Sleeping Bee Blooms

04/23/2025

Yay! 🐝 The first Sleeping Bee arrangements of the season are available as preorders for pick up tomorrow (Thursday) morning through Saturday morning! These $15 pint jar posies include frilly daffodils, sweet little tulips, and forsythia and curly willow branches. These early season blooms are some of my favorites because they continue to grow in the vase, changing color and form every day! Drop a comment here or send a message to reserve yours!

04/23/2025

It is go time for this carload of baby plants today! Such a beautiful day to spend it in the garden putting them in the ground 😊

And the tulips are growing quickly in this warmer weather 🌷💕 Soon buckets of these will be available!

Coming soon…the first pint jar arrangements with early tulips, frilly daffodils, forsythia and curly willow branches. Hoping for time after tonight’s track meet to pull those together. Stay tuned!

04/21/2025

Happy Easter Monday flower friends! It was a very exciting Easter weekend in the Sleeping Bee Bloom world. The joyful reminder of the Resurrection, time spent with family, and the construction of my new favorite space! Thanks to the patience, perseverance, and skills of my guys, the greenhouse kit I purchased last fall has become an actual structure! While not completely ready for me to move in, I am so thrilled to finally have a space to consolidate all my planting things and protect my baby seedlings from temperamental Mother Nature until they are ready to be planted.

While rather distracted with other tasks, these lovely Apricot Whirl daffodils started opening up and got pelted with the muddy rain at the end of last week. But there may be a few small arrangements available this week featuring these beauties, early tulips, forsythia, and curly willows...

However, this week I have to prioritize the massive list of tasks that need to be tackled: trays of snapdragons and early fillers that are ready to go in the garden that isn't quite ready for them, flower subscription information to get out to you all, and Mother's Day preorders to get going! Plus a few hundred more dahlia tubers to be cleaned and divided. It will be an exhausting week, but I am looking forward to it 🤗 Spring has finally arrived!

04/14/2025

A year ago I remember looking up the date for Easter 2025 and thinking to myself how lovely that it’s so late into April! I’ll have plenty of daffodils to do Easter arrangements 🤔🤷🏻‍♀️😆 Unfortunately that didn’t pan out how I had hoped with a frigid winter and a very cold spring setting bloom times back several weeks from what they were last year.

But a flower farmer is always hopeful for NEXT YEAR. And my Easter flower plans for 2026 will include these sweet little bundles of spring called kokedamas, the Japanese art of growing plants in moss-wrapped balls of soil. I happened to have just a few of the tiny tête-à-tête daffodils that I could dig up, along with blue squill, curly willows and dried materials to add a little more whimsy. Aren’t they adorable?? Coming Easter of 2026 😉

04/10/2025

Spring break traveling was wonderful, but now to really double down on all the flower farming tasks that accumulated in my absence!! Growth of my outdoor plants is really, really slow this year because of the frigid temps, but I have one little anemone that decided to bloom despite the 20 degree nights. Yay for cold hardy blooms!

Indoor seedlings are looking good, loads and loads of dahlia tubers are being cleaned and divided, and tulips, daffodils, and even the hellebores are all waiting on warmer days ☀️Praying that the rest of April is warm enough to get them blooming in time for Mother’s Day!

03/26/2025

And the winner of the $25 Sleeping Bee Blooms gift certificate is…

Julie Hohwart 🎉 🤗 Thanks again to all of the 73 individuals who took the survey!! I’m very thankful for the feedback, and I will soon be rolling out more specific information about bouquet subscriptions, flower arranging workshops, and a few other fun flower ideas floating around in my head 😊 Another season of beautiful local flowers is starting very soon!

03/26/2025

https://forms.gle/DGAy7UdZRUU2PVAeA
There are still a few hours left to complete this brief survey in order to get an entry for the drawing later today for a $25 Sleeping Bee Blooms gift certificate! Thank you again to all those who have already completed the survey...your feedback is so very much appreciated 🥰

Thank you so much for volunteering to offer some feedback on what factors you consider when choosing to purchase fresh flowers, whether from your local flower farmer, a grocery store, or brick and mortar florist. These responses will help me determine how best to market my flowers and what services....

03/25/2025

Today…was not a good day to work outside 🥶 So I spent some time checking on all the dahlia tubers I divided in the fall and stored in boxes of vermiculite in the cooler over the winter. With a very small number of shriveled or rotted tubers, it was very exciting to see that the vast majority made it through the winter!! I also store a large number of dahlia tubers, still coated in the soil they were growing in, as intact clumps, wrapped loosely in plastic grocery bags, thrown into cardboard boxes, and stored in my in-law's crawl space. Those are a little more prone to shriveling or molding, but the vast majority of those are still viable also. So I have A LOT of dahlia tubers this year 😳 Far more than I have the space to plant. This means I will have lots of tubers that I can offer for sale to any of my local flower friends who would like to grow these cut flower varieties themselves! The details of which varieties and how many I will have available won't be known until I get the rest of these clumps washed and divided...a long and tedious process that will likely take me about 4 weeks. But I will be selling the tubers for $5 a piece or 5/$20, and if you are interested, please drop a comment here!

Also if you haven't yet completed the survey, and would still like to, you can find that link below. THANK YOU SO MUCH to those who have already taken the time to do so. Your feedback is so valuable and your many kind words are very much appreciated 🥰 Submit the survey before 3pm Wednesday to be entered to win a $25 Sleeping Bee Blooms gift certificate!
https://forms.gle/2ksLzsHZx9Qr3d878

03/22/2025

The Google Forms survey is ready! If you are local to Saginaw and have purchased Sleeping Bee Blooms flowers in the past or are interested in purchasing locally grown cut flowers, please take a few minutes to complete the following Google Forms survey to offer feedback and help this side hustle flower farmer provide the flower services you need 🙂 All respondents can opt to have his or her name included in a drawing for a $25 Sleeping Bee Blooms gift certificate. Drawing will be held Wednesday evening, March 26th, so you must respond before 3pm on Wednesday to be included. Thank you for participating!!
https://forms.gle/wPh41MrcCEc52nWa8

03/19/2025

Time to fully emerge from my social media hibernation 😴 and provide a preview of all the beauty this growing season is about to bring! My south-side daffodils are just starting to bud and the Lenten roses will be showing their lovely faces soon 🤗 Those first sweet little bunches of flowers are only a month away! Hundreds of seedlings are growing in my basement and garage with a few hundred more to get their start this week. Look for more preview posts this week and an opportunity to offer some feedback as I try to plan for my sales outlets this year. I’ll be asking my flower friends to complete a short survey to help me figure out how to best provide you with the services you need from your local flower farmer florist! Plus all survey participants will be entered in a drawing for a free $25 vase arrangement 😊🎉💐 Check back Saturday morning (March 22nd) for a link to that survey. Thank you!!☺️

02/02/2025

While it is still definitely winter outside, the preparations for the 2025 flower season have started consuming more and more of my days. Lots of planning...dreaming...seed starting...and this week the process of waking up the anemones!

These classic disc flowers with the striking deep blue centers are favorites of mine 💙 (The white with green centers are pretty amazing, too 😍) This year I ordered more than 300 corms (the brown nugget root structures the plants grow from) in lots of different fancy varieties to trial. Because they thrive in cooler early spring weather, the growing process needs to start early enough so that they mature and produce flowers before the temps are consistently in the mid-70's and they shut down. Last year I had lots of stunning blooms in time for Mother's Day arrangements, and I am hoping for the same this season! They will also provide lovely focal flowers for wedding reception centerpieces the following weekend 💕 And with each plant producing 7-10 blooms I should have plenty more to share with my flower friends!

01/19/2025

Brrr 🥶
How to cope with the worst of winter?
🌷 Scroll through the pictures on the Sleeping Bee Bloom Facebook or Instagram page as a reminder that January doesn’t last forever 😉🌸☀️ Someday soon I’ll get to play with these blooms again!

01/03/2025

Happy New Year Flower Friends 🎉🌸🐝💕 The 2025 growing season is still several months away, but after some time away from flower farming tasks it’s time to get going on the planning, purchasing, planting, and posting! A few photo highlights for the first few days of January:

💐The first seeds to get their start this weekend will be the slow-growing lisianthus. Last year was my first successful attempt at growing them from seed so I’ll give it another go this year because they are stunners 😍 And they last forever in the vase!

💕 My favorite unexpected finds yesterday were these colorful highball glasses at Menards…I’m envisioning lovely arrangements of tulips and daffodils in these for Mother’s Day offerings this year!

🐝 And isn’t my new hat adorable?! My talented niece designed and embroidered the blooms and bees for me so I can stay cozy over here while waiting on spring 😊🌷 And making plans to bring you more beautiful blooms in 2025!

10/27/2024

The unexpected final gathering of remaining blooms from my back yard ended up becoming one of my favorite arrangements of the season. A lovely autumnal mix of peachy pink, burgundy, and violet blue, and a fitting end to a beautiful growing season. THANK YOU so much to all my fellow flower fans and followers who have embraced this little side hustle of mine and are such willing recipients and supporters of my passion for growing and arranging beautiful blooms 💕🌸 I’ve already got the beginnings of next year’s beauty waiting in crates and boxes and seed packets…I’m so looking forward to sharing them with you in 2025!

10/26/2024

The last of the pumpkins are available on the porch this weekend!! After Sunday these are gone and the flower porch is closed until spring 😊🧡🍁

10/22/2024

Pretty pumpkins still available on the porch! These are some of the last ones…a few more new ones available Thursday and Friday, but then I need to completely switch over to fall clean-up and dahlia tuber digging and dividing. The growing season might be done, but there is still so, so much to do before winter!

10/20/2024

My experimental succulent pumpkin 💚🧡 While all the other pumpkins I’ve done are all dried flowers, foliage, and seed pods (outside of a few hens and chicks I’ve added in years past), this one is actually a living succulent garden. Testing this out this fall to see if I want to add them to the pumpkin line up next year. What do you think? I’m kind of in love with it so far 😍

10/19/2024

It’s a perfect fall morning to pick up a pretty pumpkin! Available on the porch all morning 😊🍁🧡