From Surplus to Success: Transforming Farmers Market Leftovers into Opportunities

As a child, I hated leftovers (exception: Thanksgiving dinner). As an adult, however, I can get pretty excited about them – though I suspect that’s because leftover food means I don’t have to figure out what we’re having for dinner.

Farmer’s market flower leftovers are a different story, however, because they represent unsold inventory of a highly perishable product. It rarely happens anymore, but in the early days of the farm, there were many times when I returned home from the farmers market with a carload of bouquets. It was absolutely demoralizing, and there were days when I considered giving up my flower farming dream as a result. Even today, if the weather is terrible and causes market-goers to stay home, we can end up with unsold flowers. It still hurts to see the van return with more than a bucket or two of bouquets.

If the only photos you take of your bouquets are the ones you snap while at the market (or on the way there), then they’ll always be shrouded by paper and crowded together. Still beautiful — but not showcased to their full potential.

Despite having been on display at the market for several hours, our flowers were still fresher than the ones the florist got from the wholesaler, as those stems typically travel long distances – out of water – to get to the flower shop. But often what’s left over from market, such as mixed bouquets, isn’t particularly marketable to a florist. And selling at wholesale prices when you’ve put the work into creating the arrangements, wrapping them for sale, and have sat with them at the market all morning (in a booth you’ve also paid for) is bad for the bottom line.

Part of my flower farming journey has been learning other ways to put those leftover farmers market flowers to use. Here are some examples that I hope will help others:

1. Take pictures

Snag pictures that are hard to get when every bloom gets sold before it fully opens.

You’ve put a huge amount of effort into growing these blooms, but chances are, you don’t have a portfolio of really good pictures of your final product. This is probably due to several reasons. First, when you’re just getting started and are putting your effort into growing, harvesting, arranging, and selling, picture-taking is often rushed or ignored completely. Photos don’t have to take a lot of time, but when you’re packing the car/van in the early morning to make the drive to market, and then hustling to get your tent set up when you get there, photography tends to fall to the bottom of the priority list.

There are so many ways to take photos of your flowers in ways that showcase their full beauty — but you have to get them out of their wrappers and coax them into full (or at least fuller) bloom! For example, the ranunculus on the left, if still in tight bud and wrapped in paper, would look deceptively small and uninspiring. Even simply providing a just-unwrapped bouquet (center) with a beautiful backdrop makes a huge difference.

Second, unless you’ve already put a lot of effort into online sales, you may not think you need webpage-worthy shots of your market bouquets. After all, your market customers don’t have to see a picture of your bouquets to decide whether they want to buy one – they get to see the real thing! But as soon as you decide to start selling bouquet subscriptions (CSAs), or otherwise transact business online, you are going to need photos that showcase the full beauty of what you’re selling. Overhead or side-angle shots of your market bouquets all massed together are great for showing the bounty of your harvest, but they don’t let a new customer see what they can expect when they bring home one of your bouquets and put it in a vase.

Last, while some of the summer/fall flowers like zinnias and dahlias need to be harvested in full bloom, many of the other flowers you bring to market will be in tight bud, to give your customers the longest possible vase life. All of those pictures you take of your market bouquets – pretty as they are – probably don’t show your product in its full glory.

Using your leftover market bouquets to take photos – after you’ve let all the blooms open to their full potential – is a great use of any leftovers, as it shows the exact number and type of stems you would normally include in a bouquet. So, let all those buds open fully, and then start snapping photos you can use on your social media, web page, and any other marketing outlets you use.

When we bring bouquets with peonies, such as ‘Coral Charm’ (shown here) to market, those peonies are usually in tight or loose bud, such as those in the first three pictures, above. This means that the impact these giant, focal flowers impart to a bouquet when they unfurl will never be captured by photos taken of the market bouquets.

2. Practice

Use your leftover product to practice your floral design skills.

Unless the only thing you sell at the farmers market is straight bunches (and if so, why??) then you already have experience designing mixed bouquets. Now’s your chance to perfect those skills. Even if you never plan to create designs more advanced than those you sell at market, you can practice building them faster, since reducing the amount of time it takes to create your products is critical to your profitability.

Another way to use these blooms is to expand your floral repertoire by experimenting with different styles of floral design or playing with new color combinations. Your future customers will appreciate having additional options – and you’ll be more likely to sell more (hopefully all) of what you bring to market the next time!

If you’re looking to branch out into more advanced floral design work – including weddings – then practicing your skills is paramount, as your ability and confidence in building more complex florals is critical to taking on weddings that require designs or installations that are beyond your current comfort zone. If you’re already comfortable making vase-based arrangements, practice making centerpieces in shallow compote dishes, which – even if your composition skills are top-notch – will help you perfect your ability to create adequate mechanics to underpin the design. If you haven’t yet mastered the light and airy, garden-inspired bridal bouquet, practice those! Or just work on your spiral technique.

Leftover greenery and flowers are also an excellent source of material for practicing arches and overhead installations. Getting a better understanding of the volume of material required to create these designs and the ability of different varieties to hold up out of water is every bit as critical to a successful wedding business as the beauty of the designs themselves.

Before I ever committed to doing a wedding with a floral arbor, I practiced on the garden arch at the entrance to what we now call the “Old Garden” (center photo). Compote arrangements (left and right photos) can require some practice, too, as the wide mouth of the vessel usually requires some sort of armature to keep the flowers correctly placed.

3. Dry them

Dry extra flowers for sale and/or use in dried flower products, such as wreaths, potpourri, or even handmade paper with embedded petals.

Dried flowers are decidedly back in fashion, thanks in large part to talented flower farmers, crafters and designers who have been showcasing the creative beauty and variety of their dried creations on Instagram and Pinterest. Dried flowers can be a source of much-needed income in the fall and winter, too, when the fields – and the cooler – are bare, and they are far easier to ship than fresh blooms, which means you can sell them to customers outside of your local area.

Growing the right amount of celosia has been tricky for us. Sometimes we wish we had a lot more; other times we have a surplus. Since many of the celosia varieties dry well, we make use of extra celosia by drying it for use in craft projects and for sale.

4. Give them away

Donate to community organizations, senior living centers, or hospice providers.

During COVID, when weddings and other events were all on hold and even our farmers market was closed for a while, I used our blooms to create small, bedside table-sized arrangements and brought them to local nursing homes. Being able to provide beauty and pockets of joyfulness in the face of the daunting challenges that the pandemic created, particularly for the residents of these centers, gave me – and our flowers – a purpose.

A note here: you should not, in my opinion, (there may be exceptions, of course) give away your flowers to market customers. If you do, you are sending the message that your flowers are without value – which, given the ideas above, not to mention the cost you invested to bring them to market in the first place, is definitely not true. You’ll also be encouraging potential patrons to simply visit the market right before closing time, when they can pick up your leftovers for free (or reduced cost).

Instead, put your efforts into growing and designing the most beautiful, freshest flowers your customers can buy, and then stand your ground on pricing them to create a sustainable business. If needed, put more effort into right-sizing your growing operations, trying to reduce over-production. Remember, giving your flowers away to would-be customers or providing steep discounts not only hurts your ability to stay in business, it hurts other flower farmers, too, by creating customer pricing expectations that aren’t consistent with the cost of producing high-quality, locally-grown blooms.

Giving away our flowers during the pandemic made me feel like I was doing something productive. Donating excess flowers to a worthy cause is always a good option.

In closing…

My dad claims some leftovers are actually tastier than the dish when it was originally served. That may not ever be true when it comes to the flowers that are at the heart of your business, but that doesn’t mean your leftover blooms have to go straight into the compost pile. Bottom line: while unsold inventory from farmers markets is frustrating and demoralizing, finding ways to use these blooms productively can help you better market your flowers to new and existing customers, gain confidence and experience in designing, and expand your current offerings.