Buh-Bye...
Tulips- I know, I know you love them and they are the best early spring time flower, they make amazing Mother’s Day bouquets, have a light scent, and they make a fun sound when holding them. While this is enough for some to continue growing tulips after some “ah ha” moments and research it would be irresponsible to continue growing this spring time classic. Encouraged by our friend at Blossom and Branch Farm in Colorado we dug deep, asked around and got some not so pretty answers. Every single bulb is treated with fungicides before they can be imported into the USA, unless you purchase from the US (which is less than 1%) then your bulbs have toxic chemicals and residue that is harmful for you to touch, breathe and can kill your soils! I have verified with three well known US distributors and sadly they confirmed this. It is due to the import laws on bulbs. To go down a rabbit hole and read more, click here! Briana also links this article in one of her YouTube videos and talks a little bit about it. It is my opinion that ANY grower who claims “organically grown”, “regeneratively grown”, “certified organic”, “certified naturally grown”, or “grown without chemicals” should also be questioning the morality of growing this particular flower. It is our view that this particular flower’s origin needs more light and the “ugly” side needs to be talked about.
Additionally, in our season and climate I cannot sell enough of our tulips to make it make financial sense. Flower farmers purchase bulbs every single year and grow them as an annual-we do not perennialize this flower like most gardeners or homeowners do. This allows for the best possible bloom and longer stem length for those market bouquets, so we have to invest in bulbs each year, plant them each year, and pull all the bulbs from the ground each year. This year we lost thousands of dollars in tulips, hyacinths and daffodils because they either died in my cooler from lack of enough purchasers or our small heat wave in April sped up their opening time and even with harvesting three times a day I missed a lot! I also didn’t pay for my time at all! Literally hours of unpaid work! I’ll miss this flower tremendously but I’ll leave all that harvesting and back breaking labor to the smaller scale farmers and enjoy a bouquet from them once in awhile or just scroll on IG and marvel at all the gorgeous photos posted from regions in the world that are much better suited to grow this diva .
Narcissus-same as above. Daffodils are historically the earliest bloomer on our farm and while they bring some color into our otherwise brown field they are covered in fungicidal residue. It’s not worth it for my heatlh history and for the possibility of jepordizing our certification with Certified Naturally Grown. We are your only farm in the state of Nevada to be able to say this and we want to stand true behind our word!
Calendula-it’s sticky! I swear every grain of sand, every thrip, every nat sticks to the petals and stems of calendula and the stems are far too short to make them worth it for me. While I know there are health properties to this beauty, I will leave this one to the larger farmers that have much more space than I do.
Dara-ugh this one! My son has lovingly referred to it as “the firework” flower. Appropriately named as it comes on just around the 4th of July for us in zone 7b/8a. What’s killer about this one is that is it highly invasive. The last time I sowed this seed intentionally was in 2019 and haven’t since. Each year it has come up in different areas and some have completely taken over shading out other slower growing flowers. I have actively pulled as many of these as I can keep up with because each one of those florets produces a seed. One flower can produce thousands of tiny seeds which is why they spread so quickly. Additionally they are in the carrot family and are challenging to pull once large enough. No more to this interesting one.
Annual Scabiosa-I have a love/hate relationship with these. They are beautiful and come in some really fun colors. They truly are a tangled mess to harvest and their stems are sooooooo fragile and thin. They bend super easily and once bent they become unusable. I will be sticking to the sturdier perennial sister and only two colors from this season on.
What will you be saying goodbye to in 2024?