As everyone’s preparing for the festivities of the holidays, I am preparing for the new year of growing.
I am researching the best prices, highest quality, and newest breeds of seeds, bulbs and bare roots. I’ve been considering what I know about what more seasoned flower growers are growing as well. I spend hours going through catalogs and comparing options.
I also do a ton of reading: personal, farming and floral design. I recently came across this book:
Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded … by Dan Ariely which discusses his research of behavioral economics: judgment and decision-making and their interplay with our own success. He discusses how we make decisions based on comparison, and he advocates considering context to understand value, and what we want.
This book really tapped into my current consciousness, allowing me to understand my own decision-making, and how to make it more efficient…especially during a time of year when I feel particularly inefficient.
At this moment I am compiling seed orders and plug orders. This process is pretty standard but always has a bit of tweaking. I am using a few new suppliers. In big wholesale catalogs there are not glossy colorful images to seduce me:
just line items and prices because there are too many items for images and it keeps cost down. Professional growers know what the product looks like or we go to the breeders webpage to learn more about the hybrid.
It is much less seductive and romantic then you think. This is still flower farming , but this part is very rational and practical. With experience, a grower’s mind closes up the gap between all of this information and the glorious end product.
As a small market farm (1.5 acres) I only have so much space so I have to be selective about the varieties I grow. I don’t want to have too much of an item that will go to waste. New hybridization and specialized breeding has introduced very slight nuances between types and it can be hard to decide which sunflower will be best for a spring seeding. There are 4 varieties that all fit my needs of being daylight neutral and cold-tolerant for quicker harvest.
The next time you purchase a bouquet, maybe you’ll consider some of the work I’m describing in this post. Not to mention the years of breeding even I did not see that occurred from the suppliers I purchase from, all to bring you the best flowers for cut flower production. There might be 1oo varieties of that one flower. But the ones you have are grown with the highest quality, and efficiency in mind not just aesthetics. Its pretty amazing the scientific world of growing and breeding behind your bouquet. When you spend a $1 on a flower, it might have thousands of hours and dollars into developing that one hybrid.
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