california cut flower commission Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Slow Flowers Podcast with Debra Prinzing

California Flower Farmers Share the Love With Slowflowers.com

Friday, February 14th, 2014

California Cut Flower Commission named Premiere Sponsor of Debra Prinzing’s SLOWFLOWERS.COM, a new online American flower directory

SEATTLE, WA (February 14, 2014) – This Valentine’s Day, California’s flower farmers are showing their love by making the largest contribution to date to the Slowflowers.com campaign on Indiegogo. The California Cut Flower Commission (CCFC), representing all of California’s flower farmers, became Slowflowers.com’s Premiere Sponsor with their $1,500 contribution. Designed to connect flower lovers to local floral retailers that support and sell locally-grown flowers, the campaign has surpassed its goal to raise $12,000 and now has more than 200 “funders” contributing in excess of $17,000 to the cause.

“I’m very encouraged to have such support from the flower farmers of California,” shared Debra Prinzing, the Seattle-based author of Slow Flowers (St. Lynn’s Press, 2013) and leading advocate of American flower farming. “With imports representing over 80 percent of flowers sold in this country, the mission of Slowflowers.com is to help people who care about the source of their flowers easily find and identify ways to buy American-grown flowers.”

Scheduled to launch this spring, Slowflowers.com will feature easy-to-use search tools to find floral vendors in several categories, including florists, studio designers, wedding/event designers, supermarket floral departments, CSA subscriptions and farmer-direct. Members of Slowflowers.com pledge to supply their communities with local, regional and American-grown flowers.

“Debra is making a difference and creating a conversation that we support,” explained CCFC CEO/Ambassador Kasey Cronquist. “Currently, there is no other resource like Slowflowers.com that makes it easy for flower lovers to be assured of the origins of their flowers and bouquets.”

Prinzing created Slowflowers.com to fill an unmet need that she had as a consumer and lover of flowers. “Slowflowers.com is a simple solution to a problem I have continued to face over the past several years,” she said. “While writing and speaking to groups about my passion for American flower farmers and their flowers, I am continually asked how the average person is supposed to know where to buy American Grown flowers and how they can be assured that what they are getting is locally grown. I created Slowflowers.com to be my answer, a free, public and user-friendly resource that can help others, too.”

Prinzing’s grassroots Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign continues, with five days remaining for additional support for her efforts. Visit the Indiegogo Slowflowers.com campaign to watch a video and for more information about the project.

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About the California Cut Flower Commission

The California Cut Flower Commission (CCFC) was created by the state legislature in 1990 with the mission to promote California cut flowers and foliage. The CCFC is overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and is funded by grower assessments. The Commission represents the state’s 250 growers who collectively produce more than 75 percent of the cut flowers grown in the U.S., generating $278 million in sales (2011). For more information about California cut flowers, visit www.ccfc.org or on Facebook/CaliforniaGrownFlowers.

About Debra Prinzing

Founder Debra Prinzing is a Seattle-based outdoor-living expert who writes and lectures on gardens and home design. She is the leading advocate for a sustainable and local approach to floral design and is credited with creating the term “Slow Flowers.”

In 2014 Debra launched www.slowflowers.com, a free online guide to florists, shops and studios who design with American-grown flowers. She is the author of seven books including Slow Flowers and The 50 Mile Bouquet (both by St. Lynn’s Press) and is the producer/host of the weekly “Slow Flowers Podcast with Debra Prinzing,” found on Itunes and www.debraprinzing.com

Posted in American Grown, Blog Posts, Creativity, floral design, General, Slowflowers.com the Directory of American Flowers | No Comments »

SLOW FLOWERS Podcast: American Flower Farming Update with Lane DeVries (Episode 112)

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013

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Meet Lane DeVries, CEO of The Sun Valley Group, America’s largest cut flower farm, and Chairman of the California Cut Flower Commission.

American Flower Farming Update with Lane DeVries, Chairman of the California Cut Flower Commission (Episode 112)

Today’s interview is with Lane DeVries, a fourth generation flower farmer who grew up in his family’s business in Holland until he came to the US in 1983, at the age of 23.

I’ve gotten to know Lane in the past few years while partnering with him on projects for the California Cut Flower Commission, the advocacy agency that promotes that state’s 225 flower farms. His farm, The Sun Valley Group, based in Arcata and Oxnard, is the state’s largest (in fact, it’s the country’s largest).

Lane and I recently met in Portland, at the Field-to-Vase Dinner, a very special gathering of flower farmers, florists, flower retailers and wholesalers and the media, held on October 8th.

I co-hosted the event with the CCFC and our goal was to convene floral industry leaders to discuss new initiatives in the American Grown Flower Movement.

The underlying message: partnering with your would-be competitors is a good idea when it comes to changing how consumers connect with domestic flowers.

Lane takes time to meet flower consumers as often as possible. He recently made an appearance at New Seasons Market in Portland, Oregon.

My podcast interview with Lane took place via Skype, a few days after that dinner. Please enjoy our conversation and meet a man who lives and breathes cut flowers. I love that Lane, in spite of all of his professional success, continues to eagerly seek out the next new thing. He sees old flowers in a new way and improves on customer favorites with new hybridizing methods.

He is a visionary and I credit Lane with his amazing leadership moving his own flower farming community into an important dialogue about American grown flowers.

The next time you see a blue-and-yellow license plate-style CA-Grown label on a bouquet of flowers at the supermarket, you’ll have people like Lane DeVries to thank.

Highlights of Lane’s long career in the U.S. cut flower industry are chronicled in Amy Stewart’s 2007 book, Flower Confidential: The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful – and you can read an excerpt of that story here, courtesy of Amy and Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (c) 2007 and 2008. All Rights Reserved.

(Photos (c) Linda Blue, courtesy of the California Cut Flower Commission)

Posted in American Grown, Blog Posts, floral design, General, Plants, SLOW FLOWERS Podcast | No Comments »

Local Flower Growers Say: “Pick Me” – The Field-to-Vase Dinner Recap

Sunday, October 20th, 2013

Note: This article originally appeared in the online edition of The Oregonian, October 17, 2013. Click here to read the online version where you can comment and Tweet the link. I want to acknowledge up front that the Field-to-Vase Dinner concept and format began in June 2013 at the Monterey Bay Greenhouse Growers Dinner, created by my friend Kathleen Williford of the California Cut Flower Commission. The Portland event earlier this month was based on her model and she was there in spirit! Follow Kathleen at @kathinated.

The table was set with American-Grown flowers, the vases containing stems from Oregon, Washington & California cut flower farms.

A shared meal, local food, local flowers and an important dialogue about American Grown Flowers.

A coalition of California cut flower farmers recently arrived in Portland, extending their hands of friendship to the local floral industry. They weren’t exactly holding olive branches, although those botanical elements would likely be found in a vase of California-grown blooms.

No, the reason was self-preservation, not just for the seven California farms in attendance, but for their counterparts in Oregon and Washington.

Their Field-to-Vase gathering took place on Oct. 8 at Leach Botanical Garden in southeast Portland, where a local caterer served a decidedly local menu to about 40 flower farmers, floral retailers and wholesalers, and designers.

Part flower summit, part floral showcase, the event brought together people who might otherwise view themselves as competitors.

Collaboration is the best way to save American cut flower farms, maintained Lane DeVries of The Sun Valley Group based in Arcata, Calif., the largest cut flower farm in the United States.

Meet Lane DeVries, CEO of The Sun Valley Group, America’s largest cut flower farm, and Chairman of the California Cut Flower Commission.

DeVries is also the current chairman of the California Cut Flower Commission, the organization that hosted the event.

U.S. flower farms once produced nearly 65 percent of the nation’s cut flowers, but over the past two decades, imports from South America have caused that figure to shrink to around 20 percent, DeVries said.

“We’ve actually seen cut flower operations go out of business in a lot of states,” he said. “The reason we are reaching out to (Northwest) flower farms is to work together as an American-grown domestic flower movement.”

Flower farming cooperatives are well established in the Northwest, dating to 1942 when the Oregon Flower Growers Association was founded. The wholesale farmer-to-florist market operates from a warehouse in Portland’s Swan Island industrial district with about 30 vendors.

In 2011, inspired by Portland’s home-grown floral business model, the Seattle Wholesale Growers Market opened on behalf of 16 Oregon and Washington flower farms.

Diane Szukovathy and Molly Sadowsky of the Seattle Wholesale Growers Market

According to Diane Szukovathy, a Mount Vernon, Wash.-based farmer and the Seattle growers’ market president, the emerging market’s locally grown efforts gained momentum last fall when it received $138,000 in USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant funds, administered in partnership with the Washington State Department of Agriculture and the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

“The grant money helps us open more distribution channels for local farms to sell their flowers,” Szukovathy said. “Together, we can all shed light on major shifts in how people buy flowers.”

A wide variety of Northwest-grown flowers and foliage is found in the floral departments of New Seasons Markets.

These Farm Bouquets represent the participating flower farms from California, Oregon and Washington – a veritable bounty of botanical excess!

Katie McConahay, the chain store’s floral merchandiser, said she’s starting to expand her definition of what is local and seasonal to include California-grown flowers, especially during the winter months when production on Northwest flower farms is lower.

“When I buy for our stores, my focus is definitely on Oregon- and Washington-grown flowers,” McConahay said. “For many of our customers, California was not considered ‘local,’ but in order to sustain an American-grown floral product consistently throughout the year, California is a good year-round option for us.”

She hopes better product information and education at stores will help consumers see that domestic flowers, even from one state away, offer an alternative to imported ones.

The gathering was held in a quintessential Northwest venue: Portland’s Leach Botanic Garden.

Seasonal, local and sustainable flowers – beautiful and of the moment.

For Christopher Papst, a manager-buyer with Greenleaf Wholesale Florist, based at the Portland Flower Market, bringing California flowers to the Northwest is a logical next step after sourcing locally, especially in the off-season when production is limited on Oregon and Washington flower farms.

“For one thing, the transportation costs are better,” he explained. “Ninety percent of imported flowers come through Miami, followed by three to four days on a truck. Even under ideal conditions, it’s still four days. For the freshness factor alone, I want California flowers.”

Increasingly, florists are coming to Greenleaf with specific requests for local and seasonal flowers, Papst added. “I just had a florist asking where our flowers originated from because she had a customer insisting on local flowers.”

Elizabeth Artis of Espe Floral + Foliage, a Portland designer with a commitment to local and seasonal flowers.

Elizabeth Artis, owner of Espe Floral + Foliage, a flower shop inside the Food Front Cooperative Grocery in northwest Portland, was encouraged by the connections she made at the gathering. Her studio’s tagline is “local, seasonal, sustainable, lovely,” a sentiment that resonates with her eco-minded customers.

“I’ve always considered California ‘local,’ and now I have a new vocabulary to communicate that idea to my clients,” she said. “As winter is coming, having flowers from California – just across the border – will give me more options.”

Local flower farmers

If you prefer domestic flowers:

Support local flower farmers. Meet them at farmers markets and search web resources like the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.
Request that your supermarket buys from local flower growers. Ask your florist to do the same.
Ask: Where were these flowers grown? Who grew them? What growing practices were used?
Appreciate the seasons in your own garden and vase.
The Portland Flower Market and the Oregon Flower Growers Association are open to wholesale customers only.
Some West Coast wholesale markets, including the San Francisco Flower Mart, the Los Angeles Flower District and the Seattle Wholesale Growers Market, offer limited public hours.

Debra Prinzing is a Seattle-based design writer, author of “The 50 Mile Bouquet” and “Slow Flowers: Four Seasons of Locally Grown Bouquets from the Garden, Meadow and Farm” and creator of Slow Flowers, a new, free online directory to help consumers find florists who use American-grown flowers.

SLOW FLOWERS Podcast: American Grown flowers from a California Point of View (Episode 107)

Wednesday, September 18th, 2013

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SLOW FLOWERS Podcast: American Grown flowers from a California Point of View (Episode 107)

Kasey Cronquist and I toured a Carpinteria, California, greenhouse together in April 2013.

Here’s Kasey discussing the importance of supporting America’s cut flower industry – at the Monterey Bay Greenhouse Growers – Open House this past June.

I’m so pleased to introduce you to Kasey Cronquist. I truly value Kasey’s leadership, counsel and friendship. He is the CEO and Ambassador of the California Cut Flower Commission, the largest organization of its kind promoting American Flowers.

And he is a kindred spirit who is supremely passionate about saving our homegrown flower farms and preserving the agricultural way of life as a part of our country’s vibrant landscape.

Kasey and I first met by phone in 2010 when I called him for a quote to include in an article for the Los Angeles Times. I was writing about organic flowers for Valentine’s Day and Kasey sure set me straight, changing the focus from organic (and possibly imported flowers) to a locally grown priority. He pointed out: “We believe California flowers are the green alternative, whether we stick a label on them or not.”

It was the beginning of my own evolution as an American flower advocate.

Since joining the CCFC in 2007, Kasey has spearheaded an aggressive public affairs program targeting lawmakers at the state and federal level. He is a dynamic spokesman for flower farming both among his home state constituents and nationally and is a master at social media communications. Kasey understands the power of blogging, tweeting, posting and using visual social media platforms and he has brought flower farming into the modern era in that regard. More than all his talents, though, I’ve mostly been impressed with Kasey’s community-building gestures to bring together small and large flower growers across America with a united voice.

In March 2012, I wrote a post called “Meet the Ambassador of Local Flowers,” profiling Kasey for The 50 Mile Bouquet blog. You can read this extensive interview here in which Kasey shares many inspiring ideas about the American cut flower industry.

One quote of his particularly impressed me:

“We can’t move that ball, but we can create market demand for local flowers. We leaned into the CA Grown campaign and now California’s flower farmers are the single largest licensee of that agricultural program — out of all the other commodity crops in the state. The future is in educating people to buy local, to buy U.S.-grown flowers.”

Read Kasey Cronquist’s Field Position blog at Americasflowers.org

FB page: https://www.facebook.com/CaliforniaGrownFlowers

Twitter: @kaseycronquist and @cagrown

Posted in American Grown, Blog Posts, Creativity, General, Podcast Episodes, SLOW FLOWERS Podcast | 2 Comments »

SLOW FLOWERS Podcast: Farm-to-Table; Field-to-Vase Panel Discussion (Episode 101)

Wednesday, July 31st, 2013

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From left: Kathy Brenzel, Kasey Cronquist, Debra Prinzing & Christina Stembel

Welcome to Episode 101 of the new SLOW FLOWERS Podcast. The audio featured here is from the July 19, 2013 panel discussion at the California Association of Flower Growers & Shippers (NORCAL) conference, moderated by Kasey Cronquist, CEO/Ambassador of the California Cut Flower Commission. Panelists included Kathy Brenzel, garden editor at Sunset Magazine; Christina Stembel, founder of Farmgirl Flowers, and me. The audience Q&A that followed our presentation was difficult to hear due to the limited number of microphones in the room, so here is the edited transcript of those questions and our panel’s answers.

Q&A following Field-to-Vase Panel discussion:

Kasey Cronquist : I hope you all have a sense of how special this group is in context of this industry. This is certainly a trend, or as Debra says, “a cultural shift,” that we’re excited about. It’s a special time because you’re not necessarily going to hear a program like this or have the chance to hear from speakers like this subject in our industry or at other floral trade conventions. I get to sit back and enjoy listening to people talk about locally-grown.

I think you have a sense here that there’s a renaissance in our midst in terms of bringing flower farmers back and of course this is a good thing for California. Where people say “California’s Flowers are America’s Flowers,” it’s because we want to back up that local claim for those florists when the season is over and they can’t source from those local farmers, California’s growing flowers all year long providing another source of American grown. I could spend each day energized by the things I’ve heard here. I want to open it up to questions:

Q: Regarding the “Farm-to-Consumer” idea or for that matter, “Farm-to-Florist.” How should our wholesalers in the room feel about this particular approach? Because I can certainly see where you’re going. We are flower growers who are strictly wholesale and we want to keep it that way. I have 185 customers and I don’t want 2,000 so how does that work for the wholesaler?

A (Debra): I totally agree that we’ve got to work on the wholesale level of this message. Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think wholesalers should be afraid of this concept at all. They’re the ones who are on the front lines, talking to florists. And even if you don’t care about American grown, you should care about making money and branding your flowers as American grown or California grown in order to answer the question that the florists are going to be asking anyway. If they’re not asking it now, they’re very soon going to be asking it because consumers are asking them. I think from a farmer point of view if you can provide content, photography, messaging or signage that the wholesalers can use it’s going to do the work for them. I know there’s a fear that somehow the florists are going to cut around the wholesaler and come to you direct, but like you just said, you don’t want to deal with all those florists. So if you can partner with the wholesaler and make everybody succeed, I think it could be a win-win.

A (Christina): Pictures. Pictures of the farmers with content about where (the flowers) come from. People want to see a human face, so give them information about “this is the farmer who grew this.” It’s something that the wholesalers can then give to their customers. At Farmgirl Flowers, we use a wholesaler as well for some of our product and they don’t want to be photographed because they don’t want 2,000 people coming to them either. But it’s about educating the florist. And I really do see this movement shifting quickly and I think that the florists will be asking you soon, just based on the volume of questions we get. We’ve had to hire staff people just to answer the email and the phone calls that we get from florists. It’s not directly our bread and butter but we feel like it’s our mission to educate as well.

Kasey Cronquist: I want to add to that. We’ve felt that pressure on the requests for content. For wholesalers, as much as for the flowers, it’s a content marketing-supply opportunity for them. They have the relationships with the farms and they can package that relationship up and provide it to the florists who are wanting that content to share, either on Facebook or Pinterest so (the florist) has access to the farmer, not directly, but through the wholesaler’s relationship with the farmer.

A field-to-vase celebration

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

Welcome to the Slow Flowers Dinner

Imagine a table set for 40 . . . inside a flower-filled greenhouse. Vintage vases overflowing with just-picked blooms adorn the table and a locally-grown menu is served.

Last month I joined with the California Cut Flower Commission to host a “Slow Flowers” dinner as part of the 2013 Monterey Bay Greenhouse Growers Open House & Tour.

The table was set for local food and local flowers.

We called it “Farm-to-Table; Field-to-Vase” and held the dinner in the gerbera-filled greenhouse at Kitayama Bros. Farms in Watsonville, California. The event was a gathering of like-minded persons. Each of us — farmer, florist, media, community advocate — cares deeply about the role of American flowers in the greater agricultural environment. And everyone in attendance contributed an important voice around the table, a table with locally-grown food and locally-harvested flowers.

Eight Days: From Santa Barbara to San Diego . . . and points in between

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

Here’s what I’ve been up to lately. I traveled to Southern California all of last week – from Saturday, April 13th through Saturday, April 20th. I experienced many great highlights; too many to mention. Here are some of them:

Tours focused on the entire process – from planting and growing to harvesting and grading. Mums, also known as pom poms, are one of the last commercially grown flowers still grown in soil.

Fun to wear the VIP badge!

Chalkboard welcome at Padaro Floral in Carpinteria, California

DAY One: Carpinteria Greenhouse & Nursery Tour, sponsored by the California Cut Flower Commission. I was hosted by Harry and Michele Van Wingerden, the great folks at Myriad Roses and Padaro Floral Design for a day of book-signings and eco-floral demonstrations. A special thanks to the Van Wingerden family, CCFC CEO/Ambassador Kasey Cronquist and Event Planner Anna Kalins for making it a successful and enjoyable day!

Erin Taylor, designer of flowers, interiors, landscapes and more~ The talented owner of botanik in Summerland, California hosted my lovely book event.

DAY Two: Book signing and flower demos at botanik in Summerland. Loved spending time with very talented owner Erin Taylor and her team. After several hours at botanik, I met up with Cristi Walden and we headed to Sea Crest Nursery, her father Jack Stevenson’s palm and cycad collection. It was so exciting to return to this beautiful place and hear how my talented friend is learning the business of growing and selling amazing landscaping plants (oh, and propagating, too!).