/ 01
The blind spot
Free labour makes every bed look profitable.
Every worked example on the internet, including mine, has an asterisk the size of a barn: the grower's own hours are in there at zero.
In the profit-per-bed article a 10 metre dahlia bed contributed about £500 in year one. That number is true and useful, and it silently assumes someone plants, stakes, disbuds, weeds, waters, cuts, conditions and sells that bed for nothing. Price those hours at even minimum wage and some beds on every farm, mine included, quietly go red.
This is not a reason to despair. It is the most useful flashlight on the farm, because labour is the only major cost you can redesign. Seed costs what it costs; the hours are yours to move.
A flower farm never runs out of jobs. It runs out of hours. Spend them like money, because they are.
/ 02
The audit
Where the hours actually go.
I tracked a full week in peak season with a notebook and a kitchen timer, expecting growing to dominate. It did not.
| Cutting and conditioning | 14 hours |
| Bunching, wrapping, orders | 8 hours |
| Deliveries and market | 7 hours |
| Weeding, watering, staking, sowing | 10 hours |
| Admin, messages, invoices, socials | 6 hours |
| Everything else that isn't a category | 3 hours |
| Total | 48 hours |
Half the working week happens after the flowers are grown. That was the finding that changed how we run the farm: the harvest-to-sold pipeline, cutting, conditioning, bunching, delivering, invoicing, is where the hours pool, and it is also where they are easiest to shrink, because it is process, not weather.
Do your own week once, in season, honestly. It is the least romantic afternoon in flower farming and it pays better than any seed order.
/ 03
The rate
Give yourself a wage, then defend it.
Put a number on your hour. Not your dream number, a floor: what the farm must pay you for a bed or a channel to count as working.
| Contribution before labour (year one) | ≈ £500 |
| Hours across the season (plant, maintain, cut, sell) | ≈ 35 |
| Paid at £12.50/hour | ≈ £437 |
| What is left as actual profit | ≈ £63 |
| Same bed, year two (tubers split, systems in place) | ≈ £300+ |
Sobering, and clarifying. Year one dahlias mostly pay you a wage, not a profit, and that is fine, you were paid. The crops that fail the test at any wage are the ones to cut or redesign, and you cannot know which they are until stems and hours are both counted. The same test run on channels is even sharper: it is how we discovered that one of our loveliest wedding packages paid £6 an hour, and one boring Tuesday wholesale run paid £28.
/ 04
The redesign
The cheapest hours are the ones you delete.
Before hiring anyone, shrink the job. The pipeline hours fall to systems, not to effort.
The moves that bought back the most at ours: batching cuts to two big morning harvests instead of five small ones; a bunch recipe card so bunching stops being a design decision (the maths of that is in the stems-per-bunch reference); a standing delivery route instead of bespoke drops; and moving every order, count and invoice off paper so nothing is written down twice. None of it is glamorous. Together they gave us back about eight hours a week, which in August is a day off.
Then, and only then, hire the £12 jobs, weeding, washing buckets, striking beds, and keep the £30 jobs, selling, planning, growing skill, for yourself. Farms that hire before they systemise just pay someone else to do the chaos.
/ 05
Counting it
Two numbers, kept together.
Everything in this piece needs just two numbers per bed: stems out, hours in. Stems tell you revenue; hours tell you what it cost to earn.
The notebook method works, one line per session: date, bed, job, minutes. Our free crop planning spreadsheet has the profit-per-bed sheet ready to take an hours column and your own wage line. And logging the stems half of it, in the field, wet hands and all, is the exact job BloomOS was built for: every cut recorded as it happens, so at the end of the season contribution per bed is simply there, waiting for you to divide it by your hours.
From the field
Find out what your hour really earns.
BloomOS turns cuts logged in the field into contribution per bed, ready to set against your hours. Free to start, built by a flower farmer, and recruiting a small founding cohort now.