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Tulip 'Renown Unique' from Unicorn Blooms. Photo: Louise Warner, Unicorn Blooms
This year’s Seed Buyer’s Guide assembled by Lily Jackson, features an expanded roster of businesses that specialize in cut flower growing materials: seeds, bulbs, tubers, corms and rhizomes that yield plants whose stems can be removed and sold, often for decorative use.
Many of these plants will be familiar to home gardeners, but they are also an increasingly attractive business opportunity for farmers. Growing cut flowers can diversify farm income, attract pollinators, enhance property appeal and reach a market hungry for an alternative to blooms jetted in from abroad or grown with energy and chemically intensive methods.
Despite the challenging temperatures and short growing seasons that plague parts of this country, Canada’s cut-flower industry is evolving to make that business opportunity more accessible to small-scale growers.
Louise Warner is owner of Unicorn Blooms, (a Peterborough-based, wholesale supplier of cut-flower materials that you can find listed in this issue), board member of Canadian Flowers Week and owner of flower-growing company Wild Imagination. She has seen significant shifts in the Canadian cut-flower community that make it more feasible for new and seasoned farmers to make money. For instance, the combination of more environmentally-conscious consumers, low-cost Internet marketing and e-commerce solutions and florist preference for a “wilder, romantic, garden-style look” have created more opportunities than ever for small-scale flower growers to find a market for their product.
In addition to these demand-based shifts, Canadian farmers also benefit from supply-side growth thanks to the business savvy of suppliers like Louise. In her case, she was frustrated that the world’s largest producers of specialty flower varieties would often only ship to the largest greenhouse companies. She established Unicorn Blooms to help smaller-scale growers access the lucrative product.
“When I started the company, at the time with Heather Henson of Boreal Blooms in Cold Lake, Alberta, we knew many flower growers across the country were looking for these specialty varieties and faced the same problem that we did; (We were) too small to independently import these items that we felt were necessary to set our businesses apart. We really needed specialty product to convince customers that local flowers were worth seeking out and paying a premium for,” she says.
Now, Unicorn Blooms provides a Canadian source for prized Italian ranunculus bulbs, as well as various tulips, dahlias and narcissus that Louise imports. It means that Canadian producers can approach florists, designers and flower lovers with high-quality, specialty blooms grown locally. Although Canada retains a relatively weak flower-buying culture, Louise notes that “farmers and florists are helping to change this by showing people flowers and foliage they have never seen before.”
So how should farmers get started? Louise focuses on filling wholesale orders with her business, but she encourages prospective growers to start slowly.
“Be realistic about what you can handle growing well and who you can sell it to. Focus on a few crops that are high value . . . then assess what needs to be added or dropped from your mix.”
If 2020 is the right year to test growing cut flowers on your farm, you’ll find plenty of good places to start in the Seed Buyer’s Guide.
— Lily Jackson