Valentine's Day Push (Part 2)

Valentine's Day Push (Part 2)

#Flowers #Valentine's Day Flowers for Valentine's Day LA Hybrid Lily Oriental Lily Oxnard

This week we dive into how our Oxnard farm is coping with Valentine’s Day 2013, Oxnard is a chaotic blend of world class flower farm and our national transportation hub. 

In the fields, greenhouses and hoop houses, Oxnard is a growing some amazing flowers. Right now beautiful lilies are being harvested, as the light levels are just perfect. 


Oriental lilies enjoying the Southern California sun.

Alberto, our head lily grower in Oxnard stands among our Royal Lilies. This variety is called Party Diamond, which is a pink LA Hybrid, grown for Valentine’s Day. These are being harvested fast and furious for the holiday.

Alberto Arroyo

Our Oxnard farm is broken up into three properties. There is “Home Ranch” where we grow primarily lilies, asters, gerbera daisies, celosia, dianthus and lisianthus. Then there is “Golden Coast” where we grow oriental lilies, brassica, and even some French Tulips. Lastly are our outdoor fields of iris, called “Channel Islands.” These three areas are a short drive a part, and generally surrounded by strawberry fields.
The gerbera greenhouses are my favorite aspect of the Oxnard farm. It is like walking into a Dr. Seuss story. Big, colorful blooms balanced on top elegant stems, reaching for the sun. The gerbera are the only flower we grow hydroponically, and the bright white of the green house contrasting with the bold colors of the blooms immediately make you smile when you step into the greenhouse. I think we could bring groups unhappy and disheartened people here, and this warm and colorful environment would cheer them up.


Prepare for JOY.



A rainbow of color awaits you.

Many of the asters, lilies and gerbera daisies grown in Oxnard go straight to our bouquet division, Sun Pacific Bouquet. At this time of year, crews are working around the clock creating bouquets, featuring the red and pinks of Valentine’s Day. All these bouquets have an enormous amount of personality, from the big and bold like On Fire For Your Love to the playful and fun Sweetheart. These bouquets are all made by our dedicated team of artisans in Oxnard.

Marisol in Action!

I spoke with the Oxnard Sun Valley Head Quality Control person, Marisol Hernandez, about how things were going on our Oxnard bouquet line.

Lily: How are things going this holiday season?

Marisol: Overall, we are doing great. The team work has been awesome and production is flowing smoother than I anticipated.

Lily: Any issues?

Marisol: This year, the main challenge was dealing with some crop availabilities. When you are making bouquets you need to be able to adapt to crop supply and demand, and maintain the up most quality Our team, came through with flying colors, and the bouquets looks great.

Lily: Is your team still working around the clock?

Marisol: Luckily we have been winding down our super long shifts. Late last week, I was here for a few 12 hour days…glad that is over.

Marisol is one of those people at Sun Valley working tirelessly behind the scenes. She is on the farm at all times of day and night, making sure that we ship out the best quality flowers possible. Like a lot of the Sun Valley team, she will be taking a deep breath of relief once the last Valentine’s Day order has shipped. This little bit of relief will be short lived however, as we roll right into filling Women’s Day orders. For us this is another big bouquet holiday, so on Friday, March 8th expect to see some really colorful and creative bouquets, meant just for the women in all our lives.

Oxnard is also our national transportation hub. From this unassuming facility we distribute an enormous amount of flowers and bouquets.


The majority of the flowers we grow in Arcata are brought to Oxnard, where many of our customers come pick them up. The Oxnard shipping dock is busy place. Many of our customers actually use our facilities to stage their eastbound trucks. They will coordinate with other California Growers and use our dock as a consolidation point to fill up entire trucks full of flowers. With Valentine’s increased volume, we expand into another facility we keep for just such occasions. This facility is called “Del Norte” and it is a huge refrigerated warehouse, perfect for flower distribution.
If you receive flowers from our Arcata farm, they get to you a few different ways. Every evening, two or more semi-trucks leave Arcata. One truck goes directly to San Francisco, and then continues on to Southern California. The other trucks go straight through to Oxnard, about 600 miles. These rigs generally stop at both the Armellini and the Prime shipping docks and cross dock our freight onto their trucks for points East. The trucks end up at our Oxnard Farm, dropping off bouquet ingredients and other crops from Arcata.  Then they often get loaded up with supplies for Arcata, turn right around, and return to Arcata on the “back haul”

As Valentine’s Day rolls forward like a huge wave, the warehouses ebb and flow with product, the trucks ride through the night and our team pushes through no matter the hour. Luckily, right now the majority of our flowers are reaching their final destinations and lovingly being prepared for the big day.

Whew!

It's a Farm! (Part 1)

It's a Farm! (Part 1)

#Arcata #Flower farming #Flowers #hydrangeas #iris #Redwoods #stargazer #Sun Valley



Looking at a beautiful flower arrangement on a polished wood table in your hallway, it is easy to forget that these flowers didn’t come from a test tube or a pristine laboratory. They came from a real working farm.  This means dirt, mud, weird smells, heavy equipment and people hustling and bustling in every direction.

Forklifts, trucks and carts full of buckets are zipping around in a constant commotion. You do a double take as a mini-train of colorful Hydrangeas goes speeding by, their delicate heads overflowing out of white buckets and barely staying on board.

These flowers were just picked, and are now on the way to be packaged and sent on their way. The contrast of vibrant colorful flowers stacked on a drab muddy cart, epitomizes the surreal beauty of a cut flower and the hard work involved in getting it to the vase on your hallway table or to the design table in your studio.

Farm fresh Hydrangeas and Golden Beauty Iris just after picking.

The beeping of a forklift grabs your attention just in time as it pulls out of a seemingly endless row of hoop houses. The scale is amazing. Are you on a flower farm tucked between the roaring Pacific Ocean and the legendary redwood forests of northern California, or in the vast Midwest, surrounded by silos, combines and hay bales?

The strong wind driving the salty freshness of the sea up over the dunes and across the Arcata Bottoms leaves no doubt that you are next to the ocean.  The sand and dust in the wind scour your cheeks, you are dodging huge puddles, keeping dry from the spitting rain and all the while looking out of the corner of your eye for the next forklift. Yes, they call this "summer" around here.

You reach for a heavy glass door, slide it open with both hands and step into a huge glass paned greenhouse; your senses react to the incredible change. Here you stand in the warm swirling air, the smell of new growth and rich soil welcomes you. The wind is gone, replaced by the hum of fans moving the air strategically around the vast green house. You still hear the outdoor environment as it shakes the glass panels of the structure with each gust, but now you feel the humidity and the effects of all that fresh green foliage. Row upon row of Oriental lilies greet your eyes, a few have blossomed out early, ridiculous blooms bursting out of a sea of green stalks.

Early blooms and Sumatra Lilies just about to be harvested.

The quiet of the greenhouse is very calming.  Way down at the end of a row, you see a small cluster of workers. They are snipping lilies at the perfect stage.  These lilies will be ready to open up and share the peak of their beauty when they get to the consumer.


Picking our Starfighter Oriental Lilies, the Starfighter is a contemporary version of the legendary Stargazer.

Sun Valley's growers guide the lilies upward with light.  Ironically, we are usually trying to reduce the amount of light on the lilies, so that they strive to grow taller and get closer to the sun.  The proper light level also encourages thick stems which are needed to support the big heavy blooms, usually growing 4 or more per stem.  Hanging from the top of the greenhouse are small black boxes.  These are sensors which are constantly monitoring the conditions in the greenhouse.  If the light gets too bright, canvas sheets are automatically pulled across the length of the green house, if it gets too dark, lights will come on to keep the precious lilies in the ideal conditions.

Bunches of lilies.

A flower farm is science wrapped in organized chaos. Communication flows from the growers, to the sales team, to the customers, back to the picking teams, to the warehouse and transportation departments, and again back to the customers.  Sun Valley prides itself on "operational excellence."  This isn't just lip service, this is an absolute necessity to get our California grown flowers to the end users all over the county, with the highest quality, impeccable consistency and a fair price.

"Creating a World of Color" includes a lot of people, enormous logistics and tons of soil.  In the next installment of "It's a Farm" we will visit the warehouse, so stay tuned.

Please forward this post to fellow flower fans!

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-Lily


“The earth laughs in flowers.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson