Starting the flower farm
Little Lifestyle Flower Farm is based in Napier, New Zealand, growing dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, sunflowers, feverfew and more. I love cultivating beautiful blooms and sharing them with the community.
Hi, I'm Kristin. I'm a first year cut flower grower here in beautiful Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. My property was hit hard by Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, with flooding leading to the full devastation of house, land and surrounds.
When the time came to move back nearly a year later, I have to admit to being intimidated and daunted with starting from scratch again. Thoughts of giving up and selling the property went through my mind as I stared at silt and years of vanished landscaping.
Slowly but surely as I worked to bring the property back to some semblance of normalcy, my enthusiasm and love of gardening reignited, and it came with new determination to do the things in life that I enjoy the most.
As an avid hobby gardener for years, the first step for me was to grow myself a beautiful cut flower garden to drown out the brown, monotonous silt and patchy grass. I started researching what I would grow online, and discovered the wonderful world of flower farming. With five acres of my own, and previously only creating and selling hay, I realised I had the space to build my very own cut flower farm.
Not wanting to get too ahead of myself, I started with a house garden, and I built it myself from scratch – purchasing retaining timber, cutting it down, screwing them together to create beds, filling with soil, hammering in stakes, planting all my tubers and seedlings, and applying trellis netting where needed as things grew.
My first flower season summer 2024/25 was an experiment, where I grew many different varieties, some which did well in the climate here, and a couple which didn't. I also discovered which ones I liked growing and others I didn't. It's a good place to start, and if you're thinking of doing the same thing, I recommend starting out just finding what you like. You don't have to grow everything!
My plans for the 2025/2026 season have expanded into my front paddock, with half an acre put aside for around a thousand dahlia plants and thousands of zinnias, snapdragons, cosmos and strawflower seedlings.
I hope that 2026 will be the year of firmly establishing Little Lifestyle Flower Farm within the Hawke's Bay community, with many plans in place for the following years.
