Compton Collective

01/16/2023

What are your favorite flowers for bouquets?

01/15/2023

Anyone who is interested in our bouquet subscriptions, what area of metro St Louis do you live in?

And do you have any recommendations for small businesses who might want to partner with us as pickup locations for our flowers twice monthly?

We are working on confirming our bouquet subscription pickup locations for the coming season.

So far we have a pickup partner in:

Webster Groves
Kirkwood
Ballwin
And of course our farm in Robertsville/Lonedell.

We need to know where you live and how many of you are interested to find additional partners.

Thank you!

11/29/2022

Come make jewelry with me at the farm!

Since I no longer do shows, I’ve been trying to come up with a way I can sit down and make jewelry pieces with you guys for the holidays.

My favorite part of my Compton Co; business was sitting with you and hearing the stories behind the charms you were choosing as I made your custom pieces.

The only thing I’ve come up with is to set up my necklace bars in my kitchen here at the farm and have you come sit at my island with me while we chat and build your gifts together.

Is that completely unconventional? Probably.

Is it unprofessional? Maybe?

Am I going to do it anyway? Yep.

Because I love connecting with you over these jewelry pieces.

I have a full silver necklace bar AND a full bronze necklace bar for you to shop. Over 50 different words in our vintage dictionary word charms, thousands of add-on charms, and you can build necklaces, bracelets, or bookmarks. Each base piece (chain, bracelet, bookmark) is $20 and you can add up to four charms. Build as many pieces as you want during your hour.

$20 for a thoughtful, personal, handmade gift is a steal. Make these for everyone you know. Mothers. Teachers. Sisters. Besties. They work for everyone and necklaces always fit. 😉

Because my house is fairly small, and I only have two necklace bars to work with, I can’t host a bunch of you at the same time. This has to be an intimate event, which means you’ll have to book time slots.

I’ll have the bars set up Friday Dec 9 from 11am-2pm and Sunday Dec 11 from 10-5.

If you’re interested, let me know below and I’ll send you an invoice to put a non-refundable $40 deposit down on your hour. Your deposit will serve as a credit toward your purchases. If for some reason you can’t make it during your booked slot, we can reschedule or you can shop virtually.

You CAN bring your friends/family with you to shop, but be mindful that we have to keep your personal shopping event to one hour. If you want to bring several peeps and you think it might take more than an hour, feel free to book two hours.

Let me know below if you want a spot. Leave your email and I’ll shoot you an invoice. All invoices must be paid within 24 hours or your spot will be given away.

Missouri/Illinois friends, my house is in Robertsville, MO if you want to see how far that is from you.

I’m excited to see you guys!

09/05/2022

It’s time to start cutting everything back and planting for next year.

One of the most difficult parts of learning to farm is how far ahead you have to plan.

In general, none of the Comptons are planners. We are wingers. We just wing it. For everything.

But you can’t really do that with farming. 🤷‍♀️

We need to have the majority of our first spring flowers of 2023 in the ground in the next few weeks, and honestly, we are probably behind already.

Learning curves galore over here. 🥴

08/23/2022

I made a bouquet for the kids’ bus driver, Ms Beverly, as a happy first day of school present.

Let me tell you, learning to put bouquets together has been the absolute hardest part of flower farming.

Not the million wheelbarrows of compost we dragged around.

Not germinating and tending to the seeds.

Not planting the seedlings and getting them to grow.

Putting them in the stinking vase is SO MUCH HARDER THAN I EXPECTED!

Have you guys ever arranged flowers before? Were you a natural? Or did you want to throw the flowers in the trash repeatedly, like me? 🤣

08/18/2022

We did our first floral delivery today, which means we are officially in the flower business! 🙌

Do we have a website? No.

Do we have business cards. Also, no.

Do we have payment processing. Uh, no.

But we are moving forward anyway. 💐

07/27/2022

The Collective Comptons are going to host an impromptu flower pickup/meet n greet at the farm this Sunday, July 31 from 11am-2pm.

It’s $35 and you’ll get a paper wrapped bouquet and a mini jar arrangement.

🌻 Do we know exactly what’s gonna be in your bouquets?

No, we don’t. Depends on what’s ready to harvest on Saturday.

💐 Can we guarantee it’s going to be the most beautifully arranged jar you’ve ever seen.

No, we can’t. We’re new. We honestly have no idea what we are doing.

🐐 Will you get to feed Freddie some treats? Yes, you will.

Will he scream? No, he’s lost his voice.

🦃 Will Big Mama snub you? 100%.

🐓 Will you get to hold a fluffy chicken? Absolutely.

So, if any of our St Louis area friends would like to grab a spot to come see the farm, meet Freddie and Big Mama, hold a fluffy chicken, and support our budding flower business (see what I did there …), we would love to have you. (We are located in Robertsville, MO, if you want to see how far of a drive it is for you.)

We have 15 spots available. If you’d like one, shoot me a message or comment below. Payments to be made via Venmo or PayPal.

07/26/2022

We had our first photo shoot for the farm on the hottest day in the last 5 years.

Why would we hire a photographer to take photos of us sweating, dirty, and generally looking worse than the compost we were spreading?

Because this is what it actually looks like to build a farm.

Yes, those styled shoots you see Floret doing are beautiful. The huge armfuls of blooms, flowing hair, and sweet aprons make for lovely photos. And I’m sure we will have some styled shoots in the future.

But right now, sweat and dirt is all the Collective Comptons have to offer. 😅🥵🌱🌻💐

07/25/2022

Rare Vision Photography came by to capture some pics of the farm this weekend! 😍

07/18/2022

Our flowers are starting to POP!

We have enough to have learned what we like, what we don’t, what’s working, what we are good at, etc. but not enough to sell yet.

If you were in our situation, what would you do with your flowers?

06/24/2022

Buckle up buttercups, because I have a lot of questions for you today. They’re fun questions though.

When you buy bouquets of cut flowers, why do you buy them?

Is it a celebratory action?

Is it self-care?

Are you buying them for other people?

Is it a reward?

Is it simply because they bring you joy?

Tell me all the things about buying flowers!

Pic: I bought myself flowers for my birthday.

06/22/2022

We don’t have much blooming yet at the Compton Farm, but these little globe amaranth are starting to show off a little bit. 😍

06/16/2022

06/15/2022

I’ve never had a garden before. I’m a true novice.

And in typical Heather fashion decided to start an entire flower farm instead of starting with a couple flower beds in my yard like a normal person.

I didn’t know how much peace and connection gardening would bring into my life.

Every night Chris is home we spend in the garden together. Even if it’s just to sit here and watch hummingbirds, we spend quiet time in the garden together.

Early this morning I lost my grandmother. She was 93, and put up quite the fight.

Today, I’m so glad to be back in the garden, so I can grieve in my place of peace.

Pic: I’m cutting back the angelonia. They aren’t thriving the way the other flowers are, so I’m hoping a heavy pruning will jumpstart some new growth. They’re awfully interesting little guys when you look really closely at them.

06/09/2022

Good morning from the Compton Farm!

We hope you’re stretched out like Wednesday here, and ready to have a fabulous Thursday!

P.S. The cat’s name is Wednesday.

06/05/2022

Have you guys ever heard of a farm CSA (community supported agriculture) or Farm/Garden Share programs?

Essentially, in Farm Sharing, members of a community purchase shares of a farmer’s harvest up front, before the harvest has happened. (You aren’t buying shares of the farm, just shares of the harvest.)

Then you pick up your harvest share from various pickup locations weekly or bi-weekly, based on whatever share size you bought.

The kicker is that the community is sharing the risk of farming with the farmer. If something out of the farmer’s control happens, and there is no harvest, share holders would not get their harvest, but they also wouldn’t get their money back.

This provides financial stability for farmers who are at the mercy of Mother Nature for their livelihood and success.

I was a little nervous to put this system in place at Compton Collective Farm, fearful that I wouldn’t be able to produce the flowers or food that people had paid for, but we recently had an example of why it’s so important for small farmers to have financial support from their communities and why so many farms have adopted this model.

🐔 We have a flock of laying hens. I imagined if we started selling Farm Shares we would have an option to include eggs with your flowers.

Our hens are fully pasture raised. They live that natural, bug-eating, dust-bathing, sun-soaking life. Their eggs are DELICIOUS.

A couple weeks ago a predator took out our entire laying flock. Every single hen, dead (or presumed dead, I only found half their bodies).

If we had Farm Shareholders waiting for their shares of eggs, we currently don’t have any eggs.

And to get more eggs, we need to invest in another flock of adult hens. Chickens don’t lay eggs until they are 5-6 months old, so we can’t buy babies and have eggs this season. Adult laying hens are 3-4x the price of baby chickens. And we need ~20 hens to sustain future Farm Shares.

The investment of new laying hens would wipe out all income the previous laying hens brought in, plus some, and now the farmer is in the hole for the season.

For small farmers, unexpected expenses like that can sink their operation.

However, if we had Farm Shares, our members would be sharing the risk of loss with us, and we would have money from their up-front share payments to buy new laying hens and get eggs back in rotation.

We are getting our new hens tomorrow, so our members would have missed out on having their eggs for approximately 4 weeks.

Ways Mother Nature can ruin a small farm who uses natural and organic farming methods:

🌧 Too much rain/flooding
☀️ Drought
🌪 Wind/storms
❄️ Late snow
🐞 Pests
🦝 Predators (as we talked about above)
🦠 Disease

Farmers live in an incredibly unstable world to keep their communities food stable.

Is a Farm Share program something you have ever participated in? Or would consider participating in?

Why or why not?

Pic: One of our hens scratching around in Chris’s vegetable garden before the predator incident.

06/04/2022

Heyyyyy guys! I’ve missed you!

I’ve been trying for years to get the name of this page changed and Facebook finally approved it!

The Compton Co; is officially Compton Collective now. 🙌🙌🙌

If you don’t follow me on my personal page, you might not know that our little hobby farm is in the process of becoming a real deal flower farm.

Chris and I have partnered with our friend Pam Compton to create Compton Collective.

Pam is a Compton, but we aren’t related. We are a Collective of Comptons, here to bring you sustainably farmed flowers, veggies, and eggs.

Now that Facebook has allowed me to brand this page appropriately, you’ll be hearing from me again on the regular. Woot!

Our farm is located in Robertsville, MO (about an hour outside of St Louis).

It’s time for us to start planning our pickup locations for our fall flowers. Can you guys help me out by telling me how many St Louis area friends we have?

Comment below which area of the metro you live in so we can find some amazing partner locations for our flower pick-ups.