Many of you may remember the years that Janna was here working with us on the farm--and of the beautiful bouquets she made and delivered around town. She brought a unique beauty to our market and to Chelan that touched many people.
Sadly for us, Janna has moved back east to pursue her flower farming dreams there. Happily for us, however, we've teamed up with another local, Jodi Reid, to keep the flowers growing and the bouquets in the market.
Jodi is now harvesting three times a week and arranging fresh bouquets for the market on Tuesdays and Saturdays. She's also taking fresh flowers to the Farmers Market in Leavenwoth on Thursday afternoon.
I wanted to reprint here a piece Janna wrote in our 2007 newsletter about growing flowers. What makes local flowers unique? If you already think hard about what food you eat and where it comes from, you may find yourself asking the same questions about other things in your life...
Living Stems: A story behind every bouquet
by Janna Berger
The flower fields are finally in full bloom. Those tight buds that seemed like they would forever hold their colors secret have now burst forth at full speed. Now – in addition to satisfying your palate with fresh, local, organic, sustainably produced vegetables and cheese – you can satisfy your eyes with flowers of the same caliber.
Janna Berger and Arthur Schwab at the farm in 2007In searching out a name for my new cut flower business, I wanted to find words to define what my product really is. While the names “Future Fruit”, “Sunshine Angiosperm,” and “Bee Candy Flowers” were somewhat accurate... none of them seemed right. So I began looking for a name that would describe what the flowers meant to me and what I wanted them to stand for. “Local Answer Flowers,” “Peaceful Revolution Blooms,” and “Harmony Flowers,” all felt good, but a little cheesy and hard to relate to.
Living Stems feels like it is both an accurate description of what flowers are and what they mean to me. My favorite aspect of the name “Living Stems” is the open endedness that you can sense by hearing “Stems” as a verb. Sustainable agriculture rests on the idea that the more living organisms you have in your soil, and the more different kinds of living plants you have in your fields, the healthier your plants will be. Healthy living things stem more healthy living things.
Our ability to preserve flowers in an intermediate state between life and death, simply by putting them in clean water, is fascinating. It allows us to bring nature inside. In this day and age we bring so many things inside our homes: beautiful things, useful things, gift things, nostalgic things, containers to hold our things, and on and on. The manufacture of all of these things that we buy, from books to blenders to photographs, is generally a mystery to us. We don’t know what processes, materials, or people are behind our things. Cut flowers are something that we can bring inside from outside with very few mysterious steps in between.
I feel obligated here to tell you all a bit about the conventionally grown cut flowers that you can buy at the store or order from a florist. Those flowers are generally grown under very hazardous conditions by workers who are paid miniscule wages. Pesticide regulations on growing flowers in Latin American countries (where 75% of our cut flowers come from) are generally not as stringent as those in the U.S. According to Britt Baily, a senior associate for the Center for Ethics and Toxics in Gualala, CA, "Workers who transplant, prune, cut, or pack flowers without protective clothing may absorb chemicals through their skin. Many of the pesticides used can cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive illnesses, as well as neurological disease in humans." (Specialty Cut Flowers, Armitage)
Claudette Mo, a research professor at the Regional Wildlife Management Program of the National University of Costa Rica, stated that "over 50 percent of respondents (to their survey) who worked in fern/flower farms reported at least one of the symptoms of pesticide exposure — headache, dizziness, nausea, diarrhea, skin eruptions, fainting and so on." Mo also traced the widespread diffusion of the substance, noting "discharge of pesticide residues into waterways, washing of pesticide equipment in waterways, runoff reaching important aquifer recharge areas, and some anecdotes of bird die-offs after application of granular pesticides." (http://www.consciouschoice.com/2003/cc1602/organicflowers1602.html)
There are also plenty of concerns to be raised about flowers grown in the U.S. as well. “California-grown roses were found to have 1,000 times the level of cancer-causing pesticides as comparable food products, according to a 1997 Environmental Working Group study.” (http://www.ewg.org/)
How can we find beauty in a bouquet with such a story behind it? There is nothing more hypocritical than an elegant flower with a sordid past. Living Stems’ bouquets are accountable and natural. I hope that they will help healthy living to stem in your households.
Monday, August 9, 2010 at 11:20AM 
