/ 01
Why it matters
A bunch is a unit of trust.
When a florist orders from the Dutch clock, a bunch means an exact count, an exact stem length, and an exact stage of openness. When they order from a local farm, they are hoping we speak the same language.
Get the convention right and reordering is effortless: the florist knows what arrives, prices their work off it, and comes back weekly. Get it wrong, seven stems one week, eleven the next, and you have made their costing impossible, however beautiful the flowers. Consistent bunches are how small farms get treated like professionals.
Florists do not buy flowers. They buy predictability with petals on it.
/ 02
The conventions
The standard counts, UK and US.
The wholesale world runs on fives and tens, and on the Dutch auction conventions most UK florists were trained against. This is the table on our packing shed wall.
| Roses, tulips, ranunculus, anemones | 10 stems |
| Sweet peas | 10 stems (US often 8 to 10) |
| Dahlias, focal flowers (US market) | 5 stems |
| Dahlias (UK, decorative and ball types) | 5 or 10 by agreement |
| Cosmos, zinnias and small-headed annuals | 10 stems |
| Filler and foliage (ammi, mint, eucalyptus) | by weight or fat grower's bunch |
| Peonies | 5 stems |
| Sunflowers | 5 stems |
Two honest footnotes. First, dinner-plate dahlias break every rule: heads that size trade in threes and even singly, priced per stem. Second, foliage is the wild west; a florist's "bunch" of eucalyptus from the wholesaler is sold by weight, so when you sell yours, name a stem count or a weight and keep it identical every week. The number you pick matters less than the fact it never changes.
US growers reading this: your market leans harder on the 5-stem bunch for focals and the 10-stem for everything spray or small-headed, and grower's bunches at farmers markets are their own currency entirely, which is the next chapter.
/ 03
Retail
The market bunch is a different animal.
Everything above is trade convention. The bunch you sell at the gate or the Saturday market obeys different physics: it has to look generous in a stranger's hand.
A retail market bunch is mixed, usually 15 to 25 stems built as focal, filler and foliage, and it is priced as an object, not a count: £8, £10, £12, whatever your market carries. The skill is building it to a stem budget: decide the price, decide your target stem value, and let those two numbers dictate the recipe. Three focals, five secondary, five filler, three foliage is a £10 bunch in most of the UK; the ratio flexes with the week's picking, the budget does not.
The commonest retail mistake is generosity drift: July abundance quietly doubles the stem count at the same price, and then September's leaner buckets look mean beside the memory. Write the recipe down. Abundance goes into more bunches, not fatter ones.
/ 04
The maths
Per stem underneath, per bunch on top.
However you sell, the arithmetic underneath should always be per stem, because the stem is the unit your beds produce and the unit your costs attach to.
| Ranunculus, wholesale price per stem | 80p |
| Bunch of 10, trade | £8.00 |
| Same stems in a £12 retail bunch (3 of 18 stems) | ≈ 67p each + the rest |
| Stems per plant per season (honest average) | ≈ 8 |
| So one plant, sold in trade bunches | ≈ £6.40 |
Run that last line across a whole bed and you are back at contribution per bed, which is the number that should be choosing next year's crop plan. The full working is in the profit-per-bed article, and the counting itself, stems cut, bunched and sold, per variety, per bed, is precisely what BloomOS logs from your pocket while your hands are still wet. Our free crop planning spreadsheet has a stems-and-bunches sheet ready for your own counts.
From the field
Know what every bunch cost you to grow.
BloomOS tracks stems from bed to bunch to invoice, so your prices stand on numbers. Free to start, built by a flower farmer, and recruiting a small founding cohort now.