Dear Customers, Subscribers, inquisitive Visitors, and Flower Lovers,
Wind Haven Farm began in a little place called Topping, in Middlesex County, Virginia. We recently moved our farm to King William County. In 2023 we are still a small sustainably grown cut flower farm now settled into our forever home and dream. But how did we end up here?
More than a few years ago now, I had just graduated from college, gotten married, and I wanted to find a way to be creative, make a living, and reside in the country. Should be easy to figure out right?
After working for some amazing artists and some other odd jobs, I was offered a position at my in-laws' farm, Dayspring. Dayspring Farm is primarily a vegetable CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm, but offered their subscribers a flower share where they could get a bouquet of flowers every week with their produce bags. The flowers were a magnet for me with all their beautiful shapes, colors, and textures. Here was where I could focus that creative energy and skills I had been taught! At Dayspring I learned how to truly grow flowers. I learned the basics of crop planning, seed starting, planting, cultivation, harvesting, and bouquet making. After a few years of working for them, Charlie and Miriam told me that they were not going to continue growing flowers at Dayspring. Their son, and my husband, Paul Maloney immediately offered to till up every inch of our small property and turn it into a flower farm! I had never thought of owning our own flower farm, but once I started thinking about it, a concrete plan began to form... then our farming endeavor went from a quarter acre to one and half to three, to seven within the first six years!
In our 4th season we were finally able to have Paul work full time on the farm, and there were other wonderful individuals who made up our first real flower team! These people allowed us to provide thousands of blooms to our customers all season, and changed us and our little farm business forever!
Now we are going into our 10th growing season! We can't believe we have been at this for a decade now! I started this business when I was 26 years old and now I am 36! We have been welcomed into the cut flower market by local florists, grocers, and The River City Flower Exchange. We are so incredibly grateful.
Last year, we continued to build out our farm infrastructure here at our new farm. This is the forever home and dream for our little farm. This past season was one for the record books for us! Everyone was moving around and wanted fresh flowers coming out of the Pandemic. We saw a huge increase in the desire for locally grown flowers. This meant we were running hard to keep up from March all the way until just before Thanksgiving! We had and still have a great team, (and for the first time ever we have the same full team coming back to work for us this year! We will be adding a couple more amazing individuals to our team this season as well.) The response from our florists and customers was overwhelming and wonderful. We are so incredibly grateful for where we are today and the community of people, our family, team, and customers! All of you made 2022 a beautiful year!
In the last two years we did an epic amount of building: 7 hoop houses and 1 greenhouse, plus got our personal home started and finally completed just before Christmas this past year, while trying to finish the inside of our barn. This coming year we hope to do less building and more streamlining of our systems and organization. It would be great to actually "only" focus on running a farm rather than having constant building projects looming. We can't wait to see what 2023 brings! Wish us luck!
We have said this before, and we will say it again, as a flower farmer, and farmers in general, we are an optimistic breed of people. We sow seeds, plant thousands of transplants every year on a wing and a prayer, with optimism for a future that doesn't exist yet. I personally am a believer that if you hold that future in your soul to guide you, that is exactly where you will be one day.
We are so excited to share all of the beauty of fresh blooms with you this upcoming season!
Thanks to everyone for choosing to support our dream by buying our flowers. You are making our dream a reality, and making a difference in your community by buying locally and sustainably.
Your Local Flower Farmers,
Jenny and Paul Maloney
