Liset Garcia grows a variety of different flowers on her farm. Photo by Estela Anahi Jaramillo

When a seed is planted, and after proper care, a farmer can cultivate various fruits, vegetables —  and flowers. The seed for Liset Garcia’s business was sewn in Los Angeles, where she wanted to pursue her passion for flower farming.

Owner and founder of Sweet Girl Farms in Reedley, Garcia has become a renowned Latina flower farmer, speaker and entrepreneur. Before becoming a farmer, her daily job was working in the medical field. She initially planned to continue in her career when she moved to the Central Valley, but just as farmers experience, things didn’t go as planned.

Garcia grew up in Los Angeles, moving to the Valley to obtain her undergraduate degree in biology at University of California, Merced. While at university, her parents bought their current farm at the edge of Reedley. She returned to Southern California to obtain her graduate degree in public health at USC and remained there for a couple more years.

She recalled seeing flower farms on social media, which inspired her to create the same experience for people.

“It’s that feeling that you give someone when they get flowers and they receive them and their eyes lighten up,” said Garcia. “They have a smile. Even if they’re mad or stressed out, they tend to relax. It’s the feeling I’m trying to emit to people when I grow the flowers.”

When growing food, farmers tend to experience setbacks or obstacles that make up the good and bad of farming life. Although droughts slow growth, farmers still find a way to make every harvest successful.

For Garcia, when she moved to the Central Valley in 2019, she experienced a traumatic accident that left her hands severely injured. She kept this secret from her family, not wanting to add extra worry to them.

Once she broke the news to her parents, they invited her – told her – to move back home with them so they could help her heal. So she moved back to their farm, where her dad grew fruit. Here, Garcia practiced mobilizing her hands again, cultivating her flowers and father’s crops, which served as a source of rehabilitation and grounding.

That is when she faced the decision to commit and pursue her dream of having a flower farm.

 

Garcia was buying seeds with the intention of testing them out and selling them. However, the opportunity came when her family built a farm stand and intended to rent it out to a friend. She found her opportunity to commit and not look back any further.

This was the moment when Garcia’s life changed for the better.

When she sells flowers, she says she gets a bittersweet feeling because that’s how she felt when she received her first blooms. Her entire journey of growing something from nothing and everything she experienced prior to this left an impact on her.

“I felt so many negative things were happening to me, but the flowers really brought me out to communicate with people,” she said. “I started the Instagram page and our Facebook page. It started pushing me to be out here more, and flowers became my therapy.”

Garcia has since drawn crowds to her stand, many by seeing her on South Alta Avenue and others by coming across her pages on social media. Sweet Girl Farms is active on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. She takes different approaches to each platform, but all center around her farm and fruit stand.

On Instagram and Facebook, with over 10,000 followers, Garcia updates her followers about current crops, what is being sold, and how much is left. On her TikTok, with over 23,000 followers, she shows how to tend and cultivate her crops—in Spanish.

On YouTube, with over 700 subscribers, she gives in-depth details of what it’s like being a farmer in the Central Valley. She shares her good and bad experiences and how to overcome them. When Garcia was farming during the drought, she shared her experience on YouTube, where the Los Angeles Times came across her page.

 

In 2021, the Times published her story and described how she continued to strive for success despite the environmental conditions her farm faced. She also shared her story on PBS, and to this day, visitors from all over California still let her know they found her article.

As a Latina farmer and business owner, she shared that she receives criticism for not fitting a cookie-cutter description of what people are used to seeing.

“It’s nice to be recognized as a woman and a Latina farmer because that carries a lot of weight for many people. I try to stay neutral because I have to be everything at once. I have to be those labels, plus me as a person, my personality,” said Garcia.

Despite finger-pointing and educating passersby, Garcia’s farm is surrounded by other Latino farmers in the area. She said the advantage of Latinos living in California is that there’s so much diversity.

Garcia has ideas and plans she hopes to achieve as her business grows. She wants to introduce many new flowers, so she has started to learn more about how to become a really good farmer of different types of flower crops.

The aspect of having classes, or a type of therapeutic rehab classroom style, is something that Garcia wants to keep open, sharing how it helped her heal physically and emotionally.

One thing that Garcia has been eager to continue practicing is her public communication to continue sharing with people. Earlier this year, she gave a presentation about herself and her farm to community members and business owners. She also participated in panel discussions for business owners.

Recently Garcia started working with Kings Canyon Unified School District, where students have interned with her over the summer, learning how to work on a farm.

“I understand how to plant a seed. So I think it’s helped me reflect and see how good of a teacher I can be,” said Garcia. “Then, I was just able to give them the confidence that we could handle things together. There will be good times at the farm where it’s fresh and nice. Then there’s days where it’s going to be super hot.”

Sweet Girl Farms is currently prepping for the Dia de Muertos flowers. For July’s Arthop, she partnered with Arte Americas to offer a free opportunity to show people how to plant marigolds. If anyone wants to buy in bulk, they will have plenty of those.

Through life’s trials and tribulations, Garcia learned to slow down and live in the moment of farming. She learned to be more present, cultivate relationships with every customer, and remember to give herself some flowers, too.