In this week’s digital extra, Rooted Flowers owner Rebecca Sadlowski talks about the challenges of finding farmland in western Massachusetts to develop her flower farm.
Learn more about Rooted Flowers, in our full feature profile on the field-to-vase specialty flower farm.
Read the full transcription:
Rebecca Sadlowski, Rooted Flowers Farm: I had been looking for years to find some sort of farmland, and it’s extremely difficult. Any time we found anything that popped up and might have been a good location, we would check out the land.
A big thing when you’re looking at land, especially farmland, if it’s still on the market, why? And a lot of times there’s usually an environmental concern and there’s probably some abutment of wetlands. And in those cases, you have to stay a certain distance away.
And a lot of times when we looked at these pieces, the amount of distance that you had to keep away from wetlands, it was so much land, there wouldn’t be anything left for us to grow on. So, we had to walk away.
When I first saw the property and saw the potential, I thought, “Wow, we’re going to turn this around.”
But as people started coming in to look at the property, like soil scientists, environmentalists, it was a little discouraging because they kept saying, “oh, well, it’s going to be years before you operate out of here, before you grow anything.” But that — that wasn’t — that wasn’t an option. It wasn’t on the table. We had to be growing the following year.
So, it’s almost six acres. We have the house in the front which was actually deemed unlivable. Then we had the outbuilding, the blue garage. And when you first pulled up to the property you could not see the buildings. It was all overgrown, and that’s how it went all the way back to the parcel — the back parcel, where you see the tunnels and everything growing now.
It took us a year to clean everything up and then the following year after that, we started growing. So we’re entering our third growing season now.
