It's a Farm! (Part 1)



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.

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-Lily


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