Two-time Indiana University East graduate Julie Frame has a booming new career, where she’s living the flower-farm dream — and where happiness reigns supreme.

Julie Frame, A.S.N. ’85 and B.S.N. ’95, owns The Barn at the Helm Flower Farm and Floral Design. She is continuing to establish her agro-business while continuing her nursing career at Whitewater Surgery Center.

Hers is a second-act-in-life success story. It’s a ready-made Hallmark movie script that includes heavy doses of romance, resilience and renewed health.

It’s about designing floral arrangements and community involvement. It’s about agro-business evolution and growth.

Frame and her husband, Tim, started the flower farm seven years ago on their farm at Williamsburg. It has matured into a nearly year-round business that also serves as a community playground and an outdoor concert hall. “It is so crazy,” Frame said with a laugh. “As grandparents, we started this crazy flower business.”

They call it The Barn at Helm Flower Farm and Floral Design.

Others can call it crazy successful. Alternatively, crazy fun.

The flower farm now features 80 varieties of flowers and a welcoming environment that screams out: Come on in. Pick your own. Savor the sights, smells and serenity. Get in touch with your inner rosiness.

“See it, enjoy it,” Frame said. “All of our events are family things.”

The Frames are the only employees. But, an army of friends arrive when cold weather becomes a problem or when events require volunteers.

“New people hear about us every day,” Frame said, noting the marketing was all word of mouth until the farm partnered with a radio station for a recent concert.

Growing organically, step by careful step, was the flower farm’s business plan: The Frames never approached a bank for financing. They hoped to make enough money to keep growing.

Flowers grow from March to December, but the farm also has a greenhouse. There are flowers to sell for Valentine’s Day and classes to teach about Christmas wreaths and centerpieces.

“We take January off,” Frame said.

The farm is open to visitors. They can tour the namesake barn, climb the vintage tractor and dote over the 1964 International truck. They can watch the windmill, view the butterfly mural and hear the waterfall. They can taste some wine and listen to the likes of comedian Heather Land and country musician Jake Dodds as they perform inside the silo gazebo – refurbished from his family’s farm – on the new Flower Farm Fridays.

Frame arranges fresh flowers, grown right on the family’s farm, for arrangements to be sold at the Richmond Farmer’s Market.

Customers and concert fans flocked in from Richmond, Muncie and Indianapolis as the word spread about the farm’s unique offerings. Land and Dodds are nationally-popular entertainers (Land has 2 million followers on social media).

The last music event of the season for Flower Farm Fridays was held October 1, featuring local favorites The Sean Lamb Janet Miller Band. Frame said they’ve already started planning next year’s events and will have their first band at the end of July.

The recent intimate events are usually sellouts — as are the Frames’ offerings at farmer’s markets.

Frame designs arrangements and delivers them. She travels for weddings. “We can do anything florists do, but we grow them. We like to do unique things.”

The business is inherently unique, Frame boasts, because about 80 percent of flowers sold in the United States are imported and theirs are 100-percent homegrown. Locally-grown flowers cut down on the carbon footprint and guarantee longer-lasting color and freshness, she said.

The Frames enjoy interacting with surrounding communities and their residents.

In those realms, visitors can pick their own flowers, brides can build their own bouquets, students can take part in special competitions and community fund-raising ideas are always welcome.

Tim and Julie Frame sit in one of the sunflower fields open to visitors at The Barn at the Helm. The sunflowers are planted in rotation to be in bloom through October.

Frame often works 80-hour weeks, yet still maintains a part-time job as a nurse for cataract surgeries at Whitewater Surgery Center in Richmond. “I love it,” she said. “I am not ready to give up nursing. I love the patient-care aspect.”

The flower-farm business is an unexpected merger of careers for the Frames. “Our paths never really mingled before. I was a nurse and he was a farmer,” she explains.

Tim Frame is a fifth-generation corn and soybean farmer at Williamsburg — population 1,759. He also has worked 32 years for UPS in Centerville.

So, how exactly did this nurse and farmer/truck loader happen to become agro-tourism entrepreneurs? Well, that’s an awesome question.

The answer has an amazing backstory, one that includes mystery and misery and making the decisions to shift gears in work careers.

She married just after graduating from Northeastern High School in 1982.

He graduated from there in 1979. They bought a property in 1986 just north of the Frame homestead farm and raised two sons, Jacob and Luke.

Frame earned an associate degree in nursing from IU East in 1985 and then a bachelor’s degree in 1995.

She worked eight years in ICU, five years in nursing administration, five years in education and foresaw a long nursing career and retirement with Reid Health, but things did not turn out that way.

She got sick. She became the long-suffering patient with a painful, life-altering illness. She visited doctor after doctor and even the Mayo and Cleveland clinics in a “14-year journey” to solve the mystery. “I left Reid because I couldn’t function,” she said. “They (doctors) didn’t know what it was. I did what I could to find out what was wrong.”

And what was wrong? It turned out to be complicated issues that stemmed from temporomandibular joint syndrome, better known as TMJ.

Tim and Julie Frame welcome the public to their agro-business, The Barn at the Helm, for flower picking, live entertainment, family fun, and general relaxation while taking in the countryside surroundings.

Most people can manage TMJ with home treatments, but others need medications and procedures such as dental splints and physical therapy. Severe cases require surgery … and Frame’s case was severe.

“Six years ago, I had life-changing surgery,” she said. “It totally fixed me.”

In fact, she feels like she’s in her 30s again — reliving them without the pain.

Life is blissfully busy today. You’d be right if you guessed she has energy to burn, an effervescence that shines through even during a phone conversation.

That’s something that flowers do, she said. “They bring happiness and joy.”

In fact, if you call the farm and get voicemail, it starts:

Flowers Make Me Happy … hope they do you, too.

The farm’s “happiness” includes some flower staples and some unique varieties that are all delivered fresh: “They last longer and smell better,” she believes.

Frame got the idea for a flower farm in a Hallmark-scene way — going to a farmer’s market while the Frames visited a son and their grandchildren in Tennessee. She waited in line for an hour to buy a bouquet that was created in front of her by a woman vendor. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Frame remembers thinking. “I could totally grow all of those flowers. I am a farmer; I can do that.”

So, she started learning — reading books, soliciting advice and attending conferences — and soon found herself in love with flowers and a new method of family farming.

Julie Frame stands in one of the sunflower fields at The Barn at Helm Flower Farm and Floral Design, an agro-business she started with her husband, Tim Frame.

The Frames tested the waters at first by displaying their flowers — giving some arrangements away and attending farmer’s markets. They grew dozens of kinds of flowers, then 50 and then 80 as word-of-mouth spread. Then they got even more creative by putting their farm and their stories on display. “My husband and I both love it,” she said. “We never thought we’d do this. But, this is what we are supposed to do.”

They are supposed to keep evolving without getting out of hand, they believe.

She plans to cut down servicing out-of-town weddings and doing more community events at the farm.

“We look at what we should do and not do,” she said about yearly plans. “The goal is still that we need to make a little money. It’s also got to be about what we love doing.”

On August 6, the couple received the Outstanding Service in Agriculture Award from the Wayne County Area Chamber of Commerce. The Frames and The Barn at the Helm also received an Indiana Senate Certificate of Congratulations for Outstanding Service to Agriculture Award, presented by Senator Jeff Raatz on August 19.