Reflections on the 2025 Growing Season

The desire to rest my body and look inward, a feeling that characterised much of November and December, has suddenly shifted. Although still in deep winter, we’re now speeding onwards towards Imbolc, the pagan festival celebrating the start of spring. I can feel a rising energy inside of me, like the rising of sap in trees in spring. I feel a strong desire to sort, organise, plan and prepare for the year ahead.

Narcissi flowering during a very dry spring

This week has been a quietly busy one. I love this time of year because my dreams for the year ahead are still whole and perfect, not yet gnawed at by rabbits nor sucked dry by aphids, not yet speckled with mildew or flattened by strong winds and heavy rain.  Everything is orderly and the weeds are too slow to bother about. We have the time and opportunity to focus on just one job at a time, complete it and admire the work. Everything is still full of potential. Whereas in summer, the flower grower is pulled in all directions at once by the constant need to pick, weed, water, feed, net, wrap and sell flowers. The work is demanding, seemingly urgent, and everyday day, fresh blooms open and all of the work begins again.

In winter, when we clear a bed, it stays clear of weeds for a few weeks, when we cut back perennials, they remain neat and tidy for a few months. Everything is calmer, slower.

Part of preparing for the year ahead means looking backwards and reflecting on the year that has passed. It is said that perennials ‘sleep, creep and then leap’; they sleep in their first year whilst growing roots underground, grow a little larger in their second, and explode in growth in their third. This is the phrase that keeps coming to my mind this week when I think of Zwetsloots Floriculture. Last year, the business crept, and slowly. We did move forward and we learnt a lot, but the flowers in the field didn’t really reflect our growth because we also faced what felt like a particularly large number of challenges and setbacks. I feel hopeful about this coming year; I see the business leaping.

2025 was a strange year, full of never-ending, mostly drought-related challenges. I recently came across a photo of our bed preparation in mid-March and the soil is already parched, compacted and damaged. Waste was extraordinarily high; we reckon we threw out more that 80% of the flowers and plants we started from seed. Prolonged hot, dry weather meant weaker seedlings and stressed plants, thus early flowers on short stems attracting all manner of pests. A 40m long bed full of Sweet Williams flowered at an average height of 15cm and were scarcely tall enough for a small posy jar and so were largely left to bloom in the field.

The hot weather in early spring caused half of our tulips to go blind: a weighty economic loss when each bulb costs thirty pence. The unseasonably higher temperatures in the polytunnel stressed the ranunculus and anemones early, resulting in splitting stems and huge spikes in aphid numbers, no matter how many ladybird larvae and parasitic wasps we introduced to control them.

All spring long, aphids attacked almost every plant, both annuals and perennials, even the heavily fragrant plants I’d expect them to avoid like achillea and feverfew. The aphids even crawled their way into my dreams, adding to a sense of aphid paranoia. We had to cut a lot back to enable the damaged plants to sprout out again. This coming year, we’ll be introducing predatory insects early and regularly spraying more vulnerable crops with neem oil, a natural oil which deters aphids and has anti-fungal properties.

Aphids, ladybirds and sacrificial roses

Last winter, we heavily mulched our beds with a free compost from our local council made from green waste bins. Initially it looked promising- dark, rich and crumbly- but it quickly turned into dust under the hot spring sunshine and exacerbated the dryness of the beds. Water seemed to instantly drain away upon hitting the earth and no amount of irrigation seemed to quench the thirst of our plants.

Bone dry soil in March and the mulch that made it worse

Irrigating in early April

Early on, we unknowingly bought terrible quality compost to pot on our annual seedlings. It arrested the growth of healthy young seedlings, encouraging them to damp off rather than grow vigorously. The several hundred antirrhinum seedlings we started in January didn’t make it into the ground until May and even then were spindly unhealthy things. They did eventually make a turnaround and flowered beautifully but not until late July, a month or two later than expected, and desperately needed. The dahlias were similarly slow to begin and suffered in the dry earth. We actually had to pick axe the hard earth to get them into the soil which is never a promising sign!

Despite cultivating a larger area than the previous year, our yields were lower. We scarcely had enough flowers for market, and so certainly no spare flowers for all of our other plans of building connections with local florists and introducing local subscription bouquets or hosting a weekly flowers club. So many dreams and not enough flowers!

I realise this sounds all really rather negative. It was a tough year, and at times it was hard to feel energised and inspired. But despite the struggles, or because of them, we learnt some really important lessons and made some major improvements to our infrastructure and growing methods, paving the way for what will hopefully be a very productive and abundant 2026.

For the first time, we had some paid help. Jakub joined us for a couple of mornings each week and made a huge difference. Being very capable and in the process of establishing his own garden maintenance business, Jakub’s help made the pressure of weeding, harvesting, lifting spring bulbs and other such tasks much lighter and freed up capacity for other important tasks.

We also bought a van for market which turned out to also be very useful for collecting mulch and transporting plants and equipment. I learnt to drive the van, and (besides the casualty of one wing mirror) I can now drive a van around in London fairly successfully (although not always happily- I much prefer country lanes!). The van means we can take more flowers to market, although we were surprised by how rapidly it fills up. A task for this year will be to come up with a better system for loading it and increasing capacity, or we’ll have to acquire a second!

One of our biggest successes this year was that we managed to attend two busy farmers markets, every week, all season long. It was a mild Autumn and, with the arrival of our chrysanthemums and the dahlias finally in full production, and we were able to continue later into the season than expected, a full month longer than we managed in 2024 which was cut short by the September flooding.  

We acquired a broadfork. It sounds like a small thing but it quickly became one of the most useful tools we have.  I’ll mostly likely be spending the rest of January and the entirety of February with said broadfork, and together, we will be ‘fixing’ all of our flower beds that were so drought-prone last year. With 30cm long tines, the broadfork penetrates deeper into the soil and opens up cracks for roots and water to pass through. In theory, it’ll enable the earth to hold more water whilst also enabling the water to drain away after heavy rain.

Very fortunately, we also gained unlimited access to a place of growers’ dreams: woodchips piles, as far as the eye can see, both freshly cut and beautifully decomposed. Woodchips for flower beds and woodchips for paths. The goal this year is for our beds to be able to retain as much moisture as is possible for a field that gets direct sun from dawn until dusk in summer.

Clementine and a wood chip moonscape

We have made a plan for a new, larger, and more reliable fridge, and it should be realised before the start of tulip season. The fridge will be big enough to hold thousands of peonies in peony season and to push Danish trolleys loaded up with bouquet materials in and out. It’ll means enormous gains in efficiency for us on market preparation day. And, compared with our existing second-hand (or rather third or possible fourth-hand) fridge, we shouldn’t have to worry about it icing up when it’s too hot outside or leaking when it rains, or just cutting out because another component has given up the ghost.

We have made numerous new beds, both for permanent plantings and annuals. Some of them are already planted up with new crops like astrantia, and others are waiting for spring deliveries such as alstroemeria. We have dug numerous trenches, laid pipes and erected new taps. The taps also mean more time saved and less carting water and buckets around the garden.

Creating more beds

Last and certainly not least (although I’d almost forgotten since it has been almost a whole year now), I left teaching altogether in February and am now a full-time flower grower!