My Story - Dominika Best

I wanted to bring some beauty into my life and focus on something different than my anxiety about the world. I scrolled through the internet and found flowers. Farmer-florists with armfuls of gorgeous flowers in sunny fields of flowers. That was what I wanted. That life. But how could I get that living where I was without uprooting my entire family into the country. I live in Los Angeles but I wanted that beauty. 

I found a way and I want to show you how you can nurture your own beauty.  

Perhaps you have a grassy front yard or side yard, or even a backyard littered with kids climbing toys. You have a vision for your flower garden, but how do you turn your existing space into a garden oasis, a flower-filled sanctuary?

How can you get your own armful of flowers too?

Four years ago, I was exactly where you are now. I made all the mistakes, even though I’d been a gardener for as long as I can remember. 

But first, a bit about myself. I’m originally from Lodz, Poland. I come from a long line of farmers. I spent a lot of my first six years in the village of Bedon with my grandparents. They had a fruit orchard in front and a vegetable garden in back where they grew much of their food. 

My father’s parents had a dzialka, an allotment in town, where my grandfather kept bees and grew all sorts of fruits and vegetables. When we moved to the United States, my parents kept up the tradition, which meant we always had a garden wherever we went.

When I moved to Los Angeles and finally had the opportunity to have a garden of my own, I had just attended Tomatomania, which is a three-day event here in Los Angeles. I was on a mission, and I promptly filled my 250 sq. ft plot of garden with thirty different kinds of heirloom tomatoes. To say I went to town would be an understatement.

I fought my hard clay and tilled it and filled it with chicken manure. Soon, my jungle of entangled tomato plants was the talk of the neighborhood. The ensuing four years were a cornucopia of tomatoes and cucumbers and fresh greens. I fought the pincher bugs, and other insects, but when the rats came and made a buffet out of my tomatoes four years ago, I decided to pull the vegetable garden and grow flowers.

I did not want to deal with rodents. Especially the big city ones we get here. No, thank you. 

My veggie gardening adventure was helped by the use of starts; I had never started any of my vegetables from seed. This wasn’t a big deal with veggies, but it became a huge obstacle when my interest turned toward flowers. 

Around the time I started getting serious about growing my own flowers, I found Floret flower farm online. I became enamored of their flower farm’s gorgeous pictures and bought some seeds from them. This was before the company became the enterprise it is today, and I was able to get a ton of seeds. Since I’d only ever used starts, I had no idea how to do seed starting properly. I decided to direct sow and I followed the instructions on the back of the packets and waited very impatiently for my seedlings to grow. And what happened??

Well, barely anything grew. I got four plants total. TOTAL.

That’s right. 

I got one stock plant and a couple of zinnia plants and that was it. I couldn’t believe that out of ten seed packets, that was all I got. Oh, and I tried a bunch of sweet peas in the full blast heat of summer. Oops. For a supposedly-seasoned gardener, I’d failed miserably and worse, I’d wasted all those seeds. That’s when I deep-dove into all the gardening resources I could find to see what I did wrong and how I could do better.

The next year, I set up a propagation shelf and was able to get my seeds to sprout! YAY! But then when I put them into the ground, they ended up being like 6in tall. What?? They were nothing like the pictures I was seeing from all the other floral farmers with their armfuls of beautiful blooms. 

Then the pandemic hit and everyone became gardening-obsessed and all these new gardeners flooded the internet looking for information on how to grow flowers. All the seed shops were selling out and everyone had dahlia fever trying to get the most sought after tubers. It’s been a wild two years. 

 I’ve read all the books and taken too many courses to count, but after two years of trial and error, I finally did it. I got the garden of my dreams. My zinnias grew to over five feet tall, my dahlias bloomed all summer, and I even got grasses to grow.