Life & Work with Mia Mazzochi of Avondale

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mia Mazzochi.

Hi Mia, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
When I started growing flowers, it was just a crutch- going outside and being in the dirt or admiring what all can grow from it. It became one of my few ways of self-care when it was tough to wake up every day. I became a mom at 21 and wasn’t feeling anywhere close to being prepared. Mentally, it was a real tug of war for me, but physically, I came down with sickness shortly after having my child. I have a condition involving a chest wall defect called Pectus Excavatum, which has affected me to varying degrees during my childhood and adolescence but worsened to the degree that made life very hard after pregnancy. It was harder because doctors did not link my health problems with my defects. It was clear there were heart problems and joint issues, but they were written off as this or that thing for several years. It took plowing through specialties and academic hospitals to drive myself to find answers through these years of failed attempts at getting to the root cause that I needed something healthy and rewarding, something with a fast turnaround that made me feel like a functioning human, and something to keep me looking forward through it all. Growing flowers for fun was the answer for a while before I decided to make a living out of it for the long term, which could benefit me. I began making plans for my business about two years before the actual start of it. Since then, it was one of the better decisions I’ve made and my clearest vision. In discovering my most ailing health issues, my family resettled here in Arizona from the East Coast for my best prognosis, as the Mayo Clinic has been a blessing in my life and continues to be an active part of it. I wasted no time getting to work once we found a home here. I always chip away at it at whatever speed my body can handle until each job is done.

I grow over 25 flower varieties yearly on over 1800 square feet of active growing space in my humble backyard. Being home and having a business of growing beautiful flowers built here has been such an enchanting experience. I grow and artfully elevate the flowers through my custom bouquet orders and arrangements. I offer spring flower subscriptions and deliver them to people’s homes throughout the West Valley. I also provide doordash sales and sales through my local Co-op in Avondale. I occasionally pop up with markets and love connecting with new and returning customers in real-time. Offering my community the option of local flowers is something I hold very close to my wonky little heart. The flowers and, more so, the people who respond to them have done a fantastic job keeping my head up when it’s hard and giving my life beauty again. These are things my flowers can also do for others.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
Something I’ve struggled with my whole life has been self-confidence. I don’t know when or how that started, but I know it was from a very young age. There have been many struggles throughout my life, but a major one was the ability to see my self-worth. Somewhere in growing flowers, I began to see my growth, and it quickly became an incredibly empowering tool for seeing my value. It is challenging to pick up your family’s life and relocate it across the country to face unconventional health deficits at my age, requiring unconventional surgery and treatment. Being a bit of what I call a socially extroverted introvert, I found it hard to put myself out here in the world and had to convince people I was worthy of doing what I do. After all, I’m a shy person at heart, but people-pleasing leads my personality when I’m out of my comfort zone. And besides that, would people support someone they’ve never met, as helpless as I seemed with my health falling apart as I tried to put it back together? It felt like a mess to explain, and putting my story out there didn’t feel that graceful at first. In advocating for my business, I also found an opportunity to advocate for my health because it wouldn’t feel genuine if I didn’t tell the whole story about what I am doing here growing and selling these flowers. The more I explained this mess, the more empowered I felt. Early on in my business, I realized that connection led me here, whether with myself or through my community, and that was nothing to be ashamed of. And now, it’s a story well worth putting out there. I believe in re-evaluating ourselves daily to be better and do better for the world and within us. And sharing those struggles has made my business what it is today. It’s an empowering story about a mess with a silver lining, and I hope anyone can make anything they want of that in hopes it may help the right person one day.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I specialize in growing flowers with regenerative practices. Here in the desert, it is important to work with techniques that complement the land and build it back up rather than stripping it away, further disturbing it, or filling it with artificial inputs. I work with the land and nature rather than against it. As the flowers grow, I avoid spraying them with anything besides natural materials to aid their growth. Over time, with regenerative farming, the need for inputs lowers as the long-term goal is to actively heal the soil from the start, to leave it better than I once found it. That includes no spraying with pesticides, fungicides, or anything of the like, as many of these options diminish our supply of helpful bugs, bacteria, and fungi, which are important in regenerating healthy soil. Nature must run its course even when it’s not in my favor.

Something that sets me apart from the flower market here is the option of having local, organically grown flowers available. Without realizing it, many people are used to buying flowers from big box stores or standard florist shops, which are incredibly tainted with synthetic and harsh chemicals from the weeks they sprout to the days before they are sold. They are far from fresh as their journey here began weeks ago, and any life they still carry is mainly due to essentially being pumped with versions of flower “steroids” to hold their form or color. They have also been in and out of refrigeration throughout this process, aging them further. Often, there needs to be more quality control before the flowers hit store shelves; every flower is treated the same. Most of these traditional places selling these flowers that we are all so used to buying import them from other countries from Holland, all the way to Columbia. In doing so, this generates extremely high carbon emissions from flying a product across the world that can instead be grown right here in my backyard, where carbon is being transformed from the atmosphere back into my soil to help grow said flowers. With regenerative practices, we are trapping excess amounts of carbon that are already here in the sky that is adding to climate change, and we are simply finding ways to recycle it, so to speak, storing it in the ground where it will soon become a staple ingredient in the health and growth of my plants instead. It’s a win-win for everyone and makes for a better environmental setting if we can also get the larger farms to follow suit.

Also, my flowers are harvested 2-3x a week and sometimes more frequently during peak season in the spring. They are harvested during the coolest hours of the day, which ensures freshness and longevity. Each bloom is checked for quality control when harvested by hand. I don’t have to wear PPE to harvest or tend to them like those coming from foreign places in mass. My flowers won’t pose health risks to those who gather, handle, or buy them with unnecessary chemicals. Instead of steroids, my flowers are harvested with mindful techniques to keep their longest vase life.

In addition, all of my flower “scraps” while harvesting and arranging to go straight back into the garden via compost that I tend here on site, so it’s important to keep things organic. My flowers are to be different from the standards we are used to. The flower varieties I grow are best enjoyed fresh, not shipped. With careful selection each season, they often require less water and are more drought tolerant, especially when the soil is nurtured, which is important when growing in the hot and dry desert. They are not bred to be imported and do not add to the economic and environmental crisis we already have going for us. US-grown and locally available food and flowers are certainly a start to some of the world’s problems, which I am proud to have a hand in.

Contact Info:

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