I started Cross Street Flower Farm on less than an acre at my house in 2015. I hired a local horse farmer with a tractor to plow up my front yard with my husband, Scott, looking on in part shock. I am a self-taught gardener turned flower farmer and entrepreneur. I did not grow up farming, and if anyone had told me at age 15 that I’d start a flower farm, I would never have believed them.

My path to Cross Street Flower Farm is a long and twisting tale that starts with a Russian degree in undergraduate, followed by a short career in international banking in Boston, graduate work in nonprofit and Internal Studies in New York City, and then 8 years raising my 3 young boys. I am not a native New Englander. In fact, I grew up moving up and down the East Coast with my family for my dad’s job, never living in the same place for longer than 5 years and developing a serious wanderlust for traveling the world.

When Scott and I decided to leave Boston to raise our family in Norwell in 2006, I literally developed hives thinking about staying in one place for the next 20 years. But it turns out that setting roots is exactly what I needed, and the symbolism of the phrase "bloom where you are planted" could not be more fitting.

Once I settled in our new home in Norwell, I started a large garden, learned to raise chickens, planted apple and peach trees, started beekeeping, and read every book I could find about small scale farming and homesteading.