It was in the midst of a Super Bowl watch party last year that Morgan Sharpe decided what she wanted to do with her life: begin a flower farm.
"I was watching the game and scrolling through greenhouse options on Pinterest," she said.
A little more than a year later, Sharpe operates Creekside Flower Farm out of a farm in Flintstone where she originally moved in 2015 as part of the Chattanooga Fellows program, a faith-based program she was working with to translate texts into Spanish.
But how the Covenant graduate went from being a psychology degree-holder working as a translator, to a flower farmer is more a result of her early years as the daughter of missionaries traveling across Central America.
"It left me with this sense of placelessness. I had homes - I had multiple homes in different countries - but there was this sense of placelessness," she said.
As she began to think about how to make her own place within the city that welcomed her, first as a Covenant student and then as a part of the Fellows program, she found the inspiration for what ultimately became a much bigger endeavor. While living on the Flintstone farm, Sharpe told the farm owner about her years-old desire to have a little green space filled with windows where she could spend her time.
That desire grew as the farm owner encouraged her to grow flowers of her own, creating a complementing business to the farm's already existing wedding venue, The Barn at High Point Farms.
Sharpe took a course offered by Co.Starters for aspiring entrepreneurs in downtown Chattanooga, then competed for financing through a Covenant grant competition for graduates.
"I was competing for literal seed funding," she said.
When she won $2,500 in November, the concept grew from a dream to a reality.
Sharpe is now selling her first year's flowers, both to brides who utilize the farm for its wedding space and as a weekly flower subscription service for the general public. She also occasionally hosts pop-up sales at Niedlov's Bakery on Main Street and other locations.
"Now I'm in full swing," she said.
"Everybody loves flowers and everybody loves beauty," she added, "but I also want to reconnect people to the idea of being connected to the land. I think there is a lot of power to belonging to a place and knowing the people and the land."
To learn more about Creekside Flower Farm, visit creeksideflowerfarm.com and follow the business on Instagram and Facebook, where pop-up sales are announced.
Through her new business Creekside Flower Farm, Morgan Sharpe offers flowers for weddings and other special events, as well as a flower subscription service that delivers bouquets to subscribers weekly.