Lick Creek Flower Company

After two decades of caring for her patients as a registered nurse, Tracy Lawyer made a career change and turned her focus to nurturing soil and seed to produce fresh cut flowers.

“If I’m going to leave something I really love, then I’m going to do something else I really love,” Lawyer says. “I wish I had done it earlier, but I made the change at a good time. My children are grown and have fulfilling careers, and now I’m following one of my passions.”

With a love of flowers and parents who were master gardeners, she made the career switch in 2019, establishing Lick Creek Flower Co. near Pendleton, Indiana.

A friend once advised Lawyer to “make your business today what you want it to be in five years.” That is what she did.

Instead of focusing her efforts on prep-intensive farmers markets, she invests her time in growing and arranging flowers for pickup and sale at the farm’s flower stand.

Lick Creek Flower Co. is essentially a one-woman business with Lawyer growing out annual and perennial flower varieties from seed produced in the United States.

“We soil block everything,” Lawyer says. “It’s an old English practice in which a small press is used to create an individual block of soil for each seed to grow in. It is time intensive on the front end, but it creates healthy plant roots and increases transplant efficiency.”

Lawyer frequently experiments with new varieties, planting at least 10 new types of flowers each year to see how they perform in her soils.

“We choose flower varieties based on how well they grow in our region to ensure we harvest the most beautiful and most productive flowers,” she says.

Varieties grown on the farm include celosias, dahlias, American basket flowers, ruby gold orach, broomcorn, zinnias, tulips, decorative grasses and more.

Although Lick Creek Flower Co. is not certified organic, Lawyer’s mission is to use production methods that build and encourage healthy soils loaded with beneficial microbes that help ward off disease and encourage healthy plants.

Birds, lady bugs, assassin bugs, lacewings and praying mantis — all native to northern Indiana — help control unwanted pests.“Using organic-like production practices encourages a healthy ecosystem in the fields,” Tracy says.

Lick Creek Flower Co. sells its fresh cut flowers as bouquets through CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscriptions and a flower stand at the farm. She also sells prearranged, personalized bouquets on request.

“We sell a lot of flowers to local customers, but some people come as far as 30 miles away each week to buy bouquets at our farm stand,” Lawyer says.

Lawyer makes fresh bouquets weekly from April to October. Bouquets are available Monday-Friday each week and on Saturdays until the flower stand is empty.

Flowers purchased at a florist or grocery store are often already more than a week old and may have traveled thousands of miles. Lawyer’s flowers, in comparison, were field cut within hours of purchase.

“Our flowers are as fresh as you can possibly get,” she says. “They last forever. You have to know when is ideal to cut each variety of flower to get the longest vase life possible.”

Lick Creek Flower Co. normally has tulips available in early spring. In late May, early blooming flowers such as larkspur, love-in-a-mist and bupleurum begin to mature. A more diverse selection of flowers is generally available between the beginning of July and early October.

To find your perfect bouquet, visit Lick Creek Flower Co. on its Facebook page or website.