It’s more than 90 degrees before noon, and the sun is barreling down, but sisters Lauren Hopkins and Jerilyn Mellencamp are excited to get outside to see how their garden grows.

They walk carefully between the planted rows, using a pair of garden shears to make a quick cut here or bending down occasionally to pull out a clump of weeds encroaching on their crop.

Once and sometimes twice every other day, the two make their way out to harvest the fruits of their labor.

Instead of baskets of tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers or summer squash, they come back with a bucket full of brightly colored flowers and a variety of greenery.

Hopkins, 34, and Mellencamp, 31, are the owners of Laurilyn Farms, a local business that grows and sells fresh-cut flowers by the bunch, in mixed bouquets and arrangements.

This year, they are selling their fresh-cut flowers and providing creative floral design services at the Seymour Area Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays and Brownstown Farmers Market on Fridays.

They don’t have a brick and mortar store, but customers who can’t make it to the farmers market can order bouquets or arrangements any time by phone, email or through social media.

Laurilyn Farms can provide flowers for events and special occasions such as weddings, bridal or baby showers, graduations and funerals. The sisters recently started a bouquet subscription service that allows customers to have flowers delivered to their home every week, biweekly or monthly.

Those interested in learning more about floral design or who are looking for a fun event for a group can even sign up for workshops taught by Hopkins at Laurilyn Farms.

Although surrounded by towering stalks of corn, Mellencamp said they use the word “farm” loosely to describe their operation.

They grow the flowers in two small garden plots with 90-foot rows outside Mellencamp’s home off of State Road 11 in Bartholomew County, just north of the Jackson County line.

Their parents, Jerry and Lisa Mincy, also have flower gardens on their property in northeast Seymour that help supply blooms for the business.

Total, it’s less than an eighth of an acre. All of the perennials are grown at the Mincys’ house, and the annuals come from the Mellencamps’ gardens.

“A lot of people don’t understand how it works because it’s such a small space,” Lauren said. “I had a guy the other day ask me how big our farm was, 20 or 30 acres?”

But unlike corn where once it’s harvested, it’s gone, most flowers can be cut and then cut again, producing multiple blooms.

“You can have a very small plot in your backyard and you’re going to have tons of flowers,” Mellencamp said. “You don’t have to be a professional gardener. You don’t have to be a real or commercial farm operation.”

They still have to contend with issues such as weather and insects and also gambling on what people will like and buy.

Surprisingly, the sisters don’t come from a farming or agriculture background.

The Mincys ran JLM Pharmatech, a pharmaceutical company in Seymour, where both Lauren and Jerilyn worked for a period of time. Jerry and Lisa ended up retiring and sold the company to PD Pharmatech.

In February 2017, Lisa started talking about planting a small garden of flowers at her home. Around the same time, Mellencamp had picked up a book called “Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden: Grow, Harvest and Arrange Stunning Seasonal Blooms” by Erin Benzakein.

Floret Farm is in Washington state and was one of the first to start marketing locally grown cut flowers.

Mellencamp said she has always loved flowers and even worked at a flower shop while studying at Purdue University.

“It’s always been an interest of mine,” she said.

For Mellencamp’s 30th birthday, Lisa suggested they start a garden together.

“My mom has always had a green thumb, and that way, we could have flowers all summer and be able to share them with people,” Mellencamp said. “So that’s where it all kind of started.”

In the spring, they picked out some seeds and built a makeshift greenhouse with lights in the Mellencamps’ garage. Hopkins and her two young children would come over and help.

“We would spend evenings just sitting out in the garage seeding everything by hand in trays, and it just grew from there,” Mellencamp said.

At the time, the women weren’t considering the flowers as anything more than a hobby. But in her mind, Mellencamp was figuring out how many flowers they would have each week.

“So I’m thinking we have 500 zinnia plants and they’re each going to produce 10 to 15 stems, so what are we going to do with all of it?” Mellencamp said. “It went from 0 to 80 in like two days. It was just crazy. We definitely didn’t start small.”

Business and entrepreneurship, however, have always attracted the family.

Before a brief stint working at a flower shop in Columbus, Hopkins helped run Bite the Bullet gun shop in Seymour, and Mellencamp works full time as the development officer for the National FFA Office in Indianapolis.

“My dad was an entrepreneur, and I feel like we both had a little bit of that, definitely me, so I was like, ‘We need to sell these somewhere,’” Mellencamp said.

They immediately thought of the Columbus Farmers Market, and in May 2017, they signed up to do half of the market season. They started setting up in mid-June.

At that point, they didn’t have a name for their business.

“We’re thinking, ‘What are we going to call ourselves?’” Mellencamp said. “What we came up with was her (Lauren’s) first name and my first name put together.”

For their first week at the market, they started with around $150 worth of product. That’s when they realized there was a lot of planning required to be successful at the market.

“Each week, we got better at the farmers market, and I think what people liked was that our stuff had more of a wild and rustic, not commercial, look to it,” Mellencamp said. “Every week, we had different stuff.”

And because the flowers are cut the day before they are sold, they have the look and smell that flowers are supposed to have instead of what is shipped from Central America where the majority of flowers come from, she said.

During their time at the market, Mellencamp noticed Lauren had an eye for floral design and arrangements.

“I’m just not as artistic as she is,” Mellencamp said. “I never have been.”

The booth became more of an experience than just a stop for people to buy flowers.

“You could come and watch and see Lauren put together a bouquet, and it was fun,” Mellencamp said.

“I had no idea that I had a knack for this,” Hopkins said. “It just came natural to me.”

Now working full time as the floral designer and face of Laurilyn Farms, Hopkins handles the day-to-day operations, including communication with customers, making all of the arrangements and most deliveries and handling the marketing and accounting for the business.

She also helps with the daily farming chores and is responsible for cutting and processing flowers at the proper stage, which is different depending on the variety.

The most popular blooms grown at Laurilyn Farms are zinnias, which they have in every color of the rainbow, and sunflowers. They even have chocolate cosmos that are a gorgeous dark, rich brown that smell like chocolate.

“When you look at our bouquets, you can sit there and look at them for a while and then sit them on the table and you still find something different in it,” Mellencamp said. “We use a little bit of a lot of different varieties.”

Being a part of the Seymour Area Farmers Market this year has been a great way to get their name out in the community. They decided that since they are from Seymour and it’s closer, it made sense to go there instead of Columbus.

They also have received requests from people to set up in Seymour.

“It’s very supportive, and one of the coolest things is people thanking us for being there,” Mellencamp said. “They recognize that it’s a pretty significant time commitment to have this kind of business.”

“We’ve been amazed,” Hopkins said. “Already at this point in the market, we’ve sold more than what we sold the entire season at Columbus.”

Because crowds are smaller at Seymour’s market, Hopkins said they can spend more time with each customer individually and make personal connections. They also are the only vendor that sells just-cut flowers.

When it comes to spending money on flowers, Mellencamp said some people have trouble justifying it because flowers eventually just wilt and die. But she has a different take on it.

“If you went to a gourmet restaurant and enjoyed a meal with local ingredients, you would pay more for it, but you don’t expect that experience to last past that meal,” she said. “The idea is to enjoy it for that time. The same goes for flowers.”

 

Laurilyn Farms, a fresh-cut flower business

Owners: Sisters Lauren Hopkins of Seymour and Jerilyn Mellencamp of Jonesville. Also working at the business are their mother and father, Lisa and Jerry Mincy of Seymour, and Mellencamp’s husband, Richard Mellencamp.

Location: No brick and mortar store. The business is located at Mellencamp’s residence in Jonesville with a second farm at the Mincys’ residence in Seymour.

Available at the Seymour Area Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

For daily deliveries and bouquet subscription, contact Lauren via:

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 812-528-4366 (call or text)

Social media: Facebook and Instagram

Website: laurilynfarms.com

Laurilyn Farms offers several options for wedding and event florals: a la carte, do-it-yourself bulk flowers and full-service design.

Workshops include fresh flower arranging in a vase with care instructions, succulent garden design and care and private workshops. Private workshops can be for a bridal shower, baby shower, birthday or a “just because” get-together with friends.