Episode 765: Beyond the Bouquet: Expanding Your Flower Business Through Education and Experience with Xenia D’Ambrosi of Sweet Earth Co.

https://youtu.be/PDyvSAAA7FI We’ve recently highlighted Slow Flowers members who serve not only the professional floral market, but the home gardener in search of cut flowers, flower seedlings, education, and inspiration. Capturing the attention of this often-overlooked population is not hard these days. Home gardeners and flower lovers are avid followers of social media’s influential growers and designers.They are the principal buyers of books about cut flower gardening and about growing specific types of flowers, as well as the shoppers who eagerly line up to buy cutting garden plants not always seen at garden centers. After hosting several recent episodes on this theme, I continue the conversation in today’s episode with Xenia D'Ambrosi of Sweet Earth Co. Xenia shares how she developed an online course, The Eco-Friendly Cutting Garden, to teach students how to plant a backyard flower garden that benefits the environment. The course evolved from a series of in-person, on-farm workshops, adapted for an online format to serve a wider population of cutting garden students. Xenia discusses how she developed the course, the demographic of her students, and the ways this course reinforces her brand as a sustainable cut flower grower and designer. Xenia D'Ambrosi of Sweet Earth Co. Sweet Earth Co. in the pages of The Flower Farmers book Here’s an excerpt from The Flower Farmers, the 2025 book I co-authored with Robin Avni. One of the 29 flower farmers featured in its pages is today’s guest, Xenia D’Ambrosi of Sweet Earth Co. Xenia D'Ambrosi of Sweet Earth Co. We wrote:. . . in 2010, a cancer diagnosis altered everything for Xenia D’Ambrosi. “It was a life-changing event,” recalls the woman who at the time worked on Wall Street in finance. While going through her cancer treatments, Xenia began her own version of horticultural therapy. “I started to reconsider what I wanted to do and how I wanted to take care of myself and my family.” She embraced eating locally and gardening. “I volunteered at some local farms and I truly believe that having my hands in the soil healed me.” She also studied at New York Botanical Garden for a certificate in gardening with a focus on sustainable design and began to create edible landscapes for others in her community. She grew vegetables and herbs for both her family and for private chefs and formed Sweet Earth Co. in 2012. A few years later, she added cutting garden design and transformed the kids’ playfield into a “farmstead,” a thriving teaching farm filled with an acre of cut flowers, which grown for commercial use. The Eco-Friendly Cutting Garden course package Xenia D’Ambosi used the farm as a backdrop for the mini-sessions she films and posts to Sweet Earth Co.’s YouTube channel. These have led to her signature online course, The Eco-Friendly Cutting Garden, created for avid gardeners and beginning flower growers. The six-module course connects Xenia with people all around the country, as she teaches how to plan, plant, harvest, and maintain a productive cutting garden that supplies a steady supply of bouquets. The Eco-Friendly Cutting Garden Students at an in-person cutting garden workshop at Sweet Earth Co. Xenia recently appeared as our April Slow Flowers Member Meet-Up expert as she shared with others in the Slow Flowers community the background behind creating her online course. With an MBA and a background in business and marketing, it’s fascinating to learn how she evaluated Sweet Earth Co.’s assets and created a digital product to help scale her expertise. I’m sure you’ll find yourself asking, “what expertise do I have that could be packaged into an educational product or experience?” There are so many fantastic takeaways from Xenia’s session, so be sure to take notes! Find and follow Sweet Earth Co. on Instagram and FacebookRegister for The Eco-Friendly Cutting Garden, Xenia's online course. $100-off course discount: SLOWFLOWERS Thank you to our Sponsors This show is brought to you by slowflowers.com, the free, online directory to more than 700 florists, shops, and studios who design with local, seasonal and sustainable flowers and to the farms that grow those blooms. It’s the conscious choice for buying and sending flowers. Thank you to our lead sponsor, Flowerbulb.eu and their U.S. lily bulb vendors. One of the most recognizable flowers in the world, the lily is a top-selling cut flower, offering long-lasting blooms, year-round availability, and a dazzling petal palette. Flowerbulb.eu has partnered with Slow Flowers to provide beautiful lily inspiration and farming resources to help growers and florists connect their customers with more lilies. Learn more at Flowerbulb.eu. Thank you to Rooted Farmers. Rooted Farmers works exclusively with local growers to put the highest-quality specialty cut flowers in floral customers' hands. When you partner with Rooted Farmers, you are investing in your community, and you can expect a commitment to excellence in return. Learn more at RootedFarmers.com. Thank you to Johnny's Selected Seeds, an employee-owned company that provides our industry the best flower, herb and vegetable seeds -- supplied to farms large and small and even backyard cutting gardens like mine. Find the full catalog of flower seeds and bulbs at johnnyseeds.com. Thank you for joining me today! The Slow Flowers Podcast is a member-supported endeavor, downloaded more than 1.5 million times by listeners like you. Thank you for listening, commenting and sharing – it means so much. As our movement gains more supporters and more passionate participants who believe in the importance of our domestic cut flower industry, the momentum is contagious. I know you feel it, too. If you’re new to our weekly Show and our long-running Podcast, check out all of our resources at SlowFlowersSociety.com. Thank you for listening! Sending love, from my cutting garden to you! (c) Missy Palacol Photography I'm Debra Prinzing, host and producer of the Slow Flowers Show & Podcast. The Slow Flowers Podcast is engineered and edited by Andrew Brenlan. The content and opinions expressed here are either mine alone or those of my guests alone, independent of any podcast sponsor or other person, company or organization. Next week, you're invited to join me in putting more Slow Flowers on the table, one stem, one vase at a time. Thanks so much for joining us today and I'll see you next week! Music credits: Drone Pine; Gaena; Come On Overby Blue Dot Sessionshttp://www.sessions.blue Lovelyby Tryad http://tryad.bandcamp.com/album/instrumentalshttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ In The Fieldaudionautix.com