Griffin, GA |

At first glance, The Flower Shack at Green Gate Farms might look like a vibrant sea of color—but its roots run much deeper than just aesthetics. Inspired by her grandmother’s love of gardening, Tara Green set out to start a U-Pick flower farm on their family property in Griffin—a move that bloomed into both a business and a way to educate the public about agriculture.

“I guess, just growing up, my grandmother always loved flowers, had a nice garden,” says Tara. “And just seeing her in that, and then right about five years ago, when we decided to do this, flower farms had just started gaining popularity. I told Steven one night, ‘We’re going to start a flower farm.’ And that spring, we started a flower farm.”

Today, that vision has come to life in rows and rows of blooms, each carefully prepped months in advance. From prepping the soil to pulling beds and planting hundreds of varieties, it’s a labor of love that takes shape well before a single visitor walks through the gate.

“We’re pulling beds here on the hills,” says Steven Green. “We’re backfilling by hand in some areas… and it takes all day. We’ve learned so much from the last few years that we have started staggering. So a lot of the earlier season flowers, we’ll pull those beds first, then a couple of weeks later, the beds for the later season flowers.”

For Tara, that process continues nearly every day during peak season—planting, checking on flower health, and keeping rotation consistent from April through August.

“We grow over a hundred varieties of flowers here,” she says. “I try to get out here super early in the mornings and do all of our planting. Just maintaining all of this is a lot of work every week.”

And if you’re not up for picking your own bouquet, Tara’s got you covered. Her roadside honor-system stand is stocked daily with custom-made arrangements—one of her favorite creative outlets.

“Making bouquets is one of my favorite things,” she says. “I enjoy the creative side of it—mixing the colors and textures, and just stretching my creative brain.”

But the experience doesn’t stop at flowers. The Green family’s working farm includes cattle and vegetable production, offering visitors a real look at the day-to-day of rural life.

“Before we had this, we didn’t really have a lot of interaction with people,” says Steven. “So this is just one avenue to come out here, to fellowship with people and to let them ask us questions. It’s neat—they get to ask us, and we can explain everything and talk to them.”

By: Damon Jones