We grow nutrient dense flowers for people who are fond of joy, connection and transformation.
Located on the ancestral territory of the Abenaki people, in the foothills of the Green Mountains, Stitchdown Farm is a family flower farm & floristry.
Our main offerings are
WEDDINGS
We create stunning floral designs for all corners of your wedding with our farm-grown blooms and unique design style.
FLOWER CLUB
Our version of a CSA, the SDFC is a weekly flower subscription, with pickups around the Upper Valley.
RETAIL BOUQUETS
We sell our flowers at select stores throughout the region.
Why flowers?
Food is our primary motivation for farming.
We take great pleasure in eating 3 - 7 times a day, and are fortunate that our flower business makes available the great privilege to grow much of our own food, to live in the most beautiful place in the world, and to participate in a productive community of farmers and craftspeople who are working towards a collectively prosperous central Vermont.
Our relationship to flowers arose of a need. We had plenty of vegetable growers in our area, but almost no flower growers.
The flower industry as a whole is far behind the food industry, and has a major need for sustainably grown blooms. It is largely unspoken that up to 90% of the flowers sold in the US are imported, and almost all are grown in potent neurotoxic poison that ravishes the soils they are grown in and the human workers that grow them.
The need for local flowers is not simply an aesthetic luxury, but an imperative step towards a more healthy, sustainable and beautiful local, regional and domestic agrarian economy.
WE HAVE FURTHERMORE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT
Flowers feed us:
emotionally and aesthetically, filling our eyes and overflowing our senses.
Also, you can literally eat most of them, and they are delicious.
WHILE FLOWERS ARE OUR MAIN FOCUS,
STITCHDOWN IS A MULTIFARIOUS BEAST
In addition to bathing in flower petals daily, we keep ourselves and the landscape busy with an ostensibly impractical, and consistently rewarding array of homestead activities.
Like for example we raise, slaughter, butcher and cure our meat on the farm. We make our bread and ciders and vinegars with ambient yeast, from apples we’ve harvested from the wild trees, some of which predate us by hundreds of years.
We build furniture and cabins and treehouses when necessary (it’s never necessary) with wood from the land, carve and paint our signs by hand, and grow enough onions that no one may enter the house without leaving with a sackful.
We’re not particularly adept at any of this yet, but we are here on this land to build a fulfilling life, closer to the source. To build skills and equity in our abilities, to reclaim the generational knowledge we lack, and bank it for our children. To spread inspiration to agrarian action, and to share our spoils along the way.
It is magnificently difficult to commit to the labor and frustration of learning as you go, and to weather the flat-out shitstorms that these pursuits beget daily. And it’s worth it. Flowers are an economic engine that creates for us the opportunity to pursue a lifestyle that is active, curious, complex, purposeful, interconnected and delicious.
