Each day Kristy Tippett lovingly tends to the thousands of garden rose bushes which grow on several acres across the mixed farm she lives on with her husband Brock and their six children.

Ms Tippett has spent the last few years of her life cultivating an expansive rose garden and developing a business she is intensely passionate about - supplying roses for events and weddings.

While she had never commercially grown flowers before, her journey began in 2018 when the trained florist learned that one of her favourite farms to source flowers from had sold to new owners who did not wish to continue the business. It meant about 8000 roses were set to be bulldozed on the Drysdale property.

With a love for the fragrant flowers she seized an opportunity to steer her career in a different direction. Ms Tippet and her fifth-generation farmer husband, Brock, tirelessly uprooted and carefully transported the plants back to the family farm at Dean.

While the farm has grown into one of the largest suppliers of garden roses in Victoria, it has not been without challenges.

It has been painstakingly challenging work to keep Soho Rose Farm afloat since the onset of the pandemic.

With restrictions prompting weddings and events to be cancelled for much of the last two years, it put some suppliers such as herself in a position with nobody to sell their flowers to.

"Pretty much all of our business, 98 per cent of it, is weddings. So when they stopped we didn't have anything," Ms Tippett told The Courier.

Finding her small business ineligible for any government grants throughout the pandemic, the passionate and dedicated Ms Tippett and her small team continued rising early to tend to the bright paddocks and harvest the flowers, despite not receiving a return.

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In an attempt to adapt to the changes and allow her employees to continue working, she opened a shop in a prime position on Sturt Street.

"We opened a shop to sell our flowers through retail and it has been pretty good. We didn't make the amount of money we would normally but it was something to keep us going," Ms Tippett said.

Yet just as the orders started rolling in again, the region was hit by severe storms - bringing with them heavy rain, intense hail and flash flooding.

She recalls her husband, who grows potatoes, canola and wheat, initially being pleased about the prospect of some rain but their feelings quickly changed when the ferocious storm rolled in.

Ms Tippett said roses could be damaged by even a standard summer storm and the plants would normally recover, but the force with which the hail fell from the skies was a "whole other kettle of fish" and caused substantial damage to her 13,000 plants.

"We had hail two days in a row, so what it missed the first day it definitely got the second day. I didn't know how much damage hail could do," Ms Tippett said.

"It hasn't just damaged the flowers but it knocked buds off and bruised the stems of the plants too."

The rose season usually lasts for about six months - from November to May - during which there are normally three flushes - in spring, summer and autumn.

But due to the inclement weather in the season so far, with lots of rain but not much sun, she did not have many roses to sell from the spring flush.

"The spring was really cold so half of the roses didn't flower. Most just got to the bud stage and without the warm weather they just fizzled on the plant."

She cut all of these plants back in anticipation of the summer flush, which is usually "the biggest and best" due to the optimal weather and little rain, which means less fungal diseases.

But it wasn't until the consistent warmer weather over Christmas and the New Year that many of the plants started flowering.

Her roses were just about ready to flush in time to fill the long list of orders she had received for the next few weeks, and would now be ready to pick, but the storm ripped through the plants before many had the opportunity to fully bloom.

Running at a loss for the past two years, this season's orders were crucial to keeping the business - an integral part of the Victorian flower industry as she grows so many flowers of an 'unparalleled quality' - afloat and even bringing the books back into the green, so she described losing the flush as "brutal".

"We've already had a pretty hard season - it is the complete opposite to the last few years where I had so many flowers out there just waiting for orders but then we didn't have any because of lockdowns. But now this year I have so many orders, but I have to cancel them because I don't have the flowers."

The plants must begin to be pruned now in the hope those that can be saved will grow back within the next four to six weeks for the autumn flush.

"Hopefully that flush will be good and we will then be able to keep going until next season," Ms Tippett said, though adding there was still uncertainty about the year ahead amidst the pandemic.

Yet undertaking the pruning again, without any flowers to sell, will come at a cost of up to $15,000, so Ms Tippett is facing further significant financial losses.

Acknowledging that she was not the only farmer in the district who had been affected by the storms, she said the whole situation was "really awful".

Aside from the loss of flowers, her husband's wheat and canola crops were also completely destroyed. They hope some of the potato plants can be salvaged, but most of them have been lost too.

She requires about $40,000 to push through this latest hardship so her flowers can bloom and be sold.

Ms Tippett has been inundated with messages during the last couple of weeks as friends and loyal customers have become aware of her situation.

She is both humbled by and grateful for this generous support, which includes one friend who has set-up a Go Fund Me page for her business. It raised almost $30,000 in two days and has restored her hope that her business may survive.