Brookfield Blooms is a flower farm in Baltimore. My wife Alana grows dahlias, zinnias, sunflowers, lisianthus — seasonal cuts sold through bouquet subscriptions, farmers’ markets, and an online store. It’s a real business with real customers. For a while she ran the entire thing on Square, Squarespace, Google Sheets, and Mailchimp.
It worked. Then it didn’t.
The thing that broke wasn’t any single tool. It was the seams between them. A customer signs up for a bouquet subscription on Squarespace. Alana manually adds them to a spreadsheet. She tracks their payments in Square. When they want to skip a week, they email her. She updates the spreadsheet, the packing list, and the route sheet. Multiply that by 40 members across three pickup locations and you’ve got a part-time admin job stapled onto an already full-time farming operation.
I’m a software engineer. Watching this up close, I did what engineers do: I looked for a better tool. And I found a weird gap in the market.
Generic e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Squarespace are powerful, but they don’t understand subscriptions the way a farm needs them. A bouquet subscription isn’t a Netflix membership. It’s seasonal, it varies week to week, members skip and swap, and logistics change based on what’s blooming. Bolting subscription management, delivery zones, and inventory tools onto Shopify through third-party apps costs $50 to $150 per month in extras and creates the same disconnection problem Alana was already dealing with.
Farm-specific platforms like Local Line and Barn2Door are closer, but they’re expensive ($99 to $299 per month plus fees) and built primarily for produce operations. Nothing was designed for the way a flower farm actually works: designer’s-choice bouquets, multi-site pickup networks with local business hosts, ultra-perishable product that can’t be rescheduled, and members who care about photos more than variety lists.
When Harvie shut down in December 2024, the gap got worse. Over 150 farms lost their CSA management platform overnight, mid-season. The feature those farms missed most, algorithmic share building with member preferences, still hasn’t been replicated by any remaining platform.
So I started building Picket.
The name comes from picket fences, the boundary between a private garden and the public street. Picket handles the selling, the subscriptions, the logistics, and the communication so the farmer can focus on growing.
Picket is a single platform that replaces the Square + Squarespace + Sheets + Mailchimp stack. Subscription management, delivery zone logistics, an online store, and landing page templates that guide new businesses through setup. No app tax. No $500 setup fees. A free tier that actually works, not a trial with a countdown clock.
I’m building this as a solo engineer, bootstrapped, because I think that’s the right way to build for this market. Flower farmers and small growers don’t need a venture-funded platform that has to 10x its revenue every year to satisfy investors. They need a tool that’s affordable and built by someone who understands their workflow because he sees it up close every day.
Picket is in active development. If you’re a grower and you want to be part of shaping what this becomes, I’d love to talk.
Built for growers like you
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