We feel so blessed to be living this life filled with flowers – gleaming orbs of happiness and hope we can hold in our hands and share with others
Festival Farm is a regenerative, urban flower, seed and food-growing, family business based in Waihōpai, Invercargill.
In the summer of 2024/25, we made a bold and unexpected move — we left behind our 25-acre permaculture paradise and relocated to town. After more than a decade of nurturing land, animals, and dreams in the countryside, we embraced a new chapter: urban life. It wasn’t an easy decision ( for us), but it was the right one.
We went to the farm in our twenties, newly married and full of idealism. It was the birthplace of our family and Festival Farm — a place where we poured our hearts into self-sufficiency, permaculture, and raising our boys in nature.
But life threw us curveballs, including serious illness, loss, and limitations that reshaped our world. Despite the many magical memories, the weight of maintaining the land grew too heavy. In 2024, after a particularly challenging winter, we made the courageous choice to shift course.
Now, with a smaller home and a new urban section to transform, the pressure has lifted. We’ve gained freedom, energy, and clarity that has allowed Festival Farm to evolve with us.
I continue to offer a floristry service, including garden bouquets, wedding and event florals across Southland and Otago, as well as farewell flowers. We still also grow and sell open-pollinated seeds, and create botanical art. Every creation honours people and planet, just now crafted from a cozy corner of suburbia. Proof that you don’t need acres to grow abundance or community.
Festival Farm is more than just a flower and food farm.
Our work fosters resilience, wellbeing, and a sense of belonging through gardening, education and creative engagement with the land.
It’s more than a business. It’s a declaration.
A quiet revolution in bloom.
We choose to sow seeds of hope — and you can too.
Nau mai, haere mai.
Nic & the Festival Farm whānau
Oh hey — I'm Nic head gardener, floral designer and the proud, dirt-stained dreamer behind Festival Farm.
I’m busy growing our urban farm while stepping into the most unapologetic version of myself — a woman who sees gardening not as a hobby, but as a radical act of care.
My journey hasn’t been a straight line. I’ve stumbled through motherhood, growing a business, rebuilt myself through the seasons, and come to realise that growing food and flowers is both my protest and my poetry. I grow to make sense of it all.
I’ve found freedom in the soil, in the plants, in the riot of colour that spills from our urban farm.
I garden in ways that break the rules.
I design with wondrous and wild blooms.
I write poems to keep my spirit alive.
I share seeds so others can grow their own rebellion.
My floristry isn’t polished — it’s alive.
Wild textures.
Twisting stems.
Poppies that drop petals too soon and roses that open too wide. I welcome it all in it's natural beauty.
I believe planting seeds is political. Tending a compost pile is resistance. That making something beautiful with your own hands, especially in a world built on convenience and destruction is one of the most powerful things you can do.
Festival Farm is a love letter to my children, to the earth, to my community and to all those who refuse to give up.
