My Story
I'm a former TV Director from London who escaped to the Cotswold borders with my family in 2013 in search of a better life. I've always had a huge passion for gardening and my stone courtyard in Brixton wasn't cutting it.
I ran a successful wedding video company which I absolutely loved. Our amazing team of 6 produced nearly 300 weddings a year and I was able to work part time to fit around the family.
Then Covid struck.
2020 was going to be our busiest year yet, but when the weddings began postponing and cancelling, we could no longer afford to pay the bills. In July 2020 we were forced to make the heartbreaking decision to close and company went into liquidation.
Overnight I went from running a busy, thriving business to having no purpose, no income and worst of all, no idea what the future held. I needed something that would nourish my mental wellbeing and give me something positive to focus on and it became my garden.
I set myself the challenge of creating a huge new flower bed from scratch and I signed up to open my garden to raise money for the National Garden Scheme.
I spent weeks researching the perfect flower combinations and settled on a carefully curated selection of dahlias and annual flowers that I would grow my scratch.
The result was outstanding and the feedback from the visitors was that they could't believe you could create such a thriving display in such a short time.
May
August
So Dahlia Beach was born!
In November 2020, during the second lockdown, I launched my website and placed an order for 4000 dahlia tubers from the world's leading supplier in Holland. The collections sold out in 2 months, before I had even posted the first one.
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So I decided to launch a PYO Flower Farm. Despite being turned down by the local planning authority on my original site, I keep searching and I was thrown a lifeline by the wonderful Carter family who own Millets Farm; Oxfordshire's most popular family day out.
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Millets Farm agreed to lease me an acre of land to run my own PYO flower farm and the rest is history.
We are open from August until November for people wanting to pick their own flowers and we also run workshops in how to grow and arrange dahlias in front of Poggy, our bright pink open top, dahlia decker bus!
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Click here to find out more about our PYO farm
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