DIY Homesteader Festival Workshop:
Intro to Flower Farming
Whether you’re a home gardener, market-gardener or aspiring flower farmer – annuals, perennials, native or not, flowers add so much value to your garden. If produce feeds your body, flowers nourish your soul. Join Lourdes to learn how to cultivate beauty by starting your own cut flower garden. She will explore the five Ws and one H of growing flowers. Learn the importance of discovering your Manitoba flower farmers and support local flower farmers the next time you purchase a summer bouquet.
Hands-on: Limited. Presentation style.
Accessibility: This workshop takes place in an outdoor event tent on mown grass pasture, with the usual suspects of event seating.
Speaker:
Lourdes Still
Lourdes C. Still is a flower grower and founder of Masagana Flower Farm, a west-facing prairie acreage with glowing sunsets located near LaBroquerie, MB. She has 5 years experience as an international flower buyer before diving into the world of horticulture. As an importer, she brought a great deal of flower varieties to Winnipeg and western Canada all the way from Colombia and Ecuador. She has been inspired by many of the dedicated growers she met in South America. She is also a florist, creating floral bouquets, arrangements and installations for more than a dozen weddings/events to date. In 2016, Lourdes and her husband Kevin created a bountiful 600-sq-ft. garden of cut flowers and summer produce. She was hooked from the start, feeling connected with pride to the entire growing process—from seed to seedlings to full-grown plants—that thrived in their garden. In 2017, Kevin built her a hoop house that she filled with cosmos, dahlia, zinnias and amaranths to name a few. As her interest in floriculture deepened, she participated in "Floret Online Flower Farming Workshop", worked at a Manitoba flower farm and is on track to finishing the Master Gardener Certification Program through the University of Saskatchewan. She has now tripled her garden size and remains in awe of how many stems she cut and arranged in bunches last year! This growing season, her new focus is to inspire people to embrace local, seasonal and sustainable blooms by sharing her own cut flower garden journey. She looks forward to playing her growing role on the Canadian prairies as it catches on to the Slow Flower Movement.
