I’ve always resonated with the idea that we move through life facing backwards. We can see everything that has already happened to us with real clarity. We see the accidents, the losses, the lucky escapes and the stretches where everything seemed to work. And because that’s what we can see, we start imagining that the road ahead will look much the same.
But we can’t see what’s actually coming.
A business is built in much the same way. We prepare for the problems we’ve already experienced. We add another employee because last year we needed more help. We buy another piece of equipment to widen the bottleneck. We write another policy because something went wrong. Eventually we convince ourselves we’ve built something resilient. Then something happens that wasn’t in the plan.
For years we joked that Bonny Blooms didn’t need more employees. It needed three more Craigs. It was a joke, but it contained a problem I didn’t fully appreciate.
A seasonal employee can learn how to print a label, pack a box or harvest a tuber. What they can’t acquire in a few weeks is fifteen years of horticultural knowledge, scientific training, breeding experience and all the strange little pieces of information accumulated from doing the same work season after season.
Experienced dahlia growers develop an almost ridiculous visual memory. Put an unmarked tuber in front of someone who has grown a variety for years and they probably recognize it. You notice the shape of the crown, the neck, the skin, the way the eyes form. You learn what looks normal and what doesn’t. Then multiply that kind of knowledge across thousands of decisions: weather, storage, disease, propagation, harvesting, shipping, customer service, knowing which problem can wait until tomorrow and which one needs to be dealt with immediately.
You can hire labor. Experience is considerably harder to hire.
I learned how important that distinction was when my dad died in November 2024. I returned from Scotland in December to a farm that still needed to be harvested. Dahlias unfortunately don’t suspend their biological processes because something terrible has happened to the person growing them.
So I harvested. December became January. The weather was miserable. The work was physically difficult and, looking back, probably not particularly good for me mentally either.
Rather than stop and deal with what had happened, I kept finding things to do. I finished a book I’d been laboring over for years. When the book was ready to publish, I built a tissue culture lab. Anything to fill the mind.
Meanwhile, the farm calendar kept moving. If you’re late finishing one job on a farm, the next job doesn’t move politely out of your way. It arrives on schedule. You start borrowing days from the next task, then the task after that. I spent much of 2025 chasing seasons, scrambling to catch up, and I’m not sure I ever did.
Then, during the 2026 shipping season, I received bad news about my mum in Scotland. Her Alzheimer’s had progressed dramatically, and being thousands of miles away suddenly felt even further than it usually did.
I had only recently gone through something similar with my dad. There is a strange form of grief that comes with diseases that slowly take someone away while they are still alive. You begin grieving long before they die. Little pieces of the person disappear, conversations change, recognition fades, and eventually you find yourself mourning someone who is still physically there.
I think part of me believed that grief worked like a pressure relief valve. That by experiencing some of it slowly, over months or years, you were somehow releasing the pressure and preparing yourself for the final loss. But that wasn’t how it worked with my dad. When he died, the grief arrived with all the force it would have anyway. Everything that came before hadn’t reduced it. It had simply been additional grief.
So when the news about my mum came, I knew something about the road ahead. And being thousands of miles away brought its own kind of guilt. You know there is very little you can actually do to change what is happening, but that doesn’t stop you feeling that you should be there. Every phone call carries more weight. Every piece of bad news makes the distance feel like a decision you are continuing to make.
This time, though, I thought the farm could absorb my absence. We had a shipping crew. We had seasonal employees. People knew their jobs. I had spent years building systems precisely so that everything didn’t depend on me anymore. Surely I could step away for a while and let the machinery continue without me.
That was the stress test. And we failed it.
Not because the people working for me didn’t care or weren’t working hard. The problem was that I had unintentionally asked seasonal employees to substitute for knowledge and speed that had taken me fifteen years to acquire.
When I came back and tried to rescue the shipping season, the obvious answer was to bring in more people and go faster. Except shipping living things doesn’t work particularly well that way.
A shipping room full of dahlias is a logistics operation with biological inventory. Tubers sitting too long can dry out or develop mold. Cuttings continue growing. Temperatures change. Weather changes. Every box needs to contain the right plant, in the right condition, going to the right person at the right time.
Go too slowly and the backlog grows. Go too quickly and mistakes grow. Mistakes create emails, replacements, refunds and more work, which takes people away from shipping, which makes the backlog grow. The bottleneck begins feeding itself.
Somewhere in all of that I realized something uncomfortable. For years, I had thought that hiring more people made the farm more resilient. In reality, it had just made it bigger – and more fragile.
The knowledge, the decisions and ultimately the responsibility were still concentrated in one person: me. The farm could survive a broken tractor. It could survive bad weather, a failed crop, an employee leaving without notice. What it couldn’t survive very well was me not being there.
Small farms are particularly vulnerable to this. We talk constantly about weather risk, crop failure, pests, disease, equipment breakdowns and markets. We talk considerably less about what happens when the most important piece of machinery on the farm is a human being.
What happens if that person gets injured? What happens if they become ill? What happens if someone they love dies? What happens if, after fifteen years of doing it, they simply can’t keep doing it at the same pace?
I turn 50 next year. For years that had been the point on the horizon when I imagined stepping away from farming, or at least from the production and shipping side of it, and spending more of my time breeding. I thought I was gradually working toward that transition.
Life accelerated the timetable.
And perhaps that’s ultimately what a stress test is supposed to do. It doesn’t necessarily destroy something. It reveals where the weakness was already hiding.
Mine was surprisingly simple.
The farm had employees. It had systems. It had customers. It had fifteen years of history. But far too much of it still depended on one person being there, knowing what to do and being capable of doing it.
We thought we needed more employees.
What we really needed were three more Craigs.
Unfortunately, I never figured out how to grow those.