Meet Lizzy Beller, a young flower farmer and Rodale Institute Farmer Training (RIFT) alumna.
After graduating from the RIFT program in the fall of 2022, Lizzy struck out to start her own flower farm, Bubbly Hills Farm, in 2023 on a half-acre of land in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. In her first year of farming, Lizzy learned how to manage pests without pesticides and established new markets for her business. Learn about the joys and challenges of farming, and the unique ups and downs of her business, in a Q&A with the farmer herself.
Q: How did you become interested in farming? What brought you to the RIFT Program?
I was in my junior year of college when I broke my foot, and I learned about nutrition because I wanted to heal faster. I had never been able to heal quickly or build muscle quickly before. That led me down a rabbit trail about personal health and I learned how beneficial it is to grow your own food. Then I started growing, and I loved it so much. I started growing all my own vegetables and feeding myself, and I felt so much better and healed so well. Then I grew vegetables commercially, and that was weary and not super fun. I joined the Rodale Institute Farmer Training program to learn more about organic farming, and I continued to work at a small commercial vegetable farm at the same time. Rodale Institute taught me how to handle large amounts of produce, and working at the small market garden veggie farm taught me fast succession and turnover and gave me experience in market gardening.
Q: What were your biggest takeaways from the RIFT program?
The farm visits and talking to farmers stood out to me. The RIFT program helped me to understand the real challenges to getting into farming, like getting land and creating infrastructure for your farm. Farmers that we met with admitted that they had worked a full-time job until they could get each piece of their farm in place and could slowly transition to full-time farming. That was a big eye opener for me.
Q: What is your advice to other small and beginning farmers?
You have to know going into it that your first year is going to be a mess. It is. You can’t project what pests you’re going to have, which are probably going to end up being your biggest issue. But it’s great to have that experience in your first year, so that you can learn from it. You already know you’re not going to be profitable in your first year because you put so much money in for supplies and everything else. So just know that your first year, as long as you finish the year, you did it. Set lofty goals, but it’s okay if you don’t make them.
Q: How did you become interested in flower farming?
I started to work with flowers at Rodale Institute events because I was interested and I asked about it. I started to help with some of the weddings that came up. The more I learned, the more I loved it. I saw that regardless of age or gender, people just light up when you give them flowers, and that resonated with me very well. I am a bit of a people pleaser, and flowers literally make people happy.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your flower farm?
Essentially, I have 48 rows, each 100 foot long, and I grow different flowers in each row. Some of the plants that I grow are sunflowers (I particularly like White Light), straw flowers, rudbeckia, celosia, zinnias, and cosmos. I grow other things purely for the fact that they’re scent heavy, and I love scents. I grow ‘Mrs. Burns’ Lemon’ basil, cinnamon basil, and sweet annie as fillers. I also grow perennials like pampas grass and Plectranthus for a consistent form of greenery. I’m still narrowing down my selections, but my absolute favorite is Lisianthus, a.k.a. “Lizzies”. In the language of flowers, they stand for gratitude. They last two weeks in a vase, aren’t ethylene sensitive so you can store them in a cooler, and are just really lovely flowers. I love them. And of course they’re called “Lizzies”… so there’s that, too. I market my flowers in a variety of ways. I’ve hosted a few “cut-your-own” days. I do a flower subscription, which includes four weeks of bouquets and a “cutyour-own” day. I sell at a local farmers’ market. I tried one wedding this year, and it went really well. I’ve sold buckets of flowers for events before, and occasionally I sell wholesale to florists. This is only my second year flower farming, so I’m trying it all so that I can weed out what I don’t like.
Q: What are your favorite parts of farming? What are the biggest challenges?
Cutting a whole armful of flowers is probably my highlight. I love harvesting. Pests are a huge challenge to deal with without spraying. But I’ve learned more about biosolutions, basically bugs that eat bugs, and I like that a lot. My main pest is thrips because I have a lot of corn fields and hay fields around me. I’m not here to exterminate them, because if I exterminate them, I also kill all the bugs that eat them. So instead of spraying, I introduce natural predators like lacewings, mites, and pirate bugs to eat them. I also cut out crops that attract thrips, so there are a couple of flowers, like snapdragons, that I had to give up.
