We are a micro, backyard flower farm in Burlington, VT. We grow all of our own flowers on just a few hundred square feet.
It all started…
with our wedding 2021. We decided to get married in the backyard of our new home in a small, casual ceremony with a focus on what we cared about the most - family, music, good food, and flowers.
We decided to purchase DIY buckets from a local flower farm and arrange them ourselves. My bridal bouquet was a mix of dahlias, zinnias, strawflowers, cosmos, feverfew and sage.
After our wedding I kept my bouquet for weeks and I noticed that after all the other flowers faded, there was one that still looked as beautiful as it did the first day. The strawflower - or everlasting flower, as I learned they’re called - had stolen my heart, and I set out to learn how to grow them myself. Once I started researching I thought, why stop there when I could grow ALL of the flowers I had in my wedding bouquet?
I was surveying our backyard one October day, shortly after adopting my new married name, (Schoenthaler, which means “beautiful valley” in German) and I just thought - why not grow a bunch of flowers? I am now a firm believer that there are certain moments in life where the “why not?” just clicks, and it’s suddenly more powerful than any of the hesitations that may have stopped you before.
That day was it for me, and the start of Scho Blooms.
Humble beginnings
I’ve always dabbled in the dirt. In my summers home from college I had a small perennial garden at my parents’ house, along with a few dahlias that miraculously bloomed even though I had no clue what I was doing. It was my happy place and my getaway. Subsequent years of apartment-living kept me out of the dirt, but in 2020 we purchased our home on just under 1/4 acre. The backyard was my dream come true and full of so much potential.
I started my first real cutting garden from seed in 2022. Over the winter and early spring I bought all the books, plotted out my beds on graph paper, and started a small army of tiny green plant babies under grow lights in our dining room. Out in the snow, I made a footprint path of where I wanted the perimeter of my new garden, trying to be mindful and not to take up our entire backyard in case it was a failure. My husband, who is so amazing and supportive, went out there one day and made that footprint perimeter even bigger.
When the snow melted we got out there digging and made 6 new 18 ft beds. After all that work and a whole lot of patience, come summer the backyard exploded.
Big plans
Our mission is to take all of the beauty and joy that flowers have brought to our lives and share it with as many people as we can.
It’s hard to believe we’re headed into year four. This year we will be selling our dahlia tubers once again in our second annual tuber sale in March, tulips in early May, and mixed bouquets and arrangements of all sizes from June through October.
If you’d like to follow along with our progress and receive updates when flowers are available and exciting things are happening, please subscribe to our newsletter below!
Thank you for reading and for being here with us on this journey! It means the world.
-Stephanie Schoenthaler
