This article first appeared in our sister publication, Dairy Farmer.
Farmer and grower Keryn Luke jokes that as a practical-minded person, she doesn’t see much sense in flowers – but there’s something she loves about them, and she’s been able to turn that love into a growing little business. Riverbend Flora is a small-scale flower farm producing a range of unique flowers purposely grown for cutting.
“Flowers bring so much happiness,” Luke says.
“I feel much more connected to and appreciative of the land since starting this business. I think it’s something I get from my grandmother, who also had a love for the land and growing.”
She grew up on a dairy farm on the Taieri Plains, right next door to their current farm, Riverbend. Her grandparents owned Riverbend before they passed, and she recalls many happy hours spent in her grandmother’s company tending the garden and enjoying everything the outdoors has to offer.
After finishing school she trained to become a radiographer but ended up back on a farm after marrying her husband, Matt. The couple took on a lower-order sharemilking job for her parents, running the home dairy farm while she worked full time at Dunedin Public Hospital as a radiographer until the birth of their first child in 2011.
“I took a year off after that and went back to a few days a week. When my first was born, my grandmother, who lived on the small farm next door, passed away.
“After that Matt and I with my parents bought the farm and named it Riverbend. Because it had gone into estate when she passed, we didn’t move in right away as there were things to sort out, and we also had another baby in that time.”
Riverbend, aptly named for the bend in the river, is a fourth-generation dairy farm running 160 cows. It’s small, but that’s the way the couple like it.
“Matt still runs my parent’s farm next door as well, but we like having a small farm and being fairly self-contained. We now own Riverbend and feel blessed to have our own bit of land that we can put our mark on.”
She made it her mission to restore the gardens to their former glory. With three children under four years old at the time, she says getting her hands in the dirt also helped keep her sane. Her love of gardening started in her youth and gradually grew over the years, but she says it wasn’t until they settled into Riverbend that it really began to take root and eventually form into a business idea.
“I watched an episode of Country Calendar on Nourish Gardens when my fourth child was a couple of months old. They grew cut flowers for sale and had a winery on Waiheke Island. I got thinking about how neat it would be to spend hours in my own garden and make a business out of it. I’m a fairly logical person and initially thought no, this isn’t a viable idea, but something about it interested me.”
After six months of researching the slow flower movement, finding other small flower farmers to talk to and figuring out what it would take to get a flower business off the ground, she was hooked.
“I trialled raising seeds myself as I hadn’t done a lot of that. I did it all in our little conservatory. I got hooked quickly and asked Matt if I could use the calf paddock out the back as a test paddock. It wasn’t a great paddock for calves, so he was quite happy to give it to me. Then we had the first lockdown, so we all got involved in setting it up.”
Her first official growing season was in 2020 and to start with she thought she’d grow and sell to florists and stay as a background person. She quickly realised that, at the scale of what she was doing, it wasn’t going to be financially viable to sell at a wholesale rate.
Almost by accident she discovered that selling direct to customers was the way to go. She started selling bouquets first to family and friends and then as interest grew to more customers.
“I could charge the same price for a retail bouquet as a full bucket of wholesale flowers for a florist, so going down the more consumer route made more sense for the scale of my field.
“When I started planning this business, covid didn’t exist, and the support was minimal. But when I first started selling it was at the height of people wanting to support local and seasonal products. It worked out really well.”
She also discovered growing interest from customers to learn about flowers and gardening, which encouraged her to start offering workshops. She holds them a few times a year, covering a range of topics from the art of cutting and arranging flowers to gardening and growing for beginners. Her workshops are well attended, and she enjoys having the chance to pass on the knowledge she’s accumulated over the years from her family and fellow gardeners.
“The more I got into my business the more it took me to different places,” she says.
When a friend converted an old woolshed into a wedding venue, this took her little business off on another course again. Doing wedding flowers was the perfect addition to her growing list of services. It added a level of stability while not sacrificing the flexibility she needs.
“Wedding flowers make a lot of sense for the stems I grow, and they don’t need to last 10 days or be perfectly straight so I can be more creative, which suits what I grow.”
Flowers are grown in the house garden and the old calf paddock, which is about 20m x 31m. Luke cultivates a huge variety of flowers, focusing on varieties that are not commonly commercially available. The growing season is typically from late September through to early April.
Being situated close to the river means the soils are sandy, providing a good natural soil base to work from. Regular mulching and use of seaweed products help keep the soil thriving along with some strategic use of fertiliser when needed.
“We replant annuals every year, and I tend to have probably 10 main perennials that flower throughout the season starting with anemones, tulips, ranunculus, peonies, roses, lilies, dahlias, hydrangeas and chrysanthemums. Like farming, there are times of the year when the garden is very intensive, like when we are planting, but the whole family pitches in and it’s quite a nice time of year.”
Now into her third growing season, Luke says there have been a lot of sharp learning curves along the way, from finding a niche that naturally worked for her to always thinking of ways to utilise what she grows.
“Because my field is small, I have to always think of ways to use my flowers. If I can’t sell them fresh I dry them, press them or photograph them. You have to think like that to make it financially viable.”
She’s also had to dip her toes into the realm of social media, which was an exercise in self-belief and stepping into the unknown. Not a regular user of social media in her personal life, she initially didn’t think she’d need it but quickly saw it as a free way to show people what she was doing.
“At the start I didn’t think what was I was doing was going to be interesting enough to share. Over the years I’ve met some wonderful people and I really enjoying sharing what I am up to here at Riverbend.”
While social media has certainly played a role in her business growth, word of mouth has been one of her biggest marketing successes.
“I love what I do, so I tend to talk to anyone who will listen about it, and you’ll be amazed what comes out of that.”
As her business has taken a shape of its own, she’s been well supported along the way by her family, in particular husband Matt.
“Over the years I’ve enjoyed listening to Matt speak about his highs and lows on the farm, his plans and all of that. This business of mine has given me to chance to do the same and for us all to do something together. Matt comes up with all these ideas and being a farmer he’s got great handyman skills, which has meant my little idea for a workshop turned into something quite amazing with the help of a builder friend.”
Flexibility was on her mind when she first started the business. Family time and time off farm is important to the family and by luck or design, that’s what she’s been able to achieve as she’s worked with the direction the business has taken her in.
“This business has multiple sides to it, which I love, so the future will just embrace that. I’m mindful that I only ever wanted this to be a part-time business and while it’s growing nicely on its own, I don’t have specific plans in place right for growth. I think I’m just enjoying the season of life that we are in right now.”
