This piece is real evidence of AHP’s greatness as a writer, because I have less than no interest in gardening and the faintest possible level of interest in flowers, yet I read every word with interest.
Ha! My reaction was the opposite. I am a big gardener and grew one dahlia last year and was considering growing more and this article inspired me to skip the whole endeavor. (Despite AHP's excellent treatment of the topic).
I pre-ordered tubers from three local farms and inadvertently got caught up in the Coseytown drama this week. I received an email from one of the farms noting that I purchased Coseytown Babycakes and they needed to inform me that I could not sell any future tubers and they are no longer going to carry Coseytown tubers in the future. I wrote back and assured them I had no intention of selling any tubers as I’m too lazy to bother with storing my tubers. Then I received another email with a “coseygate2024” $15 coupon code. 🤣
I love all Culture Study gardening content but the intersection of this topic with other Cultire Study Things like The Portal and Millennial Hustle Culture made it such an extra great read.
Also, this is perhaps a #basic example, but this reminds me a lot of 2010s Serious Food People Culture, in which I totally partook as a Yelp community manager, designer of food curriculum and sometime Brooklyn Kitchen teacher. It wasn’t enough to have a decent chef’s knife and know how to use it; you had to have a hyperspecific blade recommended by Heidi Swanson (though the one she recommended was truly great and I still love it). It wasn’t enough to know the general gist of how the Maillard reaction works; you had to read the collected works of J. Kenji Lopez (a nice guy and truly a total genius, tbh), and know the precise blend of ingredients and techniques to produce the chemically Platonic ideal of a Sunday gravy. And on and on. And obviously it wasn’t enough just to love food and throw dinner parties for your friends — it had to be your job. And so it was for me for a long time, because when I love something I too tend to go wide and deep and obsess and try to know all there is to know and do all there is to do.
But you know what? I like food so much better when it’s not my job. I do other stuff now. It’s nice to let the things we love exist separately from the ways we serve our communities for money. It’s nice to stop at “enough” rather than going full throttle into “doing the most for no reason.”
I started crocheting last year and so much of this discussion rang true to what I've seen happening online around crocheters/knitter's/sewists. Rapid expansion of the hobby leading to all kinds of issues and drama with yarn dyers and pattern makers, the environmentmal impact, lots of "well who owns this idea" conversations. It does feel like Etsy is the beating heart of a lot of this drive to start selling your hobby online. Taking all of that millennial desire for productivity and funneling it into a website that, when it started, promised to connect you with small business creators and now is... Well... Whatever it is now.
Yep. I was coming on here to say exactly this. I’d say Ravelry has had the biggest impact, particularly on the proliferation of knitting and crochet designers. The Coseytown drama sounds exactly like designers who prohibit makers from selling anything they’ve knit or crocheted from their published designs (when legally that’s really difficult to enforce, and the only thing that’s technically a copyright violation is passing off photos someone else took, or a pattern someone else has published, as your own).
I remember reading an article about the meltdown when Ravelry made some site design changes a while back. I'm only on there occasionally and it hadn't really affected me but I was fascinated. If you love something you feel such a sense of ownership.
Admittedly, if I understand correctly what happened, the changes were not accessibility-aware and impacted a lot of disabled folks for whom crocheting was the one good thing going on in their lives, and the reaction of the Ravelry owners was not disability-informed either. The Ravelry debacle was actually about disability.
Hi fellow crocheter! Agree with all you said. Have also noticed an MLM-like trend in the community. Some makers and designers I follow are now selling lessons/advice on how to make money as a maker or designer.
And so so so many designers posting about their designs being resold without their permission.
This was such a wonderful piece to read. So much so that I just started subscribing monthly! I related with your questions about what is the difference between a small business and a business. lol. About a month before the COVID lockdown began, my partner at the time and I created a website for our small plant shop. We really wanted to sell plants online and at that point we had NO EXPERIENCE, with all of the many tasks that goes into shipping plants. We created an online storefront that local customers could interact with and even schedule to pick up plants they bought online. Suddenly, the lockdown begins all over the country, and everyone is stuck inside wanting figuring out what to do with all this free time! We had a pretty good instagram presence, and I think that’s also what kind of what made us blow up also. ALL OF THAT IS WORK though, and it was just the two of us starting out. Our online shop started getting flooded with more orders than we knew what to do with, plus, we were always trying to figure out the easiest and efficient way to ship plants across the country safely. lol. All of a sudden, we are paying attention to weather forecasts in different parts of the country, seeing if we may need a heat pack to add. Just so much work. We hired a couple people to help us out, but again, now you’re training people how to do the work. More work! lol it was rocky, but I do remember a lot of people wanting to combine shipping, and I believe we tried to accommodate as much as possible, but it was just way too much for us to handle. Anyways, I have vivid memories of reading all these emails of people complaining about shipping costs or something or another, and literally cursing Amazon’s shipping standards and their effect on the expectations of customers. lol
That’s all behind me now, now I’m just working at a garden center making things look pretty and helping others make things look pretty. lol
Thank you for allowing me to relive some great memories as well as for being seen and understood as a entrepreneurial elder millennial lol
I admire your plant arc! Shipping live plants seems dauntingly hard to me, and a business model I am going to continue to avoid personally, while being super grateful to every company that does master that logistics and operations hurdle to send plants to ME :)
I would say yea, it is indeed hard, but I know that starting out, that wasn’t even a thought. I think if we understood how much work would go into shipping plants, initially, we would’ve prolly done something else. It was kinda like following this new trail and uncovering all sorts of things. I’m grateful for the experience of going through the trials and tribulations of running an e-commerce business from your house.
I feel this so much! I run a gardening business where I sell seeds and ceramic pots to start the seeds. I'm not dealing with the live plants, but I do ship fragile pottery. Oh the headaches! And because the whole point of the enterprise for me is to not contribute more single-use plastics to the world, I ship in 100% paper, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
Working at home this morning, but gearing up to head down to the shop to ship more boxes this afternoon.
Also - those complaint emails. I used to get all hrumph about them. Now I just apologize calmly and politely and offer to refund their order if they don't want to wait or pay for shipping. Usually they apologize to me once they realize I'm a real person and not a corporate overlord.
This reads like my favorite kind of New Yorker piece—I think I have no interest in the topic, but then it hooks me because of what it reveals about human nature, economics, and culture. Nice work! The dynamics are somewhat similar to what I’ve observed with backyard chicken raising, which quickly takes on a life of its own and has a whole subculture online, and usually costs way more than you could ever make selling eggs. It also makes me think of my sister, who has been fully sucked into the dog show world to show her corgis, even though we used to laugh at the mockumentary Best Of Show and the dog show people it lampooned. She started a side gig making and selling breed-specific dog show tote bags on Etsy. Her hobby has taken over her life in ways good and bad; it’s the source of many friendships, but it’s also hugely expensive in part because she’s chasing dreams to make money from it. My most expensive hobby involves caring for two quarter horses, who I ride Western and keep at my house. (Expensive, but much less costly than hunter-jumper horses boarded at show barns). A trainer tried to get me to go on the Western dressage show circuit with one of my horses, because he has so much potential. Nope, I said, I don’t want to take it that seriously. I’ll keep the cost and commitment in check by doing it on my own and for personal satisfaction, not to get attention or prizes. It’s hard to resist though.
Believe me, I know, I have a rescue dog (and a rescue cat) and I follow our local Humane Society's heart-breaking Instagram. It's a point of tension between my sister and me.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that statistic from and if you’re speaking to US or the world as a whole, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly fact or evidence based. Best estimates in the US are about 1 million euthanasias of dogs and cats in shelters annually. Dogs represent a slightly bigger proportion than cats (60% to 40% or so). Anecdotally, based on my own and colleagues experiences 1 million is likely an undercount, as shelters vary in their diligence when it comes to reporting euthanasias. However, that number includes animals euthanized for any reason- illness, injury, behavioral, bite history, and space- not just the animals euthanized to make room in the shelter. I’ve worked in shelters as a per diem veterinarian and my best friend is a full-time shelter veterinarian, I can tell you that even in rural NC, the minority of shelter euthanasias are “healthy, sociable animals” and the overwhelming majority of euthanasias are for much bigger issues. Even bad shelters are pretty good at moving the healthy, sociable animals.
It is pretty well established that the big televised dog shows can sometimes transiently affect the popularity of certain breeds and increase the number of them in shelters. However, I don’t think there’s been subsequent establishment of a causal relationship between dog shows and euthanasias of healthy shelter animals.
I’m not going to defend all the practices of breed clubs and some are certainly doing a better job than others at improving the breeds, but in my experience, people who breed dogs for the show ring are doing much better for dogs than just about any other class of breeder. These are the clients who do what I recommend, do all the health testing recommended before breeding animals, breed animals appropriately, and spay dogs when they retire them from the breeding programs. Maybe the show people are contributing minimally to the problems in shelters, but realistically most of the people I know who work in shelters would love for the world to have more responsible breeders and owners like dog show people. It’s the people who are putting profits over the health of the animals and the offspring that are the problem.
I absolutely adore rescue animals, but spend enough time working with dogs and you’ll learn that breeding matters A LOT. If the aspirations of rescues are realized, we’re ultimately going to need people who are producing well-bred dogs (well bred likely includes purebred dogs and purpose bred hybrids).
Yes, I meant 1 million, not "millions". I misspoke. I am really opposed to the concept of "pure breds" and I think breeding dogs is wrong as long as there are millions of dogs available for adoption in shelters across the country. It breaks my heart when people buy breeder dogs, regardless the "quality" of the breeder. Every breeder dog takes a home that could have gone to a shelter dog. You say, "if the aspirations of rescues are realized" - yes, I'd love to see a day when shelters are empty. We're probably never going to get there, especially as long as people value pure bred appearances and traits. Dog shows promote the value of designer dogs - I think that's wrong.
I love all of this - there’s nothing like a deep dive into a subculture you know nothing about and finding that it is incredibly vast and has its own quirks and major and minor players. And of course thanks to capitalism, there’s always so much money involved.
(Does anyone else like to watch documentaries on things like this? I’m addicted. Current faves are Chicken People [on chicken raisers/showers], Well Groomed [competition creative dog groomers] and Tickled [just what it sounds like. It’s…odd]. And of course classics like Paris is Burning and The Decline of Western Civilization.)
For my part I’ve been dipping a toe into the world of quilting. I know how bad craft art people can get thanks to many years of knitting, but man there’s just…so much. So many rules unspoken and non, so many levels of craft and talent, so much gatekeeping, so much money involved.
I think there’s also something to be addressed by people more eloquent than I about how many of these subcultures - gardening, fabric arts, other domestic-related areas - are traditionally dismissed as being women’s work, ignoring how complex it all really is.
Inside the Factory, a British show, occasionally provides a peek inside a specific realm while it's serving up a look at how things are made, packaged, and shipped, along with some investigation by a historian to place the object in context. I remember one about French table wine and the actual violence that broke out between competitors. Love the show. The hosts are so enthusiastic, like kids excited by the big numbers of something in a vat or on a truck.
I can't even adequately describe what catnip this *entire* post was to me. I'm a millenial and have been avidly following Floret (and groaned at the prices this year but also bought a few packets of seed that I'm treating like absolute gold) and get emails from Coseytown and a few other dahlia growers so I saw that Coseytown email and was like...oop I wonder what's happening here!!
The generosity with which Floret puts information out into the world is truly beautiful (but also, as you point out, it needs to be paid for!) and I've come to terms with not being able to justify buying one of every variety and just picking my absolute favorites. Not to mention my backyard is small, so I am ALWAYS over-optimistic about what I have space for. So many thoughts about value, creativity, generosity -- who is expected to give things away? Who do we expect to pay (for their time, product, expertise, etc.)? Fascinating.
Gosh I love that you've gotten into one of my favorite hobbies, gardening, and specifically dahlias! It's so great to read your takes. It is wild how much people were complaining about floret's prices and I wanted to throw out a few more thoughts about it.
- floret specifically does SO MUCH EDUCATION on seed saving. The zinnias that she is selling are open pollinated meaning they come back the same year after year, making it incredibly easy to save LOADS of seeds and have those zinnias forever. In fact, in some of her videos Erin from floret specifically says things like "we want you to only have to buy these seeds once, and save them year after year for generations"
- Erin at floret partnered with Dawn Creek for some of the zinnias, and Dawn Creek is another interesting case study on this topic. The owner of Dawn Creek has been very open in the past with her struggles to scale up her seed generation and distribution to meet demand. I am under the impression that in the past she encouraged individual growers to sell her seeds because she couldn't meet demand. However, I'm in several groups where there have been Dawn Creek Zinnia Seed scammers who take Venmo payments and never send the seeds, the seeds aren't actually Dawn Creek, or the seeds are of such poor quality that they are ungrowable. In one of the floret videos, they have the owner of Dawn Creek visit and she made a comment saying "how do we make a living producing seeds?" I interpreted this moment as her expressing her frustration at the moral dilemma of wanting to be a steward of the earth, understanding that the seeds and nature are doing the heavy lifting, and the difficult feelings of PRICING labor and effort that has been in demand, difficulty to scale up, and countless untrackable hours of effort. As someone who has considered selling bouquets and tubers to cover only the cost of my garden, I could understand her feelings there.
- I'm not sure if you follow Sunflower Steve, but he was planning on partnering with Erin at floret in a similar way as Dawn Creek and Erin has actually been mentoring him to scale things up on his own. Steve talks about how generous Erin is with her time and effort in helping other breeders/growers and I will always be an Erin Stan for this because I'm sure fiscally it would have been in her best interest to scale Steve's sunflowers for him but instead she is helping him so he can reap the benefits.
- lastly, I believe that Erin from floret's partner is passionate about photography and videography and I have a feeling that he would be creating these photos/videos regardless, so a huge eye roll to anybody complaining about their flashiness 🙄.
P.s. anytime you want to do a culture study tuber exchange I'm all in!!
The Floret seeds felt inexpensive even though they were $20 a pack, because the only way to get Dawn Creek blush zinnias in the past was to "donate" $50 to their fundraiser in exchange for a tiny package of 20 seeds!
I love Floret and I bought a bunch of the zinnia seeds, but about the open pollinated seeds, if you plant more than one type of zinnia in your garden (I'm not sure the exact distance), then the plants will cross pollinate and any seeds saved will be a mix of all the plants. That's why Erin grows all her breeding plants in those mesh isolation greenhouses with pollinators inside the greenhouse.
Yes!! And even if your NEIGHBOR is growing zinnias, you might still get cross-pollination (if you're growing outside). Personally I'm going to save some seed and then just keep buying more seed from Floret to supplement, seems both fun and supportive (and still cheaper than trying to buy starts of everything, plus those starts would be very boring)
This is exactly why I don’t mind the price tag. This initial offering is the only chance Floret has to solely make money off of these seeds. Once they are released, anyone can save and propagate these varieties! I bought some celosia and some zinnias.
I had some sticker shock for the Floret zinnias for sure, but I bought them anyway! They were so gorgeous and she was very transparent about how long it took to breed those varieties.
I got my Floret seeds this week! I will add, to that bit of discussion, that in addition to the wealth of free information Erin shares, she encourages growers to save their seeds, something you can't always do with plants grown from commercial seed. Has, in fact, whole videos showing you how! I've found Floret to be incredibly generous with their knowledge and look at those seeds as an investment. $19 isn't so much if I'm not buying as many seeds next year. There was a fair bit of grumbling, amongst my friends, when the seed prices were revealed. I couldn't put a finger on why that bothered me, at the time, but I think it is the disconnect I see where people can, on the one hand, argue for fair, living wages and supporting small/mid sized businesses and on the other, complain when the result of that is reflected in the cost of their goods. There is so much, often under paid and under appreciated labor involved in farming. Anyway! I am off on a tangent. Thank you for giving me food for thought on this Sunday morning!
I also don’t have a problem with the price. It’s Floret’s only chance to make money on the seeds, really. Just like KA dahlias only really make money for KA the first year. She’s mitigated that somewhat by partnering with Stonehouse Dahlias. After the initial year there is no control! I got my seeds last week! I’m most excited for Alpenglow.
This is exactly like stained glass. All four of your concluding points, including the “haul” of tubers is exactly what stained glassers experience. People post their haul to get the rest of us jealous. In our case, supplies are getting costly so if you bungle upon an artist who died and the family had NO CLUE what to do with the stash of glass… well you can get glass for under $5 a square foot and brag on Facebook about it.
All the other points were also connected: who owns the design is a big one. Maybe this is the wave of all hobbies?
I’m a recreational thrifter mainly having fun decorating my house but I have started buying and putting aside pieces that I will likely list on IG and Etsy as a way to drive some passive income like the hyperactive millennial I am. I’ve noticed so much discourse socially about big thrift stores and the pricing strategies they’re employing to drive up cost in the store and of course cherry pick the best items to list online for auction. I think it just leaves a weird taste in my mouth that stores receiving items for free now feel comfortable posting for retail or collector prices, when those are small fractions of the populations they serve. What about the person who just gets to score something wonderful at a very affordable price? I am not talking about myself but I remember past me with less cash sometimes found items that I still treasure and wear to this day. But I recently was in a Goodwill that’s in a more affluent neighborhood near me and they had an entire rack of specialty Nikes and other sneakers that were priced $150-300. That felt like such an obvious price grab and I was a little sorry no middle school or high school kid was going to be able to find their size and love those amazing shoes they may not have had access to in the first place.
I loved this piece. I am a certified dahlia addict and member of all of the online groups AHP mentioned in this post. I missed the photo-stealing controversy earlier in the week, and if someone here has a link to the thread to share I'd be really interested in reading it. However, I have been completely transfixed by the Coseytown situation since it sort of broke out very dramatically overnight Wednesday into Thursday morning. This is such a thorny and interesting topic, and I am so glad that AHP weighed in on it.
I am fascinated by the role that social media itself has played in the onset of the 'dahlia wars' over the past few years. Instagram is the place where growers, breeders, and home gardeners share Vogue-spread worthy glamour shots of individual blooms, ombre-shaded fields of flowers, and give a peek into the 'backstage' of flower farming. The last of these is often deployed in order to maintain the goodwill of followers, who know that in real life/in their own yards, the messiness and disappointment of gardening are as central to the joy it brings as when everything goes right and you get that one perfect plant/flower/sunset. The prices of new introductions commanded by breeders, or the prices asked by the most prominent flower farmers, seem to be indexed directly to the level of care and attention these people are able to give their social media channels alongside the demanding everyday work of plant breeding and husbandry. Then of course, the Facebook groups are an endless round of people sharing the types of posts AHP mentioned above, in addition to pictures of insanely gorgeous cultivars, sometimes newly imported from Europe or Australia, that only a handful of people have access to, building demand for dahlias far exceeding the ability of anyone to meet in year one or two. By years three to four, it seems like it starts to level out a bit, partly because these cultivars are becoming more widely available and partly because many have moved on to the new hotness).
What is extremely concerning to me personally about the current firestorm is that a breeder who has a very robust, careful, and I think very generous social media presence has seemingly done permanent or long-lasting harm to her business overnight by trying to shift the paradigm around how to ensure that breeders can capture adequate financial reward from the three to seven year process of bringing a single new cultivar to market. (It is of couse only three or four days or so into this controversy, but the problem is that she only has one sale a year, which opened Friday, to make the bulk of her yearly income.) This is not because the dahlia community doesn't think breeders should be recognized and rewarded, they have shown the opposite by selling out $40+ new introductions in 30 seconds over the course of multiple breeders for multiple years now. I am convinced from reading these FB threads that she has done significant financial harm to people who bought her cultivars in the past. Many have been buying, multiplying her cultivars for years (and were planning to invest heavily in her new introductions on Friday before this drama began) with the intention of selling them according to standard practice in this industry/community. As AHP noted, the high prices breeder have been able to get for new introductions are a direct result of the idea that these cultivars are a good investment--if you buy one today for $40, plant it and grow it, next spring you have 4-15 tubers you can sell on for $25-35 each (maybe more if you are one of those people with a particularly robust instagram following). The breeder in question in my opinion should have given her customers probably nearly a full year heads up that she was looking to shift her model, and asked for community input on how it made sense to do that in a way that would protect all the stakeholders in her business. What I am reading in a lot of the comments is that her new policy (which was rolled out in a way that was very 'top down' and did not appear to invite discussion or compromise) is out of sync with her own branding, which emphasized beauty and *generosity*, leading to a complete collapse of trust. I think Erin Benzakein has successfully navigated these waters so far by consistently emphasizing generosity and sharing in her branding. At the same time, Erin/Floret did apparently roll out some language with her seed sale this year that suggets you can't breed using seed stock bought from her--another thorny question that runs counter to her own branding.
I really hope this woman can find a way to come back from this situation, even if this year is not as profitable a year, I would really like to see the conversation evolving to reflect how all breeders and growers can be compensated fairly without having to rely heavily on a perfectly-managed social media presence. For the sake of this one breeder, I hope growers will extend her the opportunity to meet them in the middle and find a solution that works for all parties. Along those lines, it would be great to see the FB group itself reflect on its own role in creating unreasonable expectations of breeders, their public image, and the products (tubers/plants) they are selling. That last part is what I mainly thinking is currently missing from the FB discussion around this. Would love to know what others here think about all this.
I didn’t even get to the global aspect of this, which you bring up - I find people in the group are utterly baffled that they can’t get a dahlia they want simply because it’s from the EU or Australia. We’ve become so accustomed to seamless importing! (For those who don’t know - it’s very complicated for individuals to bring or import tubers across national lines, for myriad reasons).
As for Coseytown - I agree with everything you’ve said, and also hope for some reflection from the group, but knowing FB, that’s not going to happen. (I do think there has been some interesting and mostly very civil discussion in the various threads, though - it’s given people an opportunity to think about norms and why this feels like such a transgression)
She has only sold out of a couple of her varieties, and normally they go in seconds! The no-copying Coseytown statement definitely dampened demand, at least for this year.
Hi! I'm new here, have been looking for a thoughtful corner of the internet where we can all *think about things* and I really appreciate your consistently considered and welcoming viewpoint AHP.
Have taken a couple of quotes from this to heart for my own business. I find it much easier to insist on properly valuing others' labour and output rather than my own. Even though the business is highly regarded there's a big part of me that doesn't *feel* that worthy. Fellow millenial-monetiser here!
Ha! Like many others, I am tickled by this piece - gardening in general just whooshes straight over my head, and yet everything discussed here feels deeply familiar. What stands out most to me is - the incredibly consistent patterns of how online fan communities grow. For me this is the great truth of the internet that I’ve observed over MANY different domains and platforms since the late 90s (when I was in high school). The development of in-group lingo, the OGs, the newbies, out of control comments sections, the need for moderators, the attempt to corral it all with rules (which become so complex that it’s de facto gatekeeping). The commerce and millennial hustle aspect can definitely give these groups a different flavor, and I think it’s more the norm now for fandoms to involve a commercial aspect (than like … Geocities) but there is some grand sameness in how large groups of people interact online. It is ramped up by MORE people being online in MORE ways, but feels so familiar.
Dahlia Lovers: I am new to this and looking for a farm where I can buy some quality tubers for the coming season. I don't have a lot of space (urban patio container garden), so am looking for 3-5 quality plants for one season. I don't care about trendiness or uniqueness of variety; I just want something that'll give me a solid season of blooms. Where would you go if you were me?
Swan Valley is fantastic — very high quality tubers, reasonably priced, renowned for their consistency. You can also sort by height so you don't get something that grows 6 feet on your patio.
If you live in a place that has a farmer's market with flower sellers, I actually found *very* affordable and beautiful tubers from a grower who mainly sells flowers but sometimes also the extra tubers they didn't have room to plant. Like Cafe au Lait for $5 affordable (!).
I’m not familiar with Swan Valley but I love Swan Island dahlias in Oregon and easiest web site to remember dahlias.com 😊 if you’re in the NW they have a gorgeous display garden too
That’s definitely what I meant, Swan Island! I find it so hard to remember all the name variations which often involve a valley or a mountain or a river or and island
This piece is real evidence of AHP’s greatness as a writer, because I have less than no interest in gardening and the faintest possible level of interest in flowers, yet I read every word with interest.
Came here to say this. At the start I was scoffing, Dahlias?? By the end I was trying to g to figure where I’d plant them. AHP at her finest!!!!
Ha! My reaction was the opposite. I am a big gardener and grew one dahlia last year and was considering growing more and this article inspired me to skip the whole endeavor. (Despite AHP's excellent treatment of the topic).
Totally agree.
I pre-ordered tubers from three local farms and inadvertently got caught up in the Coseytown drama this week. I received an email from one of the farms noting that I purchased Coseytown Babycakes and they needed to inform me that I could not sell any future tubers and they are no longer going to carry Coseytown tubers in the future. I wrote back and assured them I had no intention of selling any tubers as I’m too lazy to bother with storing my tubers. Then I received another email with a “coseygate2024” $15 coupon code. 🤣
COSEYGATE2024
I love all Culture Study gardening content but the intersection of this topic with other Cultire Study Things like The Portal and Millennial Hustle Culture made it such an extra great read.
Also, this is perhaps a #basic example, but this reminds me a lot of 2010s Serious Food People Culture, in which I totally partook as a Yelp community manager, designer of food curriculum and sometime Brooklyn Kitchen teacher. It wasn’t enough to have a decent chef’s knife and know how to use it; you had to have a hyperspecific blade recommended by Heidi Swanson (though the one she recommended was truly great and I still love it). It wasn’t enough to know the general gist of how the Maillard reaction works; you had to read the collected works of J. Kenji Lopez (a nice guy and truly a total genius, tbh), and know the precise blend of ingredients and techniques to produce the chemically Platonic ideal of a Sunday gravy. And on and on. And obviously it wasn’t enough just to love food and throw dinner parties for your friends — it had to be your job. And so it was for me for a long time, because when I love something I too tend to go wide and deep and obsess and try to know all there is to know and do all there is to do.
But you know what? I like food so much better when it’s not my job. I do other stuff now. It’s nice to let the things we love exist separately from the ways we serve our communities for money. It’s nice to stop at “enough” rather than going full throttle into “doing the most for no reason.”
I started crocheting last year and so much of this discussion rang true to what I've seen happening online around crocheters/knitter's/sewists. Rapid expansion of the hobby leading to all kinds of issues and drama with yarn dyers and pattern makers, the environmentmal impact, lots of "well who owns this idea" conversations. It does feel like Etsy is the beating heart of a lot of this drive to start selling your hobby online. Taking all of that millennial desire for productivity and funneling it into a website that, when it started, promised to connect you with small business creators and now is... Well... Whatever it is now.
Yep. I was coming on here to say exactly this. I’d say Ravelry has had the biggest impact, particularly on the proliferation of knitting and crochet designers. The Coseytown drama sounds exactly like designers who prohibit makers from selling anything they’ve knit or crocheted from their published designs (when legally that’s really difficult to enforce, and the only thing that’s technically a copyright violation is passing off photos someone else took, or a pattern someone else has published, as your own).
I am a quilter and yes. Yup. This is for sure happening all the time.
I remember reading an article about the meltdown when Ravelry made some site design changes a while back. I'm only on there occasionally and it hadn't really affected me but I was fascinated. If you love something you feel such a sense of ownership.
Admittedly, if I understand correctly what happened, the changes were not accessibility-aware and impacted a lot of disabled folks for whom crocheting was the one good thing going on in their lives, and the reaction of the Ravelry owners was not disability-informed either. The Ravelry debacle was actually about disability.
Ah, thank you, I couldn't remember the specifics. We need universal design principles built into all our systems.
Hi fellow crocheter! Agree with all you said. Have also noticed an MLM-like trend in the community. Some makers and designers I follow are now selling lessons/advice on how to make money as a maker or designer.
And so so so many designers posting about their designs being resold without their permission.
This was such a wonderful piece to read. So much so that I just started subscribing monthly! I related with your questions about what is the difference between a small business and a business. lol. About a month before the COVID lockdown began, my partner at the time and I created a website for our small plant shop. We really wanted to sell plants online and at that point we had NO EXPERIENCE, with all of the many tasks that goes into shipping plants. We created an online storefront that local customers could interact with and even schedule to pick up plants they bought online. Suddenly, the lockdown begins all over the country, and everyone is stuck inside wanting figuring out what to do with all this free time! We had a pretty good instagram presence, and I think that’s also what kind of what made us blow up also. ALL OF THAT IS WORK though, and it was just the two of us starting out. Our online shop started getting flooded with more orders than we knew what to do with, plus, we were always trying to figure out the easiest and efficient way to ship plants across the country safely. lol. All of a sudden, we are paying attention to weather forecasts in different parts of the country, seeing if we may need a heat pack to add. Just so much work. We hired a couple people to help us out, but again, now you’re training people how to do the work. More work! lol it was rocky, but I do remember a lot of people wanting to combine shipping, and I believe we tried to accommodate as much as possible, but it was just way too much for us to handle. Anyways, I have vivid memories of reading all these emails of people complaining about shipping costs or something or another, and literally cursing Amazon’s shipping standards and their effect on the expectations of customers. lol
That’s all behind me now, now I’m just working at a garden center making things look pretty and helping others make things look pretty. lol
Thank you for allowing me to relive some great memories as well as for being seen and understood as a entrepreneurial elder millennial lol
I admire your plant arc! Shipping live plants seems dauntingly hard to me, and a business model I am going to continue to avoid personally, while being super grateful to every company that does master that logistics and operations hurdle to send plants to ME :)
I would say yea, it is indeed hard, but I know that starting out, that wasn’t even a thought. I think if we understood how much work would go into shipping plants, initially, we would’ve prolly done something else. It was kinda like following this new trail and uncovering all sorts of things. I’m grateful for the experience of going through the trials and tribulations of running an e-commerce business from your house.
I feel this so much! I run a gardening business where I sell seeds and ceramic pots to start the seeds. I'm not dealing with the live plants, but I do ship fragile pottery. Oh the headaches! And because the whole point of the enterprise for me is to not contribute more single-use plastics to the world, I ship in 100% paper, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
Working at home this morning, but gearing up to head down to the shop to ship more boxes this afternoon.
Also - those complaint emails. I used to get all hrumph about them. Now I just apologize calmly and politely and offer to refund their order if they don't want to wait or pay for shipping. Usually they apologize to me once they realize I'm a real person and not a corporate overlord.
This reads like my favorite kind of New Yorker piece—I think I have no interest in the topic, but then it hooks me because of what it reveals about human nature, economics, and culture. Nice work! The dynamics are somewhat similar to what I’ve observed with backyard chicken raising, which quickly takes on a life of its own and has a whole subculture online, and usually costs way more than you could ever make selling eggs. It also makes me think of my sister, who has been fully sucked into the dog show world to show her corgis, even though we used to laugh at the mockumentary Best Of Show and the dog show people it lampooned. She started a side gig making and selling breed-specific dog show tote bags on Etsy. Her hobby has taken over her life in ways good and bad; it’s the source of many friendships, but it’s also hugely expensive in part because she’s chasing dreams to make money from it. My most expensive hobby involves caring for two quarter horses, who I ride Western and keep at my house. (Expensive, but much less costly than hunter-jumper horses boarded at show barns). A trainer tried to get me to go on the Western dressage show circuit with one of my horses, because he has so much potential. Nope, I said, I don’t want to take it that seriously. I’ll keep the cost and commitment in check by doing it on my own and for personal satisfaction, not to get attention or prizes. It’s hard to resist though.
Dog shows also have a direct connection to the millions of healthy, sociable shelter animals that are euthanized each year.
Believe me, I know, I have a rescue dog (and a rescue cat) and I follow our local Humane Society's heart-breaking Instagram. It's a point of tension between my sister and me.
That’s good. I hope she chooses to stop.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that statistic from and if you’re speaking to US or the world as a whole, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly fact or evidence based. Best estimates in the US are about 1 million euthanasias of dogs and cats in shelters annually. Dogs represent a slightly bigger proportion than cats (60% to 40% or so). Anecdotally, based on my own and colleagues experiences 1 million is likely an undercount, as shelters vary in their diligence when it comes to reporting euthanasias. However, that number includes animals euthanized for any reason- illness, injury, behavioral, bite history, and space- not just the animals euthanized to make room in the shelter. I’ve worked in shelters as a per diem veterinarian and my best friend is a full-time shelter veterinarian, I can tell you that even in rural NC, the minority of shelter euthanasias are “healthy, sociable animals” and the overwhelming majority of euthanasias are for much bigger issues. Even bad shelters are pretty good at moving the healthy, sociable animals.
It is pretty well established that the big televised dog shows can sometimes transiently affect the popularity of certain breeds and increase the number of them in shelters. However, I don’t think there’s been subsequent establishment of a causal relationship between dog shows and euthanasias of healthy shelter animals.
I’m not going to defend all the practices of breed clubs and some are certainly doing a better job than others at improving the breeds, but in my experience, people who breed dogs for the show ring are doing much better for dogs than just about any other class of breeder. These are the clients who do what I recommend, do all the health testing recommended before breeding animals, breed animals appropriately, and spay dogs when they retire them from the breeding programs. Maybe the show people are contributing minimally to the problems in shelters, but realistically most of the people I know who work in shelters would love for the world to have more responsible breeders and owners like dog show people. It’s the people who are putting profits over the health of the animals and the offspring that are the problem.
I absolutely adore rescue animals, but spend enough time working with dogs and you’ll learn that breeding matters A LOT. If the aspirations of rescues are realized, we’re ultimately going to need people who are producing well-bred dogs (well bred likely includes purebred dogs and purpose bred hybrids).
Yes, I meant 1 million, not "millions". I misspoke. I am really opposed to the concept of "pure breds" and I think breeding dogs is wrong as long as there are millions of dogs available for adoption in shelters across the country. It breaks my heart when people buy breeder dogs, regardless the "quality" of the breeder. Every breeder dog takes a home that could have gone to a shelter dog. You say, "if the aspirations of rescues are realized" - yes, I'd love to see a day when shelters are empty. We're probably never going to get there, especially as long as people value pure bred appearances and traits. Dog shows promote the value of designer dogs - I think that's wrong.
I love all of this - there’s nothing like a deep dive into a subculture you know nothing about and finding that it is incredibly vast and has its own quirks and major and minor players. And of course thanks to capitalism, there’s always so much money involved.
(Does anyone else like to watch documentaries on things like this? I’m addicted. Current faves are Chicken People [on chicken raisers/showers], Well Groomed [competition creative dog groomers] and Tickled [just what it sounds like. It’s…odd]. And of course classics like Paris is Burning and The Decline of Western Civilization.)
For my part I’ve been dipping a toe into the world of quilting. I know how bad craft art people can get thanks to many years of knitting, but man there’s just…so much. So many rules unspoken and non, so many levels of craft and talent, so much gatekeeping, so much money involved.
I think there’s also something to be addressed by people more eloquent than I about how many of these subcultures - gardening, fabric arts, other domestic-related areas - are traditionally dismissed as being women’s work, ignoring how complex it all really is.
Inside the Factory, a British show, occasionally provides a peek inside a specific realm while it's serving up a look at how things are made, packaged, and shipped, along with some investigation by a historian to place the object in context. I remember one about French table wine and the actual violence that broke out between competitors. Love the show. The hosts are so enthusiastic, like kids excited by the big numbers of something in a vat or on a truck.
I can't even adequately describe what catnip this *entire* post was to me. I'm a millenial and have been avidly following Floret (and groaned at the prices this year but also bought a few packets of seed that I'm treating like absolute gold) and get emails from Coseytown and a few other dahlia growers so I saw that Coseytown email and was like...oop I wonder what's happening here!!
The generosity with which Floret puts information out into the world is truly beautiful (but also, as you point out, it needs to be paid for!) and I've come to terms with not being able to justify buying one of every variety and just picking my absolute favorites. Not to mention my backyard is small, so I am ALWAYS over-optimistic about what I have space for. So many thoughts about value, creativity, generosity -- who is expected to give things away? Who do we expect to pay (for their time, product, expertise, etc.)? Fascinating.
Gosh I love that you've gotten into one of my favorite hobbies, gardening, and specifically dahlias! It's so great to read your takes. It is wild how much people were complaining about floret's prices and I wanted to throw out a few more thoughts about it.
- floret specifically does SO MUCH EDUCATION on seed saving. The zinnias that she is selling are open pollinated meaning they come back the same year after year, making it incredibly easy to save LOADS of seeds and have those zinnias forever. In fact, in some of her videos Erin from floret specifically says things like "we want you to only have to buy these seeds once, and save them year after year for generations"
- Erin at floret partnered with Dawn Creek for some of the zinnias, and Dawn Creek is another interesting case study on this topic. The owner of Dawn Creek has been very open in the past with her struggles to scale up her seed generation and distribution to meet demand. I am under the impression that in the past she encouraged individual growers to sell her seeds because she couldn't meet demand. However, I'm in several groups where there have been Dawn Creek Zinnia Seed scammers who take Venmo payments and never send the seeds, the seeds aren't actually Dawn Creek, or the seeds are of such poor quality that they are ungrowable. In one of the floret videos, they have the owner of Dawn Creek visit and she made a comment saying "how do we make a living producing seeds?" I interpreted this moment as her expressing her frustration at the moral dilemma of wanting to be a steward of the earth, understanding that the seeds and nature are doing the heavy lifting, and the difficult feelings of PRICING labor and effort that has been in demand, difficulty to scale up, and countless untrackable hours of effort. As someone who has considered selling bouquets and tubers to cover only the cost of my garden, I could understand her feelings there.
- I'm not sure if you follow Sunflower Steve, but he was planning on partnering with Erin at floret in a similar way as Dawn Creek and Erin has actually been mentoring him to scale things up on his own. Steve talks about how generous Erin is with her time and effort in helping other breeders/growers and I will always be an Erin Stan for this because I'm sure fiscally it would have been in her best interest to scale Steve's sunflowers for him but instead she is helping him so he can reap the benefits.
- lastly, I believe that Erin from floret's partner is passionate about photography and videography and I have a feeling that he would be creating these photos/videos regardless, so a huge eye roll to anybody complaining about their flashiness 🙄.
P.s. anytime you want to do a culture study tuber exchange I'm all in!!
I love learning all this Dawn Creek backstory - and I bought Sunflower Steve seeds earlier this year (when Erin showcased them, of course!)
The Floret seeds felt inexpensive even though they were $20 a pack, because the only way to get Dawn Creek blush zinnias in the past was to "donate" $50 to their fundraiser in exchange for a tiny package of 20 seeds!
I love Floret and I bought a bunch of the zinnia seeds, but about the open pollinated seeds, if you plant more than one type of zinnia in your garden (I'm not sure the exact distance), then the plants will cross pollinate and any seeds saved will be a mix of all the plants. That's why Erin grows all her breeding plants in those mesh isolation greenhouses with pollinators inside the greenhouse.
Yes!! And even if your NEIGHBOR is growing zinnias, you might still get cross-pollination (if you're growing outside). Personally I'm going to save some seed and then just keep buying more seed from Floret to supplement, seems both fun and supportive (and still cheaper than trying to buy starts of everything, plus those starts would be very boring)
This is exactly why I don’t mind the price tag. This initial offering is the only chance Floret has to solely make money off of these seeds. Once they are released, anyone can save and propagate these varieties! I bought some celosia and some zinnias.
I had some sticker shock for the Floret zinnias for sure, but I bought them anyway! They were so gorgeous and she was very transparent about how long it took to breed those varieties.
I got my Floret seeds this week! I will add, to that bit of discussion, that in addition to the wealth of free information Erin shares, she encourages growers to save their seeds, something you can't always do with plants grown from commercial seed. Has, in fact, whole videos showing you how! I've found Floret to be incredibly generous with their knowledge and look at those seeds as an investment. $19 isn't so much if I'm not buying as many seeds next year. There was a fair bit of grumbling, amongst my friends, when the seed prices were revealed. I couldn't put a finger on why that bothered me, at the time, but I think it is the disconnect I see where people can, on the one hand, argue for fair, living wages and supporting small/mid sized businesses and on the other, complain when the result of that is reflected in the cost of their goods. There is so much, often under paid and under appreciated labor involved in farming. Anyway! I am off on a tangent. Thank you for giving me food for thought on this Sunday morning!
I also don’t have a problem with the price. It’s Floret’s only chance to make money on the seeds, really. Just like KA dahlias only really make money for KA the first year. She’s mitigated that somewhat by partnering with Stonehouse Dahlias. After the initial year there is no control! I got my seeds last week! I’m most excited for Alpenglow.
This is exactly like stained glass. All four of your concluding points, including the “haul” of tubers is exactly what stained glassers experience. People post their haul to get the rest of us jealous. In our case, supplies are getting costly so if you bungle upon an artist who died and the family had NO CLUE what to do with the stash of glass… well you can get glass for under $5 a square foot and brag on Facebook about it.
All the other points were also connected: who owns the design is a big one. Maybe this is the wave of all hobbies?
I’m a recreational thrifter mainly having fun decorating my house but I have started buying and putting aside pieces that I will likely list on IG and Etsy as a way to drive some passive income like the hyperactive millennial I am. I’ve noticed so much discourse socially about big thrift stores and the pricing strategies they’re employing to drive up cost in the store and of course cherry pick the best items to list online for auction. I think it just leaves a weird taste in my mouth that stores receiving items for free now feel comfortable posting for retail or collector prices, when those are small fractions of the populations they serve. What about the person who just gets to score something wonderful at a very affordable price? I am not talking about myself but I remember past me with less cash sometimes found items that I still treasure and wear to this day. But I recently was in a Goodwill that’s in a more affluent neighborhood near me and they had an entire rack of specialty Nikes and other sneakers that were priced $150-300. That felt like such an obvious price grab and I was a little sorry no middle school or high school kid was going to be able to find their size and love those amazing shoes they may not have had access to in the first place.
I loved this piece. I am a certified dahlia addict and member of all of the online groups AHP mentioned in this post. I missed the photo-stealing controversy earlier in the week, and if someone here has a link to the thread to share I'd be really interested in reading it. However, I have been completely transfixed by the Coseytown situation since it sort of broke out very dramatically overnight Wednesday into Thursday morning. This is such a thorny and interesting topic, and I am so glad that AHP weighed in on it.
I am fascinated by the role that social media itself has played in the onset of the 'dahlia wars' over the past few years. Instagram is the place where growers, breeders, and home gardeners share Vogue-spread worthy glamour shots of individual blooms, ombre-shaded fields of flowers, and give a peek into the 'backstage' of flower farming. The last of these is often deployed in order to maintain the goodwill of followers, who know that in real life/in their own yards, the messiness and disappointment of gardening are as central to the joy it brings as when everything goes right and you get that one perfect plant/flower/sunset. The prices of new introductions commanded by breeders, or the prices asked by the most prominent flower farmers, seem to be indexed directly to the level of care and attention these people are able to give their social media channels alongside the demanding everyday work of plant breeding and husbandry. Then of course, the Facebook groups are an endless round of people sharing the types of posts AHP mentioned above, in addition to pictures of insanely gorgeous cultivars, sometimes newly imported from Europe or Australia, that only a handful of people have access to, building demand for dahlias far exceeding the ability of anyone to meet in year one or two. By years three to four, it seems like it starts to level out a bit, partly because these cultivars are becoming more widely available and partly because many have moved on to the new hotness).
What is extremely concerning to me personally about the current firestorm is that a breeder who has a very robust, careful, and I think very generous social media presence has seemingly done permanent or long-lasting harm to her business overnight by trying to shift the paradigm around how to ensure that breeders can capture adequate financial reward from the three to seven year process of bringing a single new cultivar to market. (It is of couse only three or four days or so into this controversy, but the problem is that she only has one sale a year, which opened Friday, to make the bulk of her yearly income.) This is not because the dahlia community doesn't think breeders should be recognized and rewarded, they have shown the opposite by selling out $40+ new introductions in 30 seconds over the course of multiple breeders for multiple years now. I am convinced from reading these FB threads that she has done significant financial harm to people who bought her cultivars in the past. Many have been buying, multiplying her cultivars for years (and were planning to invest heavily in her new introductions on Friday before this drama began) with the intention of selling them according to standard practice in this industry/community. As AHP noted, the high prices breeder have been able to get for new introductions are a direct result of the idea that these cultivars are a good investment--if you buy one today for $40, plant it and grow it, next spring you have 4-15 tubers you can sell on for $25-35 each (maybe more if you are one of those people with a particularly robust instagram following). The breeder in question in my opinion should have given her customers probably nearly a full year heads up that she was looking to shift her model, and asked for community input on how it made sense to do that in a way that would protect all the stakeholders in her business. What I am reading in a lot of the comments is that her new policy (which was rolled out in a way that was very 'top down' and did not appear to invite discussion or compromise) is out of sync with her own branding, which emphasized beauty and *generosity*, leading to a complete collapse of trust. I think Erin Benzakein has successfully navigated these waters so far by consistently emphasizing generosity and sharing in her branding. At the same time, Erin/Floret did apparently roll out some language with her seed sale this year that suggets you can't breed using seed stock bought from her--another thorny question that runs counter to her own branding.
I really hope this woman can find a way to come back from this situation, even if this year is not as profitable a year, I would really like to see the conversation evolving to reflect how all breeders and growers can be compensated fairly without having to rely heavily on a perfectly-managed social media presence. For the sake of this one breeder, I hope growers will extend her the opportunity to meet them in the middle and find a solution that works for all parties. Along those lines, it would be great to see the FB group itself reflect on its own role in creating unreasonable expectations of breeders, their public image, and the products (tubers/plants) they are selling. That last part is what I mainly thinking is currently missing from the FB discussion around this. Would love to know what others here think about all this.
I didn’t even get to the global aspect of this, which you bring up - I find people in the group are utterly baffled that they can’t get a dahlia they want simply because it’s from the EU or Australia. We’ve become so accustomed to seamless importing! (For those who don’t know - it’s very complicated for individuals to bring or import tubers across national lines, for myriad reasons).
As for Coseytown - I agree with everything you’ve said, and also hope for some reflection from the group, but knowing FB, that’s not going to happen. (I do think there has been some interesting and mostly very civil discussion in the various threads, though - it’s given people an opportunity to think about norms and why this feels like such a transgression)
She has only sold out of a couple of her varieties, and normally they go in seconds! The no-copying Coseytown statement definitely dampened demand, at least for this year.
Hi! I'm new here, have been looking for a thoughtful corner of the internet where we can all *think about things* and I really appreciate your consistently considered and welcoming viewpoint AHP.
Have taken a couple of quotes from this to heart for my own business. I find it much easier to insist on properly valuing others' labour and output rather than my own. Even though the business is highly regarded there's a big part of me that doesn't *feel* that worthy. Fellow millenial-monetiser here!
Ha! Like many others, I am tickled by this piece - gardening in general just whooshes straight over my head, and yet everything discussed here feels deeply familiar. What stands out most to me is - the incredibly consistent patterns of how online fan communities grow. For me this is the great truth of the internet that I’ve observed over MANY different domains and platforms since the late 90s (when I was in high school). The development of in-group lingo, the OGs, the newbies, out of control comments sections, the need for moderators, the attempt to corral it all with rules (which become so complex that it’s de facto gatekeeping). The commerce and millennial hustle aspect can definitely give these groups a different flavor, and I think it’s more the norm now for fandoms to involve a commercial aspect (than like … Geocities) but there is some grand sameness in how large groups of people interact online. It is ramped up by MORE people being online in MORE ways, but feels so familiar.
Dahlia Lovers: I am new to this and looking for a farm where I can buy some quality tubers for the coming season. I don't have a lot of space (urban patio container garden), so am looking for 3-5 quality plants for one season. I don't care about trendiness or uniqueness of variety; I just want something that'll give me a solid season of blooms. Where would you go if you were me?
Swan Valley is fantastic — very high quality tubers, reasonably priced, renowned for their consistency. You can also sort by height so you don't get something that grows 6 feet on your patio.
amazing, ty!!!
If you live in a place that has a farmer's market with flower sellers, I actually found *very* affordable and beautiful tubers from a grower who mainly sells flowers but sometimes also the extra tubers they didn't have room to plant. Like Cafe au Lait for $5 affordable (!).
Try to buy from someone in the same region as you. If you are in the South https://3porchfarm.com/collections/dahlia-tuber-sale, you want tubers from plants that grew in similar conditions.
I’m not familiar with Swan Valley but I love Swan Island dahlias in Oregon and easiest web site to remember dahlias.com 😊 if you’re in the NW they have a gorgeous display garden too
That’s definitely what I meant, Swan Island! I find it so hard to remember all the name variations which often involve a valley or a mountain or a river or and island