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EVERSON, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – On a five acre property just east of Nugent’s Corner, you’re going to find a growing passion project of Bellingham resident Amber Morrison.
Bellingham Flower Farm has become a part of the floral scene in Whatcom County since its founding at Morrison’s house on Alabama Hill in 2019. With each year, the farm increases its output of blooms fit for any bride and groom using regenerative agriculture concepts that Morrison learned from a young age.
Morrison’s path to owning a flower farm had a detour in the road. She grew up in Snohomish County surrounded by the world of gardening and landscaping. Her mother was a florist and her grandparents owned a nursery. There was always a garden in the backyard.
“I also remember going out to harvest for dinner. Like, ‘Hey, can you go pick a half bucket of green beans so that we can have dinner tonight?’ And it was just always there,” she said. “As a little kid, you don’t think about it being there.”
But when it came time to figure out what to do with her life, Morrison rejected the family tradition and went to college to study medicine.
“I just wanted to just do something professional. I wanted to have a professional job. My parents did not have professional job. Neither one of them went to college, and so I just wanted to be so different,” she said.
Morrison currently works as a physician’s assistant for internal medicine at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center.
She still kept up her own personal gardening and landscaping practice but it never went past her yard until one day, she thought it would be a good idea to give out flowers at the Bellingham Farmer’s Market on weekends.
Starting to grow flowers for the market began on Morrison’s three-quarter acre residence in Bellingham the fall of 2019, with intent to sell her blooms at the market the following spring. But then, the COVID-19 pandemic put those plans on hold.
In 2020, Morrison was working full-time in the hospital and she didn’t mind the work that came with a global pandemic. She compared the demands on a healthcare professional at that time to be similar to military service.
“My job is to take care of people when they’re sick, and if that’s what I signed up to, that’s what I signed up to do. Just because it got scary didn’t mean I got to walk away from it,” Morrison said.
In the spring, she got a break in the flower business plans. Bellingham Flower Farm debuted at the market in late May 2020.
“We [farmers] were considered necessary, and so farm people could come to farmers market, but there was no crafters, no food, no nothing. It was just farmers, and flowers were considered that. And the joy that [I] brought people to hand them flowers was so much better than what I was doing in the hospital during COVID.” – Amber Morrison
What started out as a side hobby for Morrison grew until she needed to expand her business on a larger piece of property. The operations moved out to Putnam Road off the Mount Baker Highway several years ago, and the small team working on the several-acre property have been working nearly year-round to build their operations ever since.
Parts of the property’s land had to be revitalized to make planting functional, and Morrison says their team has their work cut out for them to maintain and build their operations. Morrison and her small team source compost material from a local mushroom farm, and spend a lot of time fighting off voles that call the 10-acre property home.
Morrison is an early riser between the farm, her job at the hospital and her preferred extracurricular activity: running.
She’s trained for and ran marathons and continues to run most mornings. Joking, Morrison notes how the people in her life say that “everybody has a better day if Amber runs.”
Following an Achilles heel surgery last year, Morrison has had to cut back on running to roughly 40 miles a week, varying from five to 14 miles each morning starting at 6 a.m. before what she calls “computer work.”
Morrison says that running a flower farm is just like managing any small business. She wants to continue to expand their events on the property, as well as their production levels. Bellingham Flower Farm at its peak puts out roughly 80 event buckets for arrangements in a single week.
The farm held Dahlia Fest at the end of August, a one-day festival.
Morrison expected 400 to 500 people to show up on Sunday, Aug. 30, but that was a vast underestimation. About 1,400 people showed up to Bellingham Flower Farm in all, which spurred Morrison and her team to plan on a much larger festival next year.
Parking was their biggest limiting factor, Morrison said. For the next year, the expected two-day fest may involve a shuttle from Mount Baker High School.
This year’s event only had one food truck (Juanita’s Comida) and the band Silent Cowboy performed. You-pick of dahlias was something that Morrison wished they had better prepared for: they had to stop allowing people to pick flowers after only 45 minutes into the day.
When asked about future event plans, one event type stands out to Morrison.
“I do not want to do weddings. Everyone asks me that,” she said. “I don’t want to be a wedding venue. I have zero interest in being a wedding venue, but I would not be opposed to people being married in the field and then having a reception elsewhere.”
Bellingham Flower Farm is actively working to produce blooms most months out of the year, with only January offering a respite before needing to sort and sell dahlia tubers in February.
With only one other full-time employee with two part-timers, the flower farm has plenty of work to do most days. Morrison won’t be participating in the Whatcom County Farm Tour this year as it was too much work for her and the rest of the team, but that may change in the coming years.
We are Whatcom is a weekly column featuring Whatcom County residents making a positive impact on the community. To submit a Whatcom County resident to be featured, click here.