Bochner Farms Journal

Our beautiful piece of land is home not only to our flower farm, but also to a wide variety of wildlife.  Including deer.  Although Bambi and her family are adorable as they bounce across the meadow with graceful strides and fluffy white tails, they are evil little scavengers who love to feast on our flowers.

So, we are building a fence.  A really, really big fence.  It’s quite the investment of time and money, but it will be a lifesaver next spring when the lilies are tender and our baby seedlings are newly planted.

Sorry deer, NO FLOWERS FOR YOU.

 

Recently we took a birds eye view of the farm, special thanks to our friend Chris Nelson who piloted the drone, and a really cool drone called AVA (Aerial Video Apparatus).  What an amazing view of our farm.

Our day lily rows seem so small from up here.  But pretty proud of our reasonably straight lines!

This view shows the cut garden area as well as the daylily rows and even the HUGE rock that we’ve named “Druid Rock”.

Beautiful sunny days will bring us flowers next season, and we want you to be part of it!  Several of you have asked to visit the farm, so we are planning an open house next summer when everything is in peak bloom.  We hope you’ll join us.  More to come on that later…

 

 

 

I never intended to be a flower farmer.  Actually, I often get asked how this Bochner Farms dream began.  It’s so strange, but the honest answer is, “I have no idea.”

What I can say, is my husband Jim and I had intended to buy land in Oregon and live there when we retire.  Then we decided why not buy land in Iowa so we can enjoy it until we retired (you know, things like fishing and hiking and camping).  We planned to have fun on our Iowa land and then sell it to move to Oregon someday.

Things turned out differently.  We found a beautiful 50 acres of land in central Iowa.  Complete with hills and trees, meadows and a pond.  We spent time there.  As we explored the land, we fell in love with it.  We decided to build a house there.  At this point, still no talk of this crazy thing called flower farming.

I honestly don’t know how we leapt from building a house on the land to what would eventually consume so much of our energy, time, money, thoughts and dreams…Bochner Farms.  But here we are, talking of growing day lilies, hybridizing, growing cut flowers, and creating a beautiful place for people to gather and share the joy of special occasions in the midst of colorful flowers and green open spaces.

And so it began.  We hope you enjoy following along as we continue down our flower farming journey.

We hope you visit frequently to keep up on all the farm happenings.  This is a picture of our very first “Bochner Farms Business Meeting.”  A lot has happened since that chilly day in March 2017.  Good things have happened, challenging things have happened.  But at the end of the day, we’re so blessed to be walking this journey together.