This one-woman flower farm in SC is trying something new for Easter

SUMTER — Erica Goza grew up on a row crop farm in nearby Mayesville — a small SC town with a population that doesn’t break 1,000. The 1930s era farm was worked by her grandmother first, then her father, but she didn’t anticipate laboring on it the way she does today.

“I would have never thought that I would be back here in a farming capacity,” Goza said.

But instead of farming hundreds of acres, she is growing on hundreds of square feet and doing all of the work by hand. And its not vegetables that she’s growing; it’s flowers.

Eight years ago, Goza didn’t know much about flower farms.

She had a small garden with vegetables and flowers when she was living in the Upstate, and when she later returned home to Mayesville, she continued growing her flowers, but she didn’t know that “flower farmer” was a professional title.

It was Goza’s friend, Erin McArthur, who first introduced her to cut flower farming. From there, Branching Out was born.

McArthur calls Branching Out, Goza’s flower farm, a “little pocket of amazing.”

“I still don’t know that Erica appreciates how rare what she does is,” McArthur said. “She puts out world-class flowers in Mayesville, South Carolina, and I think that if people knew the quality and the variety that she grows, they would be blown away.”

Goza has been running her flower farm primarily by herself for eight years now.

Each year, she grows a different variety of seasonal flowers, but working in South Carolina’s unpredictable climate has been a trial-and-error process.

She had seen beautiful photos of flowers in places like the Pacific Northwest and areas up North, but she didn’t know if those same flowers could grow in South Carolina’s environment.

“What I learned is that we can grow a lot of the things that they grow — it’s just we have to do it in a different time of year,” Goza said.

It was a challenge, she said, to see what would grow in our climate and what wouldn’t. Some flowers have to be grown through the winter because they are unable to handle South Carolina’s humid late spring. Something that may flower in June in Maine would flower in our late March, she said.