Heirloom demo: a cut flower farm tour

Your cut flower farm, bed by bed

This is Sunflower Mill Farm, by the river in Stanbridge East, an hour from Montreal in southern Québec. It's a cut-flower farm grown with the biointensive method: permanent beds, one standard bed size, and a season that runs from the first tunnel tulips in spring to the last dahlias before the frost.

Nine blocks of twelve beds, two caterpillar tunnels and a greenhouse are drawn right on the aerial photo. Each block keeps its real measures, beds of 15 m (50 ft) by 76 cm (30 in), so every count of plants, stems and seeds later on comes from real bed metres, not from guesses.

Block seven holds the two tunnels, and the beds between them are switched off, so nothing gets planned where nothing can grow. The greenhouse has twelve beds of 35 m (115 ft): that's where the first stems of the year come from, weeks before the field.

Plan the flower season in stems and revenue

Everything starts in the Crop Library. Filter on Flowers and more than a hundred cut flowers come up, from anemones to zinnias, each with its spacing and days to maturity. You start your plan from proven numbers instead of a blank spreadsheet.

Under Cultivars, almost two thousand flower varieties carry their own days to maturity and seeds per gram. That's what turns "four beds of snapdragons" into the exact number of seeds to order. Your seed companies live in the same place: West Coast Seeds, William Dam, Johnny's.

In the Game Plan, the whole season fits on one line, week by week. The frost weeks show in blue, so a tender flower never lands in a frost. For each flower you see its beds, its stems and its estimated revenue, because a flower farm sells stems, not kilos. On your phone, the same plan counts down the days to your first sowing.

Open a planting and you tick off the season as it goes: nursery sowing, transplanting, harvest complete. On the phone, each planting shows its expected stems and revenue, so you know what a bed is worth before it blooms.

Every value can be changed. Heirloom fills them in from the crop's data, and you adjust them to your farm: your spacing, your yield per bed, your price per stem.

Succession planting, every bed, every week

The Crop Map puts every planting on its beds and in its months. Dahlias fill block two. Sunflowers are sown every week in block four: a single-stem sunflower gives one stem and is done, so weekly succession planting is what keeps the buckets full all summer.

The tunnels carry lisianthus, then tulips planted in the fall for next spring. In flower farming, tunnel beds are the most valuable, and the map shows how they turn over through the year. The map comes with you on your phone, block by block, so you know what goes where without walking back to the office.

Insights scores the plan on crop rotation, fertility, standard beds and structures, like an experienced grower reading it over before the first tray is sown.

Each block keeps its history: the plant families grown there, year after year. Your rotation rests on what really grew in that block, not on memory.

From flower plan to crew tasks

From that plan, Heirloom writes the season's tasks: a hundred and eighteen sowings and transplants on this farm, each with its bed and its date. On the phone, the same tasks show month by month.

Open a task and you see where the planting is in its life, how many plants and how many trays. It's the same task on your phone, with its beds lit up in the greenhouse.

Give a task to someone on the crew and it lands on their list. Out in the field, they check it off right from their phone: one tap, sowed in trays today.

On the Week Board, the week is laid out day by day. A day too full? Drag a task to Tuesday.

And if a planting has to move, say two weeks later because spring is late, every task moves with it. A flower won't wait in the field, so your plan can't either.

Flower seeds, inventory and settings

In the seed room, the Seeds Inventory lists every packet of flower seeds from this winter's West Coast Seeds order, and how long each one will keep.

Open a variety: this Purity cosmos, bought in 2023, expired last January. Time for a germination test, or the compost.

Season needs puts the plan against the shelf. Everything in red is still to order for this season, so you order exactly what's missing before the spring rush.

And all of it adapts to your farm: frost dates suggested from ten years of weather where you are, day length, and units. Nothing is fixed.

Starting or growing a flower farm

Whether you are starting a flower farm or heading into your tenth season, the questions stay the same: how many beds of each flower, how many stems they will give, what those stems are worth and which seeds to order. In Heirloom, that plan gives your flower farm business plan its numbers, bed by bed and from your own data, and it follows the season when it moves.

Cut flowers and vegetables live in the same plan, so a market garden that adds a few beds of zinnias and sunflowers plans them the same way. Try it free on your own farm.