Jessie Ruml, along with her husband and their four daughters, is the face behind Pixie Acres Flower Farm, a Castlewood, South Dakota-based operation producing a variety of blooms. She says “It's a family affair” and that’s no lie. Her daughters can be seen alongside her at the Brookings Farmers Market, cultivating relationships with customers and educating them about the family’s beautiful blossoms.
Ruml says “Life is funny and unpredictable,” as she never saw herself as a business owner. She “turned her family's lives upside down” when she resigned from her job in dentistry that she had held for over a decade. After graduating from the online Floret Flower Farming Workshop in 2019, she switched to farming.
“Loud, joyful, and gritty” are the three words Ruml uses to describe herself. She puts in the work every single day, averaging “16-hour workdays in the heat of the season.”
Pixie Acres provides flowers for markets, weddings, workshops, and numerous other events. With every season comes a new task. Ruml says spring and summer are spent on planting and harvesting, while fall focuses on harvesting, tearing out, and cleaning up.
Each day brings about a new task and objective. “Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are typically harvest days that start first thing in the morning to avoid the warm temps that can cause flowers to wilt after cutting,” she says.
Everything seems to have come full circle for Ruml, as she spent her childhood on a South Dakota farm “gardening, walking beans, and completing farm chores.” Now she gets to share her passion for farming and flowers with her family. She emulates joy in every word as she speaks about her family business.
When asked to describe her business in three words, Ruml says, “cultivating local joy.” She enjoys sharing her love of South Dakota with her customers. The 5-acre farm produces around 65 different flower varieties and she emphasizes that all flowers are grown and cut right there.
Pixie Acres Flower Farm is going into its fourth season at the Brookings Farmers Market. As a vendor, Ruml finds extreme happiness in watching her daughters “interact with customers, sharing little tidbits about our flowers. … Seeing the joy that our locally grown flowers bring to our customers is worth every long day it takes to grow them.”
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