By Chris Aldridge
Kentucky Ag News

When a farmers’ market vendor sells out, it’s usually a cause for celebration. But not for Kelly Riley.

The owner of Gray Arbor Farm in southwestern Scott County usually sells all of the cut flower bouquets she can bring on Saturdays to the Scott County Farmers’ Market in Georgetown. Riley and two part-time workers, and at times her mother and daughter, usually put together 80 to 150 10-stem bouquets that sell for $20.

“We sell out really quickly,” Riley said. “Honestly, I don't celebrate it.”

What she hates the most is informing potential customers that she’s out of bouquets.

“It hurts my heart so bad,” Riley said. “If people are willing to support me … actually making the trip to come to the farmers’ market … that really means something to me. So, when I can't provide my people with flowers, it just hurts me a little bit.

“We just have such a great community that really lifts up farmers in general and supports us, and we couldn't be doing this without them,” she added. “It is the majority of my revenue every year so I'm very grateful.”

A recent heatwave and dry conditions limited the number of blooms Riley could assemble, creating only 60 bouquets during a recent Saturday.

“The goal is to get to 150,” she said. “You do the best you can with what you got.”

Riley and her helpers create a floral assembly line to put together the bouquets, which are also sold Wednesdays at the Chevy Chase Farmers’ Market in Lexington.

“We make bouquets constantly,” she said. “We try to get it to 3½ minutes per bouquet so we can get as many out as possible…. We've got it down to a science.”

When she has them, Riley’s bouquets include her favorite flower, lilies. She anchors her bouquets with sunflowers or zinnias and likes to include nostalgic varieties such as the cornflower, commonly called “the bachelor’s button.”

“I try to get one premium focal flower in there, and then I'll add what I consider secondary flowers … to kind of give some pops of color and different texture.”

Gray Arbor also sells its flowers at The Hidden Trove, a gift shop in downtown Georgetown. “We do ‘Flower Thursday’ down there to make Thursday a little bit more fun,” Riley noted.

The genesis of Gray Arbor Farm goes back 11 years, when Riley and her husband, Chris, were working in the retail business.

“He was so tired of being in retail – we both were,” Kelly said “We knew we needed to do something different.

“My husband is the one that had the green thumb. We had a vegetable garden. One of our most favorite things to do was just do the produce garden together, and so he started way back in 2013 Googling, ‘How do I turn a hobby into a business?’”

There were already plenty of produce farms, but Chris discovered a niche – flower farming.

“Nobody was really doing anything like that and had really even heard of cut flower farming,” Kelly remembered. “So, we started. We got one of those little greenhouses and actually turned our closet that was under our stairs into a grow room … just to see what it was like, and he was hooked.”

In 2016, the Rileys bought three-acre Gray Arbor Farm next door to a tobacco farm. Then life interrupted their plans in January 2017.

“I lost my job, so I was like, ‘Fantastic. I now am going to be running this farm,’” Kelly said sarcastically. “So, everything that Chris learned in four years I had to kind of cram … from February until May.”

A decision that summer to start selling at farmers’ markets led to an online education in floral design.

“I spent that winter (of 2017-18) watching YouTube tutorials on how to make bouquets,” Kelly said. “That taught me how to do it, and then how to get faster at it, and so here we are.

“The ultimate goal is for this farm to produce enough to where (we) can both be on this farm together. We're not there yet…. He works full-time.

“We're getting there,” she added, “slowly but surely.”