do even more farming on. I was pregnant with our 4th child in 7 years so I looked at him like "Yeah right, I am not moving anytime soon." ha ha! I not only was very pregnant and a tired Mom to three little kids, I was also dealing with my Mom, who was battling breast cancer. As if that wasn't hard enough, we suddenly and tragically  lost my brother in April 2015. He was so young. Only 25 years old. Mom's  cancer was progressing and we decided to move her into our home so we could take care of her. Did I mention my dad had passed away a few years earlier too? Did I mention that I worked as an Oncology Med/Surg nurse for years and both my Mom AND Dad passed away from cancer? I knew way too much about cancer and end of life care by the time my Mom reached that stage. Life was pretty tough for awhile...To say 2015 was the hardest year of my life, would be an understatement. 

Mom passed away on Christmas Eve of 2015. Just 8 months after my brother. I gave birth to my 4th child 3 months later. At some point, I had something come over me and my thoughts changed about finding a 5 acre piece of land that my husband had been talking about. I wanted to live that type of life now. I had just been through so much trauma with my family that I wanted the quieter, simple life. (PS- I've later learned farm life is not quiet or simple. LOL)

On a muggy August morning in 2016, we signed the papers to sell our cozy neighborhood home and traded it for RV living in the middle of an open field. We had found a piece of land we wanted to call home.  Later that day, I will never forget sitting outside at sunset, in a lounge chair,  thinking to myself  “Can I do this for the next year?  Can I really live in an RV with my husband and 4 very young children, in the middle of nowhere while we build our dream farm?” As I was contemplating this thought, my oldest son, who was 7 years old at the time, screamed in the RV.  “What happened?” I screamed as I went to check on him. “A mouse just ran across the RV floor!” Just then, I had a slight regret of signing my beautiful neighborhood home over to the new owners that morning. Me and mice don’t jive. “I can’t do this for next year.” I thought to myself. What a house warming gift. I didn’t sleep that night. In fact, I started looking for apartments. 😂 In that 31ft RV was 6 people and a MOUSE hidden somewhere. 

In the cold winter months in early 2018, a seed was planted in my heart to learn how to grow cut flowers to bring others joy.  The word “joy” is very important to me because it was my mothers name. We were very close. A mother-daughter relationship where you can call each other everyday and never run out of things to say. Sadly, on Christmas Eve of 2015, I lost her to a long batter of breast cancer. I was devastated and knew life would never be the same again. It was just a few years later that a seed was planted in my heart to bring others joy through cut flowers. Everyone likes flowers, right?!

I decided I was going to plant my first cut flower garden that Spring of 2018. I had some knowledge of growing plants but not cut flowers. My husband and I started growing vegetable gardens when our youngest was a toddler. I was an ambitious first time Mom- I wanted to make all of his baby food so why not grow the vegetables too! Pureed squash never tasted so good. LOL! I dove into anything I could find on cut flower growing. I planted my first cut flower garden that May. Zinnias, Cosmos, Sunflowers, Gomphrena and Dahlias. To my surprise, they bloomed! This led to the spiral of growing thousands of more plants in the following years. 

Over the past 7 years, I’ve done a lot of things with my flowers. You can read more about it in this blog post. I have a love for both annual and perennial plants and use both to elevate what I can offer. I sold bouquet subscriptions, grew flowers for weddings, designed for weddings, sold wholesale, created custom orders, held farm tours (we have lots of farm animals too!), spoke at conferences but the one thing I have come to love about cut flower growing is teaching others how to grow their own cut flower gardens. You don’t need a huge farm to grow a lot of flowers. You don’t even have to have a large backyard. Don’t get me wrong, that really helps but you can grow cut flowers in containers too. You just need sun, adequate soil, a will to learn and a heap of patience.

There is a lot more to my cut flower story....this is really just chapter one.... to be continued.....