Grown Here
Flowers, food, and good things grown from the ground up.
There is something special about knowing where the things you bring home actually came from.
Knowing the flowers on your kitchen table were cut from a field just down the road.
Knowing the tomato you're slicing was picked when it was actually ripe.
Knowing the herbs in your dinner were growing in the sunshine not long before they reached your kitchen.
At Wendland Family Farm, we grow with the seasons in West Point, Iowa—specialty cut flowers, fresh vegetables, culinary herbs, pumpkins, gourds, seedlings, seasonal crops, and plenty of things we're simply curious enough to plant.
Some things are grown for beauty.
Some are grown to feed people.
Some become ingredients for things we make.
And some are grown simply because we wanted to see if we could.
That's the fun of farming.
Growing With the Seasons
Farming teaches you pretty quickly that nature doesn't follow a catalog.
Every season is different.
Spring arrives when it's ready. Rain comes—or doesn't. Summer brings heat, insects, weeds, and abundance. Fall eventually reminds us that every growing season has an ending.
We plan carefully, plant intentionally, and work hard.
Then Mother Nature gets a vote.
That's why what you'll find from Wendland Family Farm changes throughout the year.
Rather than expecting every crop all the time, we embrace what is growing well right now.
The result is food and flowers that reflect the season they came from.
And we think that's something worth celebrating.
Specialty Cut Flowers
Flowers are where much of the Wendland Family Farm story began, and they'll always be one of the things we love growing most.
Our fields are filled throughout the growing season with specialty cut flowers chosen for beautiful colors, interesting textures, exceptional varieties, and the ability to create something you aren't likely to find in the grocery-store flower cooler.
Depending on the season, you may find spring bulbs and cool-season flowers giving way to summer favorites and eventually the rich colors and textures of fall.
We grow familiar favorites alongside unusual varieties, heirloom selections, and flowers you may have never seen before.
Because locally grown flowers follow nature, the exact varieties and colors available change throughout the season.
That's part of their beauty.
No two weeks in the flower field look exactly the same.
Our flowers may find their way into bouquets, CSA shares, U-Picks, special orders, workshops, farm experiences, markets, or simply onto someone's kitchen table on an ordinary Tuesday.
We don't believe you need a special occasion to bring flowers home.
Sometimes the flowers are the occasion.
Seasonal Vegetables
There are few things Erica loves more than getting her hands into the vegetable garden.
Growing food has always felt different from simply producing a crop.
There's something grounding about planting a seed, tending it for weeks or months, harvesting the result, and eventually feeding your family—or someone else's family—with it.
Our vegetable production follows the seasons and includes a diverse mix of familiar staples, interesting varieties, and whatever we're excited to grow that year.
You may find tomatoes warm from the summer sun, peppers, cucumbers, leafy greens, carrots, beets, radishes, beans, potatoes, onions, squash, brassicas, root crops, and plenty of other seasonal favorites throughout the growing year.
Some crops thrive.
Some humble us.
Some become family favorites.
And every season teaches us something new.
Rather than promising a grocery-store selection year-round, we grow food the way farms always have:
One season at a time.
Culinary Herbs
The herb garden might be one of the hardest places on the farm to walk past without stopping.
Brush against the rosemary.
Rub a mint leaf between your fingers.
Smell fresh basil in the summer sun.
Watch bees work through flowering herbs.
There's an entire sensory world growing in a relatively small space.
We grow a wide variety of culinary and useful herbs throughout the season, which may include basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley, sage, mint, lemon balm, fennel, anise hyssop, marjoram, and other seasonal favorites.
Some leave the farm fresh.
Others are harvested and preserved for later.
Herbs may find their way into CSA shares, Farm Pantry products, workshops, dried goods, infused salts, seasonal creations, and our own kitchen.
We love that something so simple to grow can become useful in so many ways.
And we especially love teaching people what to do with it.
Pumpkins, Gourds & Fall Harvests
Fall has always held a special place at Wendland Family Farm.
Pumpkins were one of our earliest adventures beyond flowers and vegetables, and what began as a small family growing project quickly became one of those farm traditions we couldn't imagine giving up.
Throughout the fall season, we grow a colorful mix of pumpkins, specialty pumpkins, gourds, decorative corn, sunflowers, and other seasonal favorites.
We especially love the unusual ones—the tiny pumpkins, warty varieties, beautiful heirloom colors, stacking pumpkins, pie pumpkins, interesting gourds, and all the shapes and textures that make a fall harvest feel abundant.
Some are grown for eating.
Some are grown for decorating.
Some are grown for the experience of walking through a field in autumn and seeing just how much can come from a handful of seeds.
Like everything else we grow, the exact varieties and availability change from season to season.
As Wendland Family Farm grows, we hope our fall harvests continue growing with it—creating more opportunities for families to experience the farm, celebrate the season, and bring a little piece of fall home.
Because around here, it's never really “just a pumpkin.”
And Whatever Else We're Growing
One of Erica's favorite parts of farming is experimenting.
That means you'll probably find crops growing at Wendland Family Farm that don't fit neatly into flowers, vegetables, herbs, or pumpkins.
Seed crops.
Seedlings.
Dried flowers.
Sunflowers.
Plants we're trialing.
Something we saw in a seed catalog and couldn't resist.
And occasionally something we planted simply because we wanted to see what would happen.
Some experiments become permanent parts of the farm.
Others teach us a lesson and never return.
Both are valuable.
We're farmers.
We're always going to be growing something.
How We Grow
Good farming starts below our feet.
Healthy soil isn't simply dirt that holds a plant upright. It's a living system filled with organisms, organic matter, roots, fungi, insects, nutrients, water, and countless interactions we can't see.
Taking care of that system matters to us.
Our approach to growing is guided by regenerative principles, soil conservation, biodiversity, responsible land stewardship, and a desire to work with natural systems whenever possible.
That may mean reducing soil disturbance, adding organic matter, keeping living roots in the ground, using cover crops, rotating crops, creating habitat, encouraging beneficial insects, planting for pollinators, and continually learning better ways to care for the land.
We especially believe agriculture should leave room for life beyond the crop we're trying to harvest.
Bees belong here.
Butterflies belong here.
Birds, earthworms, beneficial insects, native plants, and all the other pieces of a healthy farm ecosystem belong here, too.
We're not interested only in what the land can produce for us this year.
We're interested in what condition we leave it in for the next.
Grown for More Than the Harvest
One of our favorite things about growing is discovering how far a harvest can go.
A fresh herb can become something dried for winter.
A flower can become a pressed keepsake.
A tomato can become salsa.
A cucumber can become pickles.
Seeds can become next year's garden.
A handful of herbs can become an infused salt.
A seasonal harvest can become something useful for the home long after the field has gone quiet.
That's one of the ideas behind our growing collection of farm-made and farm-inspired goods.
Whenever possible, we want to begin with what we're already growing and ask:
What else can this become?
It allows us to waste less, preserve more, teach practical skills, extend the harvest beyond the growing season, and help people bring another little piece of farm life home.
From Our Fields to You
There isn't only one way to experience what we grow.
Throughout the season, our harvest may reach you through:
CSA memberships that let you experience the growing season alongside us.
Farm-fresh flowers, vegetables, and herbs available through seasonal sales and pickup opportunities.
U-Picks where you can step into the field and harvest for yourself.
Farm experiences and workshops that teach you how to grow, harvest, arrange, preserve, cook, create, or make something with what the season provides.
Farm Pantry and seasonal goods inspired by ingredients and skills rooted in farm life.
Seeds, seedlings, and plants that allow you to grow something at home.
And sometimes it's simply a bucket of flowers, a handful of tomatoes, or an armful of herbs headed home with someone who stopped by at exactly the right time.
That's one of our favorite parts of selling directly from a farm.
The distance between the person who grew something and the person taking it home becomes very small.
What's Growing Now?
The farm is always changing.
What's blooming in June won't be the same as what's blooming in September.
The vegetables coming out of the field in spring will look different from the baskets we carry in during late summer.
And some crops have wonderfully short seasons that make them even more special when they arrive.
Rather than maintaining a permanent list of what's available, we share current harvests, seasonal offerings, U-Picks, events, and farm availability as the season unfolds.
If you see something you love, don't wait too long.
The next harvest may bring something completely different.
That's the beauty of eating, decorating, and living with the seasons.
Why Local Matters
Buying directly from a local farm is about more than bringing home flowers or food.
You're choosing to know a little more about where those things came from.
You're supporting land being kept in agriculture.
You're helping a small farm continue planting next season.
You're allowing children to grow up seeing agriculture as something alive and valuable.
You're supporting local food, local knowledge, and a relationship between farmer and community that can't be replicated by a barcode on a grocery-store shelf.
And you're helping farms like ours continue experimenting, learning, growing, teaching, and sharing.
We don't take that support lightly.
Grown With Purpose
We don't know exactly what will be growing in these fields ten years from now.
That's part of the adventure.
There will probably be new crops.
New varieties.
New ideas.
New experiments.
And almost certainly a few spectacular failures along the way.
But what we hope never changes is why we grow.
To feed people.
To bring beauty into ordinary life.
To teach our children.
To care for the land.
To create habitat.
To preserve useful skills.
To connect people with agriculture.
And to build something worth passing on.
Flowers. Food. Agriculture.
Grown with purpose. Shared with gratitude.
Welcome to what's growing at Wendland Family Farm.
