Bienvenidos! Welcome to Winter Sabbatical 2025! I can’t believe this is my 5th winter here in Mexico. I know lots of you must’ve thought I’d dropped off of the planet. My last blog post was in August. YIKES!! More on that in a bit. Travel this year was the most stress-free it has ever been. Tim flew down with me on Christmas Day, as he usually does, then returned to Nashville on New Year’s Day. The weather has been mostly beautiful. There have been a couple of overcast and windy days. No nortes yet. Today was the 2nd Monday market since my arrival. I’m well on my way to having a stocked freezer. It’s fun to see familiar faces on my beach walks, at the farmers market, at restaurants, and the flower stand at the Progreso market. I’d been burning the candle at both ends in the weeks leading up to my departure so I felt like a wrung-out sponge for the first couple of days. Now I’m settling into a routine and thinking about what I’d like to accomplish while I’m here. I just finished my 2024 financial records. Hopefully, everything else on my agenda will be WAY more fun. 

One thing on my agenda is goal setting, both for the business and personally. As a personal goal, I do want to write more this year. Though I began selling flowers in 2023, it was mostly a side hustle, as I was still working at Bates Nursery full time until November of that year. So, I consider 2024 to be year one for Melmac Florals. And it was a doozy. I knew it would be; most small businesses struggle for the first few years. My hope was to at least break even. I did not. Though, I wasn’t as far in the red as I feared I would be. My hope for 2025 is that I can at least earn enough profit to pay for my annual trips to Mexico. One of the most disheartening things about losing money this year was that I worked SO HARD and have nothing to show for it (at least in the monetary sense). This business was far more consuming than I expected it to be. Whether that consumption is solely the nature of farming or exacerbated by my tendency to obsess and overanalyze is difficult to say (my husband would say it is the latter). I knew the threat was real that I would eat, sleep, and drink this flower business, leaving little room for anything or anyone else. And I did. With every brain cell preoccupied, I had nothing left for weekly blog posts. I can’t promise I’ll be more dedicated to writing this year. But it is a goal I’m aiming for.

The only book news I have is that Olympia Publishers are in breach of contract. They had 290 working days from the date I signed the final proof certificate (meaning all editing was complete and the manuscript was ready to go to print) to produce a printed book. The certificate was signed and dated May 23, 2023. Until recently, I had been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that the delay was simply due to publishing being a lengthy process and that Olympia would follow through on this contract I signed with them almost 3 years ago. Now I’m ready to take action. That is all I will say about that.  

Aside from the financial aspect, here is a summary of my first official year as a flower farmer.

• Crop failures: ranunculus, anemone, sweet william, scabiosa, snapdragons, dahlias, sunflowers. This is thanks to voles, rabbits, and heavy spring rains that rotted hundreds of dahlia tubers.
• After spending hundreds of dollars on replacement tubers, I ended up with over 600 dahlias that produced 2600 tubers!
• I had 3 1/2 events: 2 fundraiser dinners, 1 wedding, and 1 homecoming weekend 
• I participated in 51 farmers markets. Farmers markets are, for me, the most exhausting part of this business. Not just the market itself (hard core introvert here); mainly the prep work involved. But, they did bring in 10K of income this year.  So I’ll keep doing them.
• I sold over 300 Jam Jars of Joy and 70 bouquets
• I made a great group of farmer friends by joining the Nashville Cut Flower Collective.
• I had 2 workshops on flower arranging and everyone who attended seemed to have a great time.
• I tried to run a self-serve flower stand from my home. Then a neighbor complained to Brentwood City Codes and it was shut down. This complaint also meant I had to put a stop to workshops in my home, as codes pointed out to me that I am not allowed to have customers on my property. No, I don’t know who turned me in.
• I branched out (HA!) into dried flowers last year with mixed results. I will dry flowers again this year but I have to find more fun and profitable ways to use them. Dried flowers are NOT my favorite, and they made me say lots of NSFW words.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the wedding I did this fall. Thanks for reading this far; you should’ve known I’d have lots to say after a long absence. Photo credit: https://www.tmtweddings.com