The Hillen Homestead

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.

09/13/2024

ONLY 4 TIX LEFT! And less than two weeks until we gather for another installment in our FAB Flower Happy Hour. Link in profile
Join us to hear about updates from while enjoying some tasty snacks and arranging flowers with friends. What more could you want on a Thurs evening?
Huge thanks to our many generous food, drink, and flower sponsors. They’re all tagged in this post - please go support them all year long and show them some love.
Graphics by SJ Brekosky ❤️

09/10/2024

Flower Happy Hour, Fall Blooms, Flowermore, and MORE - https://mailchi.mp/04b708acc396/fall2023-10331367

07/31/2024

Some highlights from this week - in the midst of our planned “summer lull” and still enjoying some gorgeous flowers. Squeezing in lots of time for swimming and adventuring and eating delicious fruit.

06/30/2024

I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in Germany on a family vacation to attend the wedding of our dear friend
June may not be the ideal time to abandon your flower farm, but it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Thanks to my amazing team who held down the fort (.spiraling ) and our florists who were extra patient during this time!
My husband was an exchange student in Germany in 10th grade so we had some good friends to visit, and we had a spectacular time.
Sharing a few highlights here including our visit to the saxony area, my visit to , sunset at Lake Ammersee, and Max giving a toast at the wedding ❤️. My business feels important to me but not as important as spending time with family and friends!

06/12/2024

06/07/2024

This is a Monique () and appreciation post! Every Tuesday and Thursday we pack the Two Boots van TO THE GILLS to do deliveries to DC, NOVA, Frederick and beyond.
For over 5 years we have been teaming up with Two Boots for all our DC sales and deliveries and it has been one of the highlights of running this business.
And for the last two years Monique shows up with a smile and a can-do attitude even when we are loading literal trees into the van. Or a mind boggling number of buckets. I think the record is 70-something???
Mostly things go very smoothly but there is the occasional mislabeled bucket or other confusion and she handled it ALL with grace. She is an essential part of this year’s success along with such an amazing team of folks on each farm!
Pictured here: yesterday’s truly humongous delivery.

06/05/2024

What a fun week full of flowers and friends! Bountiful days in the garden 🪴

05/10/2024

Get ‘em before they sell out! $20 bouquets featuring our very own peonies, baptisia, foliage and other blooms. Available .bread Friday til noon and Saturday 8a-2p.
Stems were harvested this morning and more tomorrow! Bouquets made with love by our whole team ❤️
You can also get a much wider selection of our blooms and thousands of stems from other local farms Saturday 8a-noon

05/09/2024

Mother's Day Blooms, US Botanic Garden Lecture, WJZ Appearance, and More! - https://mailchi.mp/1c38c5e58ac2/fall2023-10312805

05/09/2024

Flower alert! $20 grab n go bouquets and poppy bunches avail .bread Thurs & Fri 12-6 and Sat 8-2 or until we are sold out.

04/25/2024

Soooo much white this past week! Can be tricky to grow since bugs love the white blooms best and rain can stain the petals easily, but we persist.
Demand for white is always high, and this year is no different! Spring is rip roaring over here 💪

04/12/2024

Some nice tall daffs and a very blue lil’ truck - Busy week on the farm! Switching into GO MODE for spring with so many flowers popping off every day. Twice daily harvests and an awesome crew to get us through it. Today we’ll pick up fruit trees from and

04/01/2024

Hardy annual crop report: looking GOOD! We have had some temperature swings this spring but the flowers and the farmers are hanging in there.
Pictured here: scabiosa, snaps, delphinium, yarrow, poppies, eucalyptus
These are all crops we transplanted into the field in late October, covered with frost cloth all winter, and now we’ll add netting to support the extra tall stems coming soon. AKA - learned so much from the Cool Flowers book back when first published it and we’ve been experimenting ever since.