Visit almost any local farmers market and you’ll find gorgeous fresh-cut flowers for a fraction of the price you’d find in a shop. But have you ever asked who’s behind those beautiful bouquets?
“It’s part of our DNA to be part of nature and growing,” says flower farmer Hua Moua Conry. “There’s the satisfaction and dopamine hit of seeing the thing that you grew … and then you physically sell it and see the transfer of your efforts.”
Moua Conry says selling flowers makes all of the work easier — because who doesn’t love flowers?
She and her family tend to a patch of rented land in Fitchburg, about 15 miles south of Madison. That’s where you can find her most weekends, picking, de-stemming and cutting flowers with her parents and sister, Choua.
But while the flowers can bring “joy and calm and peace” to customers, as she says, the work that goes into getting those flowers to the market is sleep-deprived chaos.
Moua Family Farms can be found at two markets over the weekend: Saturday mornings in Madison and Sunday at Greenfield’s Farmers Market, just outside of Milwaukee.
What that means is that after Saturday’s market, the family rests for a few hours and then heads back to the farm in the early afternoon. Then they’ll pick flowers and vegetables until sunset. After that comes prep work — getting everything ready for market — which, depending on the yield, can take them until 1 or 2 a.m.
“My dad’s pissed every time,” Moua Conry says. “He always sneaks up [stairs] at like one or even midnight.”
Sunday, the family wakes up around 5 a.m., and after a quick bite to eat, they’re out the door for Greenfield by 6. Every weekend. Rinse and repeat.
Moua Conry says the schedule is intense, and she has no idea how her parents have the energy to farm all week and run around to the markets all weekend. But she knows it has a lot to do with what they experienced before coming to the U.S.
“They came here after the [Vietnam] War,” she says about her parents, who are Hmong and fled Laos for safety. As refugees, she says she’s never seen them not overwork themselves.
Her mom, Mee Thao, 67, and dad, Chue, 70, learned to farm without any tools on the hillsides of Laos. There was no electricity, no running water.
In the mid-’70s, they were driven out of their homes during the war and into the jungles. They subsisted on anything they could find — wild roots, ferns, tree scrubs and fruits. Mee Thao says they lived in the jungle for four years while fleeing war. That’s where she also gave birth to one of her daughters, “very quietly,” Hua Moua Conry says.
“Wherever they were, they figured out how to grow,” she says of her parents. “Even in the refugee camps, they created little areas to farm … that’s all they knew.”
Today, the family grows vegetables, herbs and, of course, flowers. The two sisters who help at the markets, Hua and Choua, both attended Milwaukee’s Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) for college. They say that knowing color theory, white space and how to compose space and color gives them a big advantage when putting flower bouquets together.
The family puts together prearranged bouquets every morning before the market: $15 for a medium and $20 for a large. The sisters say these kinds of arrangements could go for close to $100 if fresh from your florist. They also put together custom orders on the spot if there are colors or specific flowers customers would like.
“It’s so fun every time when we’re putting things together,” Hua Moua Conry says. “[My sister and I], we hype each other up like, ‘I’m seeing the vision, I’m catching the vibe!’ But it’s fast. So it’s not a moment to sit with your decision forever. It’s a quick gut reaction.”
The family was one of Greenfield’s original vendors 13 years ago and has been selling goods at different markets for over 20 years. And even though they might not be getting paid the true value of their bouquets, the Mouas aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
