A Minnesota Flower Farmer Put 50 Tickets on Sale for a Thanksgiving Centerpiece Class. They Sold Out in 18 Hours. Here's the Step-by-Step Plan to Turn the Flowers You Sell by the Bucket Into a Paid Flower Arranging Class on Your Own Farm.

From the desk of Stephen Loke
Founder, AgritourismSuccess.com
whose farm is featured in Bloomberg News and Asahi Shimbun

Dear Fellow Farmer,

In July 2020, a nurse practitioner named Liz Fiedler and her husband Josh started a flower business on his family's century farm in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

That December, Josh died of a heart attack. Liz kept the flowers going.

Then she did something most flower growers never try. She stopped only selling bouquets, and started inviting people in to make their own.

She put 50 tickets on sale for a Thanksgiving centerpiece class.

They sold out in 18 hours.

So she added a second class of 30 tickets.

At another event, called Sunfest, she charged $65 a person for a bouquet built from a 25-stem stem bar. She admits she was nervous. "That's a lot of money," she said.

People paid it anyway.

Now do the math with me. Sell those same 25 stems by the bucket, at the $0.90 a stem a Pennsylvania farm lists for wholesale zinnias, and they bring in $22.50.

Same stems. Same field. Almost three times the money. And instead of a bucket on a truck, you get a happy guest who drives home with flowers she arranged herself, and a story to tell her friends.

Liz told The Floral CEO podcast (January 2024) that her stem bar sales came to about $20,000 the previous year, and that the farm replaced her nurse practitioner revenue. Those are her own statements about her own farm, not a promise of what yours will do. But they show what can happen when flowers stop being a commodity and start being an experience.

So here's my question for you.

How many more seasons will you cut at dawn, strip leaves till your fingers ache, and still sell for less than a dollar a stem?

The Ugly Truth About Selling Flowers by the Bucket

It isn't that your flowers are poor. It's that a stem in a bucket is a commodity, priced by the cheapest seller in the world. Every one of these facts is in the book, with its source:

✔  In the United States, nearly 80% of the value of cut flowers on the market comes from imports, which hit a record $1.98 billion in 2024. Colombia and Ecuador alone supplied 88% of them (University of Illinois farmdoc daily, February 2025).

✔  In the UK, British-grown flowers account for only about 20% of flowers sold (Flowers from the Farm, May 2026).

✔  Canada imported CA$222.41 million of cut flowers and buds in 2024, while its 214 field-grown cut flower farms sold CA$32.4 million (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, August 2025).

✔  In a Utah State University Extension survey of florists, 23% said they would pay no premium at all for local flowers, and another 37% would pay less than 5% more (June 2023).

✔  A University of Tennessee zinnia budget assumed $1.00 a stem. After seed, supplies and 112 hours of labor on 1,000 square feet, the net return worked out to about $0.33 a stem (2025).

✔  In the 2024 National Agritourism Producer Survey, 17.8% of US operators had no liability insurance covering agritourism, and another 11.7% weren't sure (NERCRD, Penn State, April 2025).

Thirty-three cents. For a flower you planted, weeded, cut and bunched.

And growing more doesn't fix it. A bigger field just tires your back. A class changes the price per stem itself.

Here's the good news. The demand is already there. Tripadvisor found craft-class bookings rose 88% year over year in the first half of 2026, its fastest-growing experience category. For Mother's Day 2026, the National Retail Federation found 75% of shoppers planned to buy flowers, and a record one-third planned to give experiences. A Mother's Day flower class is both at once.

People want to make something with their hands, somewhere real. You have the somewhere real.

Who Am I to Tell You This?

My name is Stephen Loke, and I'll be honest with you from the start: I am not a florist, and I do not run flower classes. I'm the founder of a durian farm.

My farm, Bloopy Durians in Bentong, Malaysia, has been featured in Bloomberg News and Asahi Shimbun, and welcomes visitors from all over the world. Many companies send their staff and management to us.

Our durian seasons are short, roughly December to February and June to August. Our visitors come for a 1.5-hour farm tour: they ride a four-wheel drive, plant a durian tree, open a durian themselves and learn how to tell a good durian.

That taught me the lesson under every page of this book. People will pay for fruit. They will pay far more, and remember you far longer, to experience it themselves on a real farm, with a real farmer beside them.

Your flowers are no different. A bucket of zinnias is a commodity. A morning in your field, snips in hand, building an arrangement a friend gasps at, is an experience. And experiences are priced on a different scale.

So I studied the flower farms in the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia that already teach: what they charge, how they run their classes, and where some of them went wrong. Then I turned it all into a plan you can follow.

Introducing: How to Start a Flower Arranging Class on Your Farm

The Pick-and-Arrange Workshop Plan: What to Grow, What to Teach, What to Charge and How to Fill Every Seat.

This is a 120-page plan for turning the flowers you already grow (or could grow) into a paid, hands-on class on your own land.

It starts with the money: the per-stem math, eight real flower farms that already teach, and an honest test of whether a class is right for your farm. Then it walks you through choosing your first format, running a smooth 2-hour class minute by minute, and teaching a recipe so simple that every guest goes home proud.

After that, it shows you how to grow a cutting garden for your classes, price your seat with confidence, build a year of themed classes and group packages, ask the right questions before you open, and fill your first seats.

It won't promise you a number. A $75 seat in one town may be a $45 seat in another. What it gives you is real prices from real farms, a method to find your own, and the exact words to use at every step.

  Get Instant Access for $27 →  

Secure checkout. Instant PDF download. 30-day money-back guarantee.

Here's Just a Small Sample of What You'll Discover Inside

✔  Why the same 25 stems bring in $22.50 in a wholesale bucket and $65 as one workshop seat, and the per-stem chart that shows the gap at a glance. (page 7)

✔  The five things a workshop guest pays for that a wholesale buyer never will. (page 7)

✔  Why one respected workshop host warns against hosting workshops just for the money, and the hidden costs to count before you set a price. (page 8)

✔  The nurse practitioner whose flower farm replaced her nurse practitioner revenue, and the local brewery that brought her the crowd. (page 12)

✔  The simple Australian pick-and-arrange class with a 5.0 rating from 389 reviews, and the three-size price menu that lets every guest choose her own price. (page 12)

✔  How one Indiana farm made $10,950 profit from a single ticketed event day, against $4,015 from a whole month of u-pick. (page 14)

✔  The famous farm whose workshops sold out in under two minutes, crashed its website and "almost killed us," and the cap that protects your family. (page 15)

✔  The 20-point Readiness Score that tells you whether to launch this season, start with one private group or fix one thing first. (page 21)

✔  The one format to start with, and why it's the easiest to teach, uses the fewest stems and travels home safely. (page 24)

✔  The word-for-word welcome, safety talk, demo opener and close, plus the 15-minute timer that stops "the demo that ate the class." (page 31)

✔  The four-part recipe (foliage, focal, filler, airy) that lets a total beginner fill a jar with just 14 stems. (page 34)

✔  The spiral hand-tie in seven steps, and the cheap "practice bundle" that keeps your best dahlias out of beginners' hands. (page 35)

✔  How 72 summer seats could come from roughly 160 square feet of zinnias, sunflowers and celosia: the stems-to-plants formula, worked crop by crop in an illustrative example. (page 45)

✔  The 5-Step Price Formula, and why a $75 jar class breaks even at just 5 guests in the book's illustrative example. (page 54)

✔  Why a bachelorette party can be one of your easiest sales (The Knot puts the average cost at about $1,300 per attendee), and the quick text reply that books the date. (page 69)

✔  The seven questions to ask your insurance agent, word for word, before you sell a single ticket. (page 85)

Take a Look Inside

Chapter 1: Why Bucket Stems Keep You Poor. The per-stem table and money chart show the same 25 stems earning $22.50 wholesale and $65 as one workshop seat.

Chapter 2: Real Flower Farms Already Doing It. Eight real farms in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, with what they charge, how long they teach and how many guests they take.

Chapter 5: The 2-Hour Class Flow, Minute by Minute. Seven blocks, from the welcome at the gate to the goodbye at the car, with the host script to match.

Chapter 7: The Class Cutting Garden. What makes a good workshop flower, and a table of the best ones with how long each lasts in the vase.

Chapter 9: Price Your Seat With Confidence. The pricing reality checks and Worksheet 5, the Price Finder, that turns your costs into a seat price you can defend.

Chapter 10: Your Seasonal Themes Calendar. Twelve months of class themes, from pussy willow in January to Christmas wreaths in December.

  Get Instant Access for $27 →  

Secure checkout. Instant PDF download. 30-day money-back guarantee.