The Hillen Homestead

06/26/2025

.bread is closed today due to a power outage but c‘mon by Fri and Sat to grab some super fresh Baltimore City grown bouquets and the most delicious bread around!
We are carrying forward the regular weekly bouquet offerings from and we’ve got some gorgeous summery jewel tones for ya this week.
Thanks for your support!

06/15/2025

We did it!! We followed through on our crazy idea and biked nearly 2,000 miles from the Atlantic Coast of France to Budapest. Here’s a photo dump from our time in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary.
Tomorrow we fly home, wrapping up an epic and amazing nearly 6-month long trip. Grateful to for tending my fields while I was away, for keeping our customers happy in my absence, to my body for holding up so well on this adventure, and to my nutty family who undertook this project together. We (mostly) still like each other 😜.
Hit me up for all your flower needs!

05/15/2025

Photo dump from our 3-generation bike & barge trip through the Netherlands! We left our bikes and camping gear with a friend in Switzerland and took the train up to Amsterdam to meet up with my parents, my aunt and my Mother-in-Law.
Our motley crew went on a lovely 8-day river boat cruise through the canals and waterways of Northern Holland - we biked about 25-30 miles each day and met up with the boat to have dinner and sleep on board each evening. The older half of our group was on e-bikes and our kids rode on their own bikes the whole week covering some impressive distances!
Our group included the oldest and youngest people on the boat, and we had a blast. It wasn’t always easy traveling with a group of 8, but it was really special to spend this time together. And the tulips were in bloom!
Now we are re-united with our tandems and continuing on our way to Budapest. Tomorrow marks one month until the end of this epic adventure…

03/26/2025

A couple weeks ago we had a lovely visit to Atlixco, known as the City of Eternal Spring and the City of Flowers. It was an enormous jumble of greenhouses, a mix of large wholesale operations and tons of small family-run spots with various specialties. Also saw some cut flower production and met amazingly friendly flower vendors at the markets. Fun to connect with people in the same trade so far from home ❤️🌿💐🌸.

03/22/2025

Ode to : this was our first Workaway and their first time hosting a family, and it was an absolute delight. Los Volcanes is a warm and welcoming permaculture center outside of Puebla, Mexico run by an amazing crew of skilled Mexican agroecologists and green builders. They welcome a motley crew of international volunteers thru Workaway, local universities and more, and the place is filled with good vibes and joyful community.
You pay $5/day toward communal expenses including daily breakfast and lunch, contribute 4 hours of work per day, and get to stay in a beautiful spot and get to know great folks. It’s an easy 2 hour bus ride from Mexico City, and I highly recommend it as an easy and affordable vacation for my farmer friends in the off-season! Spanish is helpful but definitely not required.
Some work and some fun things we did:
•planted potatoes, onions, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries, lilies, and cacti
•built a huge tomato trellis out of bamboo
•trellised an unwieldy passion fruit vine
•performed seed germination tests
•organized a community-wide ping pong tournament
•built an elaborate fairy hotel
•processed dried mugwort for tea
•fed snails to chickens
•visited nearby towns
•ate our weight in tacos and fresh tortillas
•weeded, mulched, and prepped planting beds
•and so much more!

03/21/2025

03/06/2025

Continuing with the trip updates from my of 2025… so grateful to for accompanying me and my kids for one week in Oaxaca while Max had to go home to help his parents out.
We had so much fun together, laughing so hard we cried, adventuring around Oaxaca City and Puerto Escondido.
Photos include: 1 - street art walking tour admiring many amazing murals, 2 and 3 - visit to , 4 - beading workshop with a master craftsman, 5 - paletas!, 6 - five mile nighttime bike ride thru Oaxaca City that was the local version of Baltimore Bike Party, 7 - tiny sampling of the amazing local pottery, 8 - green building cabaña where our Oaxacan friends are developing a glamping site, 9 - sunset in Carrizilillo near Puerto Escondido, 10 - crossword puzzle fun, 11 - Sam drank an impressive amount of hot chocolate in our week in Oaxaca 🤣
Not pictured here: amazing surfing lessons, whale watching, randomly running into our Baltimore neighbors at a store in Oaxaca and getting to spend some great time together () and lots and lots of card games.

02/16/2025

Wrapped up a wonderful 3 weeks in Guatemala before heading to Mexico. Our kids did two weeks of Spanish school in Quetzaltenango (Xela), we did a home stay with a local family, we visited two wonderful Couchsurfing families, we took a side trip to Tikal/Flores, enjoyed Lago Atitlán and so much more! Lots of beautiful flowers as well.
Pictured here: 1- our kids decided to join our host for her daily 5 mile hike up a local hill at 4:30a and we enjoyed the huge slides at the top in the pitch black / 2- we did a two-day blackstrap weaving class at a women’s textile cooperative / 3 - Mayan ruins at Tikal / 4 - we swam at the nature reserve at Lago Atitlán / 5 - one of many fresh floral arrangements (all made with Guatemalan grown flowers) sold to decorate grave stones / 6 - art for sale in San Juan La Laguna (reminds me of gem corn!) / 7 - building in colonial downtown Xela / 8,9,10 - side trip to incredible hot springs high in the mountains outside of Xela

02/09/2025

BIG NEWS! During spring 2025, I am temporarily suspending operations of Hillen Homestead in order to take a “sabbatical” with my husband and two daughters. We are traveling from January thru June 2025, and I’ll post some occasional updates here. We are spending the first couple months in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico doing some volunteer work, cultural immersion, and Spanish school followed by a double tandem bike trip across Europe beginning in France. Our trip is off to a great start!
We will be returning early summer in time to plant and prep for a bountiful fall 2025 season.  You can continue to expect more gorgeous flowers than ever before! In the meantime, hit up our friends and for amazing locally grown stems. And Tyler and Dan (our friends and apprentices from last season) will be tending our fields and offering a CSA - follow along and order from them
Pictures from El Salvador: 1 & 2 visit to an amazing coffee cooperative, 3 Monument to Memory and Truth, 4 & 5 cool flowers, 6 impromptu basket weaving lesson with friends, 7 shenanigans on a hike thru corn fields, 8 getting interviewed for the one and only Radio Victoria (amazing community radio station in Cabañas), 9 sister love while walking through the beautiful community we stayed in for most of our time in El Salvador

11/02/2024

Haven’t posted to the grid since Labor Day, and dang has it been a busy fall season. Still no frost in our fields, but things are gradually slowing down.
Grateful to our amazing crew for all the hard work all season long ❤️.
Pictured here: with Pat Lehman mums, our workspace busting at the seams, Quarterback mums, with orange marigolds, shares a few weeks back, crab apple, Crystal beauty celosia, golden gate and honey glow mums, Shanghai red mums, totally tangerine dahlias, plume celosia, and my very dirty fingers after stripping over a thousand marigolds for Day of the Dead.

09/22/2024

Over Labor Day weekend Max and I escaped for a kid-free wedding weekend of dear friends and at a gorgeous summer camp in Massachusetts. A few days before the wedding I offered to help with anything including flowers. As it turned out, Sylvianne’s sister who was going to do the flowers had recently had COVID and they asked if I could take over.
With a couple days notice, I packed an armload of clippers and floral supplies into my suitcase (luckily I could check a bag for free!) and started reaching out to every flower farm in the Boston area that I knew or could find on localflowers.org directory.
I had the great luck of connecting with which happened to be 3 minutes off our route, 15 minutes from the venue, and a legit flower farm with plenty of extra stems to sell me with one day’s notice. The owner was super responsive, great to work with, and had beautiful flowers.
Combine that with foraging a bunch of foliage from my cousin’s postage stamp backyard in Cambridge, and we were off to the races. I seldom design weddings since my primary focus is selling to florists, but occasionally everything lines up perfectly and I have super flexible, low-key friends that need a little help with their florals.
We spent a couple hours the day before the wedding arranging 70 small vases, and I loved getting some quiet time with Sylvianne and her sister and other friends before the festivities began. Another good friend who has DIYed a couple weddings jumped in to help with the ceremony pieces, and we had such a sweet time pulling it all together. The celebration blended Indian traditions, including the lamp lighting ceremony with imported jasmine flowers and local dahlias and cosmos floating in the water. It was a beautiful and deeply meaningful and incredibly fun celebration!

09/13/2024

ONLY 4 TIX LEFT! We are less than two weeks away from our next FAB Flower Happy Hour event. Don’t miss it, link in our profile.
This will be a fun low-key evening with tasty treats and tons of flowers to make your own arrangement with. What more could you want for a Thurs evening?
Huge thank you to our generous flower, food, and drink donors who are all tagged in this post. Please show up to support them and thank them for all they do for our urban farm community.