Fridays on the Farm: Urban Flower Business Blooms in Philadelphia

This Friday meet Courtney Jewell, a flower producer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. From her yard in the Mt. Airy neighborhood, she has built a business based on sharing the beauty of cut flowers. Courtney established Jewells in Bloom in 2022, growing her business from a small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project to a flourishing urban farm. 

Focusing on Flowers

“I don’t come from a farming background,” Courtney said. “When I moved to Mt. Airy and had my child, I knew I wanted to work for myself and work outside. I redesigned my backyard and started growing vegetables and flowers.” 

She took business and horticulture classes at a nearby community college, giving her skills and confidence in planning and operating her backyard garden. But things weren’t going as planned. 

“I kept having problems with groundhogs and bunnies eating the vegetables, as well as disease pressures,” said Courtney. “When I had finally had enough, I switched to focusing on flowers.”

Courtney developed a 20-share flower CSA in 2019, cooperating with a florist friend who handled the administrative and pick-up site responsibilities while she did the growing. Courtney realized there was a demand for cut flowers in her area when the CSA quickly sold out of shares at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She decided to strike out on her own after the pandemic, opening Jewells in Bloom in 2022.

Growing with USDA

Courtney’s sixth official growing season was in 2024. She said she has expanded her growing area to one-third of an acre and plans to bring on her first official staff member. While there is a long list of difficulties to overcome, two key ones for her were appropriate space for storage of her cut flowers and addressing impacts of weather.

Courtney looked to the USDA in Philadelphia to address these issues and grow her operation even more. Courtney attended a workshop hosted by the local USDA Service Center, where staff highlighted resources available to urban producers through both USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). 

Courtney added cold storage in her garage after learning about the FSA’s Farm Storage Facility Loan (FSFL) program in a farmers.gov electronic newsletter. The program provides low-interest financing for producers to store, handle and/or transport eligible commodities.

Prior to adding cold storage with FSFL, Courtney carried buckets of fresh-cut flowers to her basement laundry room where she constructed a make-shift cold storage using an air conditioner. But she started running out of space.

“I was constantly navigating up and down stairs with buckets full of flowers,” she said. “It was very inefficient, not to mention I was killing my back going up and down the steps.” 

FSA celebrated the 25-year anniversary of the FSFL program in May 2025. The FSFL program was created in May 2000 to address existing on-farm grain storage needs.  Since the program’s inception, more than 40,000 loans have been issued for on-farm storage, increasing storage capacity by one billion bushels.

Courtney found a solution to her other problem in FSA’s Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP). The program provides financial assistance to producers of noninsurable crops when low yields, inventory loss or prevented planting occurs as the result of natural disasters. Courtney said NAP is important to her operation as her area experiences extreme weather throughout the year, including heavy rains, high winds, intense heat, and drought.

With cold storage taken care of and NAP in place to protect her crop, Courtney is thinking ahead to what’s next for her urban farm.

“My goal is to pay off my loan quickly,” she said. “I would like to grow my operation to become more efficient. I’m also working to create a better plan for my flower sales, so they are in and out of the cooler faster. Now, with the cooler, I have plenty of space to grow and a better footing to be successful.”

More Information

Visit local farms, ranches, forests, and resource areas through our Fridays on the Farm stories. Meet farmers, producers, and landowners who are working to improve their operations with USDA programs. 

USDA offers a variety of risk management, disaster assistance, loan, and conservation programs to help producers weather ups and downs in the market, recover from natural disasters, and invest in improvements to their operations. Learn about additional programs. 

For more information about USDA programs and services, contact your local USDA service center.