How did we even get here?

Usually that statement has a bad connotation, but in our case this is more of a “holy cow, do we seriously live on an adorable farm surrounded by flowers less that a mile from Lake Michigan? And oh by the way, our job is to share that beauty with other people?!” We’ve been pinching ourselves for the last year.

So to celebrate our first year of Moondance Flower Farm and close out 2023, we thought we’d share how in the world we even got to this point to share our Moondance Magic.  

March 18, 2020

Farmer Levi was born, the world was turned upside down with the global pandemic, and Farmer Mark & Linds were two very sleep deprived new parents in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We’d lived there for 10 years and loved the Twin Cities. But as soon as our little Levi arrived, we unexpectedly felt called to move home to Michigan, where most of our family still lived. 

May 2021

We packed up our family and tearfully said goodbye to our dear Minnesotan friends & the Mississippi River. We landed in Ann Arbor, and were lucky to find a lovely home and new jobs in town. We were grateful to be closer to Levi’s grandparents and other family, but something just didn’t quite feel right. It didn’t make sense to us for a while. Everything looked great on paper. But something was just missing.

June 2022

We traveled to Glen Arbor for a wedding and decided to take a detour to Traverse City before going back downstate. We were only in TC for 72 hours, but we must’ve remarked at least 20 times a day “Can you believe people actually get to live here?” By the third day of this, we pulled up Zillow just to see what the housing market looked like. A magical looking farmhouse was for sale, on a flower farm nonetheless! We drove right up Old Mission Peninsula to scope it out, and of course it was even cuter in real life. Our whole drive home to Ann Arbor we went down the Google rabbit hole of “how to run a flower farm.” We had been living on city lots with minimal landscaping our whole adult lives. No one in our families had farmed, and we’d killed every house plant we’d ever had. Could we really do this? 

September 2022

We decided to try out living in Traverse City for a couple months before permanently uprooting our family again. Farmer Mark took a 3 travel nurse position and Farmer Lindsay got the ok to work remotely from up north. We rented a little home in town with a yard for the pups. We were so excited to be back in TC, but we got some bad news literally the very first day there: the farm was off the market. We were devastated, and realized then how badly we had really wanted that dream life to happen. We even considered just heading right back to Ann Arbor. But a week later, the farm was for sale again! We scheduled a showing as soon as we could, and well… the rest is history! 

January 2023 - Today!

Well, we opened Moondance Flower Farm! Farmer Mark put in countless hours of farming research, Farmer Lindsay spent more time than she’d like to admit learning how to use social media and build a website. We made a lot of mistakes! We also had a lot of blind faith based on a gut feeling that we were simply called to be doing this. And overall, we think this first year turned out pretty damn great! We are so proud of our hard work, and our dedication to this passion project has led us to gain so much more expertise in a short amount of time than we ever thought possible. Turns out, Farmer Mark is just as good (if not better?!) at plant biology as he is at human biology, and Farmer Lindsay has a real knack for color combinations and flower design. We can’t wait to learn more, try new things, and make the Moondance magic even more marvelous next year!

We can’t say enough how incredibly grateful we are for the warm welcome we have received in the community this year. Your support and faith in us, even when we didn’t entirely have faith in ourselves. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

Cheers to a wonderful 2024 ahead!

Farmer Mark & Farmer Lindsay

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Embracing Delight: Our Word of the Year at Moondance Flower Farm

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Building a Bouquet from the Ground Up