This week on the FarmHouse, a podcast by Lancaster Farming, we're talking all things floral with Liza Goetz, owner of Wildly Native Flower Farm in Kent County, Maryland.
Wildly Native is both a flower farm and florist. Goetz takes on the growing of the flowers, while her daughter Lizzie handles the flower arranging.
And if it weren't for Lizzie, the flower farm may not have ever taken off.
Goetz, a former ag teacher, had been growing flowers as a hobby. When a past student asked her to do wedding flowers, Lizzie, who happened to be with her mom at the time, answered yes for her.
Now Goetz, who has always wanted to work the land at her family's farm, feels like she is doing what she was meant to do all along.
"This is where I belong. This is my place," Goetz said. "I only have some much time on this earth to be a steward of the earth. How can I do it and make a change for the next generations that are behind me?"
Weddings are now a big part of what Wildly Native does. Goetz sees local flowers starting to gain popularity.
"Flowers I feel like are one of the last frontiers," Goetz said. "When it comes to flowers, I feel like we are on the edge of the revolution of awareness."
Goetz has a wholesale license to get flowers that she might not be able to grow herself. But she likes educating her customers about local, native flowers they might not be familiar with.
Goetz always encourages her customers, especially her wedding clientele, to visit the flower farm.
"Come to the farm," Goetz said. "Come out, walk the rows, smell the flowers, taste them if they're edible, feel them. Get a sense of what actually grows."
And if growing the flowers isn't enough work, Goetz also likes to make her flower deliveries personally. She loves being able to see the reactions of her customers.
"People's expressions change, and they're happy," she said. "That just feeds my soul."
And while Goetz loves farming flowers — she calls them "sunshine in physical form" — she wants to clear up the misconception that it's an easy, always fun job.
"It is not peaches and rosebuds and flowers all day long," Goetz said. "It's sweat and bugs and mud and tears. It's true ag."
Much of the flower work is done by hand, like seeding, transplanting and cutting. But Goetz is often busy on a tractor, a sight she said is rare in her local area.
"I feel like being a woman in ag is still looked upon as unusual," she said. "It's still, to this day, odd for people to see, at least in our area, to see a woman on a tractor. I love that we are setting an example of how to do things differently."
