#413: Have We Met? Lisa’s Flower Farming Story

How did a flower farmer with limited land, no greenhouse, no tractor, and no cooler build a successful flower farming business and eventually The Gardener’s Workshop? Lisa shares her story, the challenges that shaped how she grows and teaches, and some of the lessons she learned through nearly three decades of flowers, business, and figuring things out as she goes.

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Free Resources: All About Soil Blocking

Lisa's Book, Growing A Beautiful Life

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The⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Field and Garden Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is produced by Lisa Mason Ziegler, award-winning author of⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Cut Flower Handbook, Vegetables Love Flowers, and Cool Flowers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, owner of⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Gardener’s Workshop,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Flower Farming School Online,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and the publisher of⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Farmer-Florist School Online⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Florist School Online.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Watch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Lisa’s Story⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and connect with Lisa on social media!

 

 

Have We Met? Lisa Mason Ziegler’s Flower Farming Story and the Story Behind The Gardener’s Workshop

If you have ever wondered how Lisa Mason Ziegler became a flower farmer, how The Gardener’s Workshop got started, or whether it is possible to build a flower farming business without lots of land and equipment, this episode of the Field & Garden podcast tells the story.

Lisa started her flower farm in 1998 with circumstances that did not look much like the picture many people have of a commercial farm. She lived in the city. Her entire property was only 1.17 acres, and that included her home and several outbuildings. She had no greenhouse, no tractor, no flower cooler, and very little growing space.

What she did have was an interest in gardening, a desire to find meaningful work she could do from home, and a willingness to keep figuring things out.

Those limitations eventually helped shape not only Lisa’s flower farm, but also the teaching, tools, seeds, and resources offered today through The Gardener’s Workshop.

 

How did Lisa Mason Ziegler become a flower farmer?

Lisa’s path to flower farming started with gardening.

After meeting her future husband, Steve, and beginning to garden at his family’s homestead in Newport News, Virginia, Lisa discovered a book that introduced her to an idea she had never considered before: growing cut flowers could actually be a career.

This was before social media made it easy to see thousands of other flower farms online. Information about small-scale cut-flower farming was much harder to find.

Lisa jumped in anyway.

The lack of acreage and equipment could easily have been reasons not to pursue flower farming. Instead, they forced her to develop growing methods that worked within the space and resources she had.

Looking back, Lisa sees those obstacles as an important part of what eventually connected her with so many other gardeners and beginning flower farmers facing similar challenges.

 

Can you start a flower farm without a greenhouse or lots of land?

Lisa did.

One of the biggest challenges was seed starting. Without a greenhouse and with very limited space, she needed a method that could produce the number of seedlings required for a flower farm without requiring a large growing facility.

Soil blocking became an important part of the solution.

Lisa adapted soil blocking into a tabletop seed-starting method that could be used indoors. Even during the years when her farm was in high production, she started seedlings in a roughly 10-by-10-foot room rather than a greenhouse.

That experience became an important part of The Gardener’s Workshop. Teaching gardeners and flower farmers how to successfully start seeds with soil blocks remains one of the areas Lisa is best known for, and TGW continues to offer the Ladbrooke soil blockers she has used in her own growing.

The lesson goes beyond soil blocking. Lisa’s experience showed her that not having the “ideal” setup does not necessarily prevent you from getting started. Sometimes the limitation itself leads you to the system that works best for you.

 

What matters most when starting a flower farming business?

Beginning flower farmers often worry about keeping up with flower trends, popular colors, and whatever varieties happen to be getting the most attention.

That was never Lisa’s primary focus.

When she was growing flowers for florists, supermarkets, farmers markets, subscriptions, and other local customers, she concentrated on something much more basic: producing good-quality cut flowers consistently, week after week.

Rather than asking which flower was trending, she focused on whether she could reliably grow a useful, high-quality crop in the quantity her customers needed.

That same philosophy eventually carried over into The Gardener’s Workshop.

Instead of filling the online store with every new gardening product available, TGW developed around a much narrower idea: offer the seeds, tools, and supplies that Lisa actually uses and understands.

For example, instead of offering ten different pairs of flower-cutting shears, the goal is to offer the one that has proven useful for years of real growing and harvesting.

The same principle applies to seeds. The varieties offered are chosen based on growing experience and qualities that matter for cut flowers, including whether they are practical to start and grow, useful for cutting, able to hydrate well, and capable of providing a good vase life.

 

What helped The Gardener’s Workshop grow?

The Gardener’s Workshop did not begin as the business it is today.

Lisa first grew and sold flowers. Then people wanted to learn how she was doing it, so teaching became part of the business. Those students wanted access to the same tools and supplies she used, which helped lead to the garden shop.

Eventually Lisa was traveling extensively, giving 60 to 80 lectures a year around the country while continuing to teach and promote the resources available through The Gardener’s Workshop.

Then the pandemic abruptly ended that chapter. An entire year of scheduled speaking engagements disappeared within days.

Once again, the business had to change.

That period led to the creation of more online educational resources and opened the door to another stage in Lisa’s work as a teacher and author.

Today, the farm itself has changed too. Instead of maintaining the large production gardens needed when Lisa was selling cut flowers commercially, the gardens are now focused primarily on education, growing trials, and learning which flowers and techniques might be valuable to share with other growers.

 

How do you balance flower farming, business, and life?

Lisa also talks about one of the harder lessons from her years in business: working constantly is not the same thing as building a sustainable business.

During the early years, she often worked six days a week from sunup to sundown. Eventually she realized that the person who had to change that schedule was the person running the business.

She began treating the farm more like a traditional workday. She would leave the house at a set time, work, stop for lunch, return to work, and then finish at a defined time.

Creating those boundaries made room for life outside the business and helped keep her family supportive of what she was building.

Lisa also relies on a simple practice she describes as “eating the ugly frog first.” In other words, tackle the hardest task of the day first instead of spending the day avoiding it.

That willingness to face uncomfortable challenges has been a recurring theme throughout her career.

 

From flower farmer to teacher, author, and mentor

Over time, Lisa realized that what she most wanted to teach was not limited to growing flowers.

Her own experience had repeatedly required her to try something that initially seemed impossible, whether that meant building a flower farm with limited resources, learning to start thousands of seedlings without a greenhouse, growing a business, or becoming an author while living with dyslexia.

For Lisa, success did not come from waiting until every obstacle disappeared. It came from finding another way forward.

That idea also shapes her newest book, Growing a Beautiful Life, coming in March 2027.

Unlike her previous gardening books, Growing a Beautiful Life tells the personal story behind Lisa’s business and life, including the risks, mistakes, difficult seasons, unexpected opportunities, family influences, persistence, and work that helped shape both.

It combines memoir with lessons from entrepreneurship, small-scale farming, marketing, perseverance, and the pursuit of meaningful work.

Whether you are growing a small cutting garden for your own kitchen table, thinking about starting a flower farming business, or simply trying to figure out the next chapter in your life, Lisa’s story offers one consistent reminder: you do not have to begin with the perfect circumstances. You just have to be willing to begin, learn, adjust, and keep going.