American Flowers Week

American Flowers Week

#OriginMatters American Flowers Week AmericanGrown CAGrown Debra Prinzing Domestic Flowers local flowers Mayesh Slow Flowers Wholesale

For the second year in a row, American Flowers Week is taking off! This week-long celebration of domestically grown flowers was created by Slowflowers.com's Debra Prinzing, a writer, speaker, and leading advocate for American flowers and the farmers who grow them.

 Why Dedicate a Week to American Flowers? 

American Flowers Week was organized to unite America's flower farmers with the US floral industry, while also engaging consumers in the conversation about the origin of their flowers.  This is a much-needed conversation, as 80% of flowers purchased in the US are imports, a move that has pushed 58% of US flower farms out of business since 1992.

American Flowers Week wants to change that.  After all, while 74% of consumers do not know the origins of their flowers, 58% prefer American Grown, if given the choice.

Prinzing points out that, "Consumers are more conscious than ever about the origins of the goods they purchase, especially when it comes to food — and flowers."  This is why it is important to celebrate the U.S. flower farmers who grow a diverse selection of florals year-round, as well as salute the floral designers whose values inspire them to source domestically.

  

American Flowers Week is buttressed by the support of the program, American Grown Flowers; a certification program, brand, and coalition of flower farmers--large and small--across the United States.  Through its iconic branding, advocacy, sponsorship, and wildly successful Field to Vase Dinner Tour, American Grown Flowers has been a giant in the domestic flower conversation.  

Kasey Cronquist, administrator of the Certified American Grown program and CEO/Ambassador of the California Cut Flower Commission, adds, “Origin matters, and we believe a week like this helps drive public awareness about hard-working American flower farmers that they can support all year long. Buying American Grown Flowers makes a difference.”

They aren't the only ones for the cause; one large Los Angeles-based wholesaler, Mayesh Wholesale Florist, is another American Flowers Week Sponsor this year, signaling a positive shift in the floral industry.  Their example is important, as the majority of wholesalers do not source domestically grown flowers (a move which then affects the flowers sourced by Grocers, E-Commerce, and Florists).  As one of our floral buyers, Mayesh has been a longtime supporter of U.S. Flower Farmers.  According to their CEO, Patrick Dahlson, "Mayesh is excited to promote American Flowers Week to highlight our American grown flowers and continue our support of the growing community.”

 What Can You Do To Support American Grown Flowers? 

If you are a florist, retailer, wholesaler, or floral designer this campaign is timed to coincide with America’s Independence Day on July 4th, allowing a perfect patriotic opportunity to promote American grown flowers.  See the wealth of promotional resources here: American Flowers Week Free Downloads.

 If you are a flower lover, check out the Why and How below:

We, and many other U.S. farmers, florists, and wholesalers, will be all over Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook with our American Grown blooms over the next week; follow along and add your own photos with the hashtag #americanflowersweek.  

Join the movement and Take Pride In Your Flowers! 

 

 

Field to Vase Dinner Tour Comes to Arcata!

Field to Vase Dinner Tour Comes to Arcata!

#american grown #CAGrown Amy Stewart Debra Prinzing F2V Dinner Tour field to vase Lady Aster Wil Franklin

The Field to Vase Dinner Tour is starting 2016 off right!  The widely-acclaimed dinner tour (the brainchild of American Grown) is kicking off this year's circuit right here in Arcata, in one of Sun Valley's very own tulip greenhouses--and you are invited to join us for this enchanted evening among the flowers.

Sounds magical, right?  Believe me, it is.  What I love about the concept is that it is not just a typical gourmet dinner in a pretty setting.  It is those things, but it is also an opportunity to support your immediate community, while also advocating for our country.

Yeah, I said it, and it's not hyperbole..... (Okay, maybe a little bit).


What do I mean by that? Well, did you know that 80% of flowers in the United States are imported from South America?  Unfortunately, this statistic is not well-known, which is why the American Grown brand (an offshoot of the California Cut Flower Commission) launched the Field to Vase Dinner Tour last year.  Its intention is to create awareness of the domestic flower movement.  Everything about the enchanted evening highlights the importance of Fresh, Local, and Sustainable--the flowers at the center of the table (and surrounding it), the wine in your glass, and the food on your plate.  Studies have shown that given the choice, consumers prefer American Grown flowers, echoing the preference of those who care where their beer was brewed and how their beef was raised, chickens were reared, and so on.

Last year, the dinner tour was a smashing success, nearly selling out in every location, and it looks like we are on track to do that here.  Here's what to expect:

A four-course meal of local food prepared by local businesses--think Eel River Grass fed Beef incorporated into gastronomical delights by Arcata's own Café Brio and Folie Douce; beer flowing from McKinleyville's Six Rivers Brewery; a selection of award-winning wine from StargazerBarn.com and Trinity River Vineyards (Willow Creek); and Drunken Botanist-inspired cocktails mixed from locally-made vodka.  Dinner will be served on a single long table, against a backdrop of millions of growing tulips.  This is the unique setting for an intimate tour of Humboldt County's epicurean and agricultural delights.

The tulips growing in the greenhouse won't be the only flowers, of course. There will be arrangements galore, all done by local business owner Faye Zierer Krause of Flora Organica Designs.  She'll be using Sun Valley flowers, greens, and botanicals to make table arrangements and dramatic installments, and there's even going to be a small demonstration for those who want to learn a few tricks.  

Also joining the evening for drinks, dinner, and conversation will be best-selling author and flower fanatic, Amy Stewart,  floral advocate and garden geek Debra Prinzing, and Winemaker Wil Franklin.  Of course, the evening would not be complete without our very own CEO Lane DeVries, whose passion for flowers, this community, and the Sun Valley team stands as testament to the American Grown feel of the entire event.

Tickets are $184 and include all the food and drink, a farm tour led by Lane DeVries, a flower demonstration by Faye, a swag bag of American Grown goodies, and of course an armful of local flowers.  There are only 150 tickets available for this once-in-a-lifetime event, so you better get while the gettin is good. 

So, what are you waiting for? Show Humboldt Field-to-Vase some love, buy your tickets here.  

Field to Table Flowers

Field to Table Flowers

Debra Prinzing fall arrangements field to fork Field to table field to vase local flowers

"Know your food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen"
                                                                                        -Joel Salatin

Do you know where your vegetables came from? Do you know who brewed your beer or made your wine? These days the answer is typically “yes.”  In a world where it often seems we are racing to mediocrity, I am thrilled to watch the “farm to table” and “field to fork” food movements continue to grow.

Field to Fork, with flowers!

According to the USDA, there are currently 8,268 Framers Markets in the United States, up from 3,706 in 2004. People are demanding access to fresh, seasonal and local foods; and retailers, farmers and all sorts of individuals are responding.

Right next to the produce section in the grocery store, and the most colorful booth at the farmers market is the flower section.  The same trend effecting fruits and vegetables is finally coming to flowers. It might surprise you to learn that 80% of the flowers sold in the United States are grown in far flung places like Columbia and Ecuador. The top three biggest sellers; roses, carnations and alstroemeria, are grown almost exclusively in South America.

Fall Flower Bouquets

This trend is changing as flower lovers “think outside the rose box” and explore the vast array of flowers grown domestically.  Just like with your food; once you start to look for flowers grown closer to home, you find a deeply rooted subculture of flower connoisseurs. These folks know where to find sunflowers from a farm stand on the edge of town or lilies from an artisanal greenhouse grower a few exits up the freeway. They know soil grown tulips are better than hydroponic, they know the heirloom varieties, as well as, the flashy new hybrids.

Classic iris and mason jar arrangement

Whether you live in the city or in the country, fresh flowers grown in America are becoming “a thing.” Author Debra Prinzing found that many people want to buy local flowers, but didn’t know where to find the blooms.  So she started a website called, Slow Flowers, which is basically a vast data base of small, regional and national flower farms. Just put in your zip code and learn about a flower farm near you. This is sort of like the secret hand shake to get in the local flower club.

Hold onto summer, with this early fall arrangement.

The movement has been dubbed “field to vase” and one of the most vibrant and beautiful blogs about finding local flowers goes by the same name.  CAUTION: this blog will make you want to quit your day job, and become a flower farmer!

Even though Sun Valley is a pretty big operation, we are proud to be a part of the field to table movement.

Guest Post from Debra Prinzing

Guest Post from Debra Prinzing

#American Grown Flowers Debra Prinzing

A few weeks ago, we were lucky to have author Debra Prinzing visit our Arcata farm. Debra is a strong voice for the American Grown flower movement and the founder of the Slow Flowers website. At SlowFlowers.com consumers and flower professionals can easily find growers, wholesalers and retailers of flowers grown right here at home. 
Enjoy her view of our farm 
~Lily

A (American Grown) Flower-filled Road Trip, Part Three

The hot, new “ice cream” tulip – spotted in a vase on Sun Valley CEO Lane DeVries’s desk!

I’ve been home for an entire month from an 11-day road trip that took me by plane to Southern California and back home again behind the wheel of a rental car.

I have many fond memories (as well as the photographs that I collected), while stopping along U.S. Hwy. 101 on my way north to Seattle. My first post featured Rose Story Farm and the Carpinteria flower scene; my 2nd post was about visiting author-friend Sharon Lovejoy and her husband Jeff Prostovitch in San Luis Obispo. [I'm going to save the photos and stories of my stop in Healdsburg-wine country for another day.]

So here is my third travelogue installation – all about The Sun Valley Group of Arcata, California.



Visiting Sun Valley and touring its vast flower-growing universe has been on my bucket list for quite a while. I’ve enjoyed collaborating with CEO Lane DeVries and his staff over the past few years to promote American-grown flowers and flower farms. In fact, Lane was a podcast guest last year – you can listen to that interview here. But I had never been able to see Sun Valley up close and personal!

Still on the road last month, I routed myself through Eureka, Calif., where I first visited another writer-friend, Amy Stewart of Flower Confidential and The Drunken Botanist fame (listen to our Podcast interview here).

The following morning I continued north to the next town on the map, Arcata – home to Sun Valley’s headquarters and one of the company’s farm locations. 

Sun Valley is a leading grower of cut bulb and field flowers in the United States. According to its web site, Sun Valley chose this area as an ideal environment for growing bulb flowers, due to its mild winters, cool summers, generous humidity and coastally moderated sunlight. The fields surrounding the greenhouses also provide excellent growing conditions for spring, summer and fall iris, and summer flowers including crocosmia, hypericum, monkshood and montbretia.

Bill Prescott, the farm’s social media/communications guru, met and escorted me on a whirlwind tour. It’s a good thing that I brought my rubber-soled Merrills, cuz the ground gets muddy and wet at a flower farm – in the shade houses and in the greenhouses. These farms practice water conservation, of course, but the puddles and wet spots still exist.

We started by walking through the tulip operations. By the way, click here to see the farm’s mind-boggling array of tulip varieties – you’ll not believe it!

Bill Prescott, my host and tour guide at Sun Valley Flower Farm in Arcata, Calif.

This is how the tulip-growing cycle begins. Bulbs planted in growing medium, shoulder to shoulder. Their tips emerge from the soil and then the crates are transferred to the greenhouse rows.

Just one of countless state-of-the-art greenhouses that produce beautiful tulips throughout the year.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of the beautiful variegated foliage on this tulip variety. It’s not always about the bloom, especially when you have leaves like this! 

Hello, tulip! 

The tulip harvest – this was the week before Easter, so imagine: nonstop harvesting! 

. . . and this is how the flowers come out of the ground – bulbs and all – to ensure the longest stems.

Some other popular crops include irises and lilies:

Gotta love these lemony-hued irises! 

And the classic purple ones, too! 

Lilies, just picked and ready for shipment to flower shops, supermarkets and designers. 

Having fun with the lilies – Bill is a bit of a ham!

Bill sent me home with a huge bucket filled with irises and tulips – gorgeous, fresh, just-picked and more than I could ever use in a single Easter arrangement. They survived the 10-hour drive to Seattle that day and still looked awesome when I gave an arrangement of those blooms to my mother on Easter. We both enjoyed those American-grown flowers for nearly two weeks – especially the lilies, with so many plump buds that kept opening up, a few new blooms every day.

Check out “Flower Talk: Grow with Lily” here - and subscribe to receive notices of the frequent installments.

Who is Debra Prinzing?

Who is Debra Prinzing?

#americangrown #CaFlowers Debra Prinzing Hydrangea Slow Flowers Sun Valley Floral Farm The 50 Mile Bouquet

"...sweet flowers are slow..."  ~William Shakespeare

"The day's prettiest blooms and just-unfurled leaves - gathered simply into a bunch and displayed in a jar of water - provide everything I need to start the day."  

                         ~Debra Prinzing, from Slow Flowers.

Have you been hearing the name “Debra Prinzing” a lot lately?  It seems whether online, at industry events or even reading the Costco Connection magazine, Debra’s name and her efforts to promote the Slow Flowers Movement keep popping up. 

I decided to track her down and learn a little bit more about this best-selling author and columnist. We have met before at industry events, and Sun Valley even hosted her at our booth at the International Floriculture Exposition this year, but I wanted to learn more.  

We spoke last week and I have distilled this article from our conversation.  When you ask Debra a question, don’t expect a one word…or one paragraph answer, it is clear that she sees the deep connections that run back and forth between the natural and man-made worlds. In talking with Debra, you find yourself joining in a discovery process, exploring where connections happen.  It brought to mind one of my favorite (and often misquoted) John Muir quotes:

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Debra Prinzing is an author and outdoor living expert based between Seattle and Los Angeles.  She has written seven books to date, and serves as a contributing editor to Better Homes and Garden magazine and her work appears regularly in the Home section of the LA Times.

Her newest book is called Slow Flowers, and this book is sort of the guide to the Slow Flowers Movement.  What’s Slow Flowers? Debra explained that she took a page from the Slow Foods culinary movement, and that Slow Flowers is short hand for “acting with intention, being responsive to the seasons and being conscious of your consumer decisions.”  She asks the question of herself, “What is in my garden, that I can put in a vase and reflect the season?”

Trying my own hand at the "Slow Flowers"aesthetic, #1 Sun Valley Tulips with ferns from my backyard.

This project was an off shoot of her book, The 50 Mile Bouquet, which focused on small regional farms, producing sustainably grow flowers. For Slow Flowers, she took on the rather ambitious goal of doing a bouquet every week for a year, using only locally sourced flowers.  She started November first in 2011 at her home in Seattle, and quickly realized that she was going to have to learn to design with evergreen branches, berries and other botanicals that had survived the first frost. 

She recognized that even though most of the items in her garden were past their prime, there were still local growers, and regional growers producing flowers in greenhouses year round.  So off she went, engaging the flower growing community in her area and this is where the Slow Flowers idea really solidified.  She saw that consumers don’t know where their flowers come from, and aren’t making a conscious decision to buy flowers grown in their town, their state or even their country.  She wasn’t comfortable buying roses shipped in from South America, when she could buy roses grown year round in Oregon at Peterkort Roses or buying tulips shipped in from Holland when she could buy tulips grown year round a few hours south at Sun Valley in Humboldt County, CA.  This was a revelation, that in every community in the United States there are growers, big and small, creating high quality flowers and unfortunately, only a few consumers know this.

#2 My backyard Montbretia, with Sun Valley Tulips.

Debra’s primary audience has been gardening enthusiasts, and as she spread the Slow Flowers message to people interested primarily in horticulture, she found a very responsive audience.  People interested in gardening, naturally had an affinity towards understanding the origin of the plants in their yard, as well as the flowers in their vase. Debra’s message has snowballed from there. If you haven’t checked out the book, you should, and if you keep reading you may get a shot at winning one right here at Flower Talk.

Debra puts on a very engaging presentation, make sure to see her in action if you get the chance.  Here she is making a beautiful monochromatic arrangement with Sun Valley tulips, Dusty Miller, and she was about to add our Ornithagalum.

As Debra has traveled the country promoting the book, the biggest problem she found was that the floral professionals she spoke with didn’t have a resource to help them find local, regional or U.S. grown flowers.  And Debra, being in her own words “The Queen of Multitasking,” set out to correct this problem and www.slowflowers.com was born; this website (still under development) will serve as a data base that will help connect consumers and floral professionals to U.S. grown flowers. 

 

The first thing you notice about her book is the beautiful photography, as a bit of a photographer, I was impressed to find out she did all her own photography, with just natural light.  I asked Debra my favorite question for anyone, no matter who they are, 

“What’s your favorite flower?”

True to form, Debra answered with the lovely story of how the gardenia is her favorite flower, since they were in her wedding bouquet, and how they were likely grown in a greenhouse near Portland where she tied the knot. 

Week 5 from Slow Flowers.  Sun Valley has a stunning crop of hydrangea harvesting right now.

I asked Debra to elaborate on her personal floral design style, what kind of design work does she do for her own kitchen table? She went back to her gardening roots, talking about the “abundant garden” and that in her circles, if you can see the dirt in a garden, you don’t have enough plants.  She described her arranging style as “controlled chaos,” with a reliance on voluptuous heirloom flower varieties and a strong nostalgic appeal.

So what’s next for Ms. Prinzing?  She will be devoting a lot of time into the Slow Flowers website, seeing that there is such a pressing need to support the buy U.S. Grown flower movement.  Creating this resource will be not only be a personal accomplishment, but it will be a tool to promote quality fresh cut flowers grown on U.S. soil by U.S. farmers.

 

CA Grown flowers are near and dear to Debra's heart!

  …and getting back to “The  Queen of Multitasking,” she will also be launching a podcast featuring interviews with thought leaders and opinion makers centered around the Slow Flower Movement.

On my desk, I have three copies of “Slow Flowers.”  Please comment on this post, and I will pick three random winners, cheers and good luck!