This pick-your-own farm has flowers

CLAYTON — At a Bucket of Blossoms on Rock Pillar Road people can literally pluck a bucket of flowers.

Co-owner Lila Aldridge calls the pick-our-own flower farm an escape from the daily grind. “People get so busy and caught up in their lives and just technology,” she said. “It’s just nice to be able to put your phone down and just enjoy the beauty of nature.”

The idea for a flower farm took root when Aldridge, 20, was searching for things to do around the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she is a student. “I was scrolling through events, different Instagram pages and exploring Charlotte,” she said. “I was like, ‘I need to go outside and have a connection with nature. I don’t know what to do, but I want to do something.’ ”

And that’s when Aldridge found something she wasn’t expecting. “A page comes up called a Pocket of Poppies in Unionville, North Carolina,” she recalled. “So me and my best friend went, and I just loved the experience. It was very peaceful.”

A Pocket of Poppies allows Charlotte residents like her to briefly escape the city for the countryside, Aldridge said. “I just really liked the experience of being able to connect with nature, and I wasn’t really able to do that in the middle of one of the biggest cities in North Carolina,” she said.

The next week, Aldridge visited a Pocket of Poppies with her mother, Darla, and the two essentially brought the idea back to their seven acres at 2525 Rock Pillar Road near Clayton.

They started working on the concept last November, Aldridge said. “We had to go through the process of looking at the land and seeing what we were working with,” she said. “We had to figure out what (climate) zone we were in, see what type of soil the land is, and then get the soil tested.”

The journey was a crash course in floriculture, Aldridge said. “We don’t have agricultural backgrounds,” she said. “So that was a learning process in itself.”

When deciding what to plant, she and her mom had to think like florists, Aldridge said. “You have to take a focal flower, and then you’ve got to have filler flowers,” she said. “A focal flower would be like the sunflowers or the zinnias. Then a filler flower would be not as eye-catching and attention-grabbing.”

It’s important to have a variety of focal and filler flowers, Aldridge added. “You have to have a nice mix of both,” she said. “If you just put a whole bunch of sunflowers in there, then it’s going to kind of look a little uneven or not full. You also need a wide variety of colors.”

For visitors, a Bucket of Blossoms plans to offer social events where people can spend time together, Aldridge said. “We’ve had ideas on doing like a date night thing or maybe having like a wine night,” she said. “We’ve got some ideas so that people wouldn’t just come out, pick your flowers and then have to leave.”

For now, a Bucket of Blossoms has no set days or hours, but Aldridge hopes to be open at least one day a week through October before closing for the season and then reopening next May.

“The flowers are on their time and not ours,” she said. “We got cleared out at our soft opening. So we have had to kind of judge it and see how quickly the flowers grow back.”

To keep up with the farm’s schedule, follow A Bucket of Blossoms on Facebook, where Aldridge will post the hours weekly.

“I didn’t realize that we were having as much interest as we did,” she said of early response to the flower farm. “We have had a lot of families come out with their kids to enjoy the garden.”

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