If you go to the store to buy a bouquet of flowers in Arizona, you’re probably buying daisies or roses from out of the country. But a local group of flower growers is working to change that.
Full conversation
[AUDIO OF SELLER]: This is some beautiful Xeranthemum, which is like a silvery white flower. It's fresh right now, but dries and looks almost exactly the same. There's some really nice apple mint which has a great smell.
LAUREN GILGER: Oh my goodness. Wow. It does smell like apple and mint. Wow.
We are in the back of Baseline flowers. The last standing flower shop in South Phoenix is once miles long Japanese flower gardens and there are about a half dozen local flower sellers mulling about and tables overflowing with color, pink, purple, yellow, blue and a lot of green.
SHANTI RADE: These are called Queeny lime red. And we were trying to decide what color we think those are because they're like a weird mix of like three or four different colors and muddy in a pretty way and some beautiful scabiosa.
GILGER: That's Shanti Rade, the owner of Whips Stone Farms near Prescott where for more than 20 years they've been growing 20 acres of vegetables and flowers of every shade and color.
And she's here today as part of the Arizona Flower Collective, a coalition of growers from about a dozen farms around the state who sell their Arizona flowers wholesale to florists here. They take orders online and every Wednesday, April through October, they meet here with piles of stems in tow so florists can pick them up.
RADE: Setting up this collective really allowed a lot of other growers to be involved. And you don't feel like you're like this one person out there doing it yourself. And it made it so much easier on the buyers to, to go to one, like one website, everything that's available. Get to make all of your orders like in one, you know, one selection and then come pick it up in one place.
So it's, it's good for the growers like we're getting more business out of it. And it's really great for the buyers who want to support sustainable agriculture, local flowers.
GILGER: They come from all over the state even here in the Valley where they say yes, you can grow lush flowers even in the summer heat. Are people continually shocked that you can grow these in the desert here?
ANN KERR: Absolutely. And I try to be really seasonal.
GILGER: Ann Kerr grows Amaranthus, lemon, basil and more right at the base of South Mountain on land her family has owned since she was a kid.
KERR: I do have hoop houses and things that I can grow in but I try to grow mostly field stuff and, you know, people worry about the water but I irrigate, I irrigate about once a week in the summer and that's it. That's all they get.
GILGER: That’s it?
KERR: Yeah.
GILGER: The collective is a way for local farm owners to boost their sales and be able to keep those family farms. For Prescott grower Terry Schuett, learning how to grow flowers in Arizona was the answer to a problem she encountered in her former career as a retail florist. Why couldn't she get local flowers to sell?
TERRI SCHUETT: So we could get some. Shanti was already selling locally. And then we didn't have very many other growers in the area in the late 1980s and early-90s, the federal government started implementing trade agreements, subsidies to foreign countries to be able to bring in more flowers. They were able to provide them at a lower rate. Of course, at lower cost and American grown farmers were not able to keep up with those prices. So most of those farms went out of business. We're trying to bring that back.
GILGER: I mean, there are a lot of layers to that, right? Because I mean, like if you're just talking about sustainability and emissions, like I had no idea that like if I'm at the grocery store, the flowers that I'm buying have been like what shipped in from where …
SCHUETT: Ecuador, Colombia, Holland.
GILGER: How do they stay fresh that long? That's wild.
SCHUETT: They do have preservatives. They are packaged in a certain way. A lot of things are boxed. So say hydrangeas, for example, will come when I would order them into the shop, they have kind of a cotton on the bottom that's soaked in water and then it's wrapped in plastic and rubber band for every single stem of hydrangea.
And then you have to rehydrate and sometimes that takes two or three times, a complete dunk of the entire head of the hydrangea. You have to cut the bottom. Put them in ice cold water. There are many ways to rehydrate and then they don't last nearly as long. So the difference is you get them here, they're cut the morning before.
GILGER: So am I assuming that flowers actually last a lot longer than I think they do?
SCHUETT: Absolutely. Yes.
GILGER: It's good to know. It's good to know. So I know you grew up in Prescott, you come down here for this. I wonder sort of how you got into this. You said you started in retail, talk about kind of your growth in this and why you wanted to do this differently.
SCHUETT: So, yeah, I was a retail florist at 18 years old. I got my first job in a flower shop and I was just sweeping floors and washing buckets, that sort of thing. Eventually got to learn how to design. When I moved to Arizona, I started working at Allen's Flowers in Prescott and got my master florist certification through the Arizona State Floral Association.
And as I started managing one of those shops up in Prescott thinking, where can I get local flowers? We found Shanti, you know, we were able to get a few things here and there, but it wasn't a coordinated effort. We didn't have a lot of farms that we could get things from and it was challenging to try to source everything and pick it up, you know, and order different ordering systems.
So I started thinking, you know, where can I find local flowers? So I actually enrolled in the agriculture program at Yavapai College to immerse myself in the community, started freelance designing, quit my full time job and interned. Was lucky to get a paid internship at Whips Stone Farm through Yavapai College.
So I met Shanti and realized that there was a whole world there. She was growing much, much more than I had any idea. So we just started kicking around the idea of how can we get more people involved?
And as we talked to people, there were plenty of people like me out there that really saw the demand and the need and desire to get more Arizona growing flowers. So we just started talking, we came together, that was I would say about eight years ago. And we just, this year jumped in and said, OK, we just got to do this.
GILGER: So, so is this the only place that's doing this. I'm assuming like if it's been a challenge for a long time in the U.S., for farmers to sell and grow flowers here that this is probably spreading elsewhere. People are trying to change that.
SCHUETT: Absolutely. There are collectives and floral hubs all over the country now and it just keeps growing. So we just started ours pretty late actually compared to a lot of other states are already organized and most of them are regional and we have such a large state, but we have such a diverse climate and zones that we can grow so many things at different times of year, we decided we need to just keep it all Arizona.
So we've come together for people all over the place. It's an absolute team effort and none of us could do this alone.
GILGER: So I want to ask you about the goals and hopes in this in a moment. But first tell us a little bit about the ecological side of this. There is definitely a sustainability aspect of not tripping in flowers like we talked about. But there are, I'm sure, environmental impacts of growing things here for our local climate. Tell us about that.
SCHUETT: Thank you for that question. I really appreciate that. So yeah, like you mentioned, the economic reasons are great. Also the environmental impact, as you said, we're reducing carbon footprint. We're creating green spaces which is something we're really proud of saving family farms. A few of our farmers are second, third, fourth generation farmers and they've added flowers as a specialty crop to increase their sales and to be able to keep those farms and they want to expand and scale up as well.
So doing this allows us to do that. so we support local farms, feed pollinators. That's a big one too. A lot of the things that we grow are intentional. Some of them are grown, not even to be cut. They're just to help the farm and to provide nectar and pollen. So we have little patches all over the state. Then I kind of consider it a pollinator path. And that's really exciting to me that we can keep growing that.
GILGER: For the bees. OK. so what are your goals in this? How far do you want to take this?
SCHUETT: Oh, gosh, I have big goals. A lot of us do for sure. What we'd like to see is a lot more farmers involved so we can provide a lot more product to go out to the florist, fulfill that need. So pubs around the state delivery routes around the state would be ideal and amazing, but in addition to that, we're supporting each other.
So not just the growing in the market, filling that market demand, but allowing people to keep those farms, as I mentioned and have the real dream life of running a family flower farm. It's a real job. It's great. And if we can increase the market and increase the demand and get word out there, then they can scale up. They can make a full time income. A lot of people have off farm jobs as well.
So we're hoping to let them be able to let go of those and just farm full time and be able to grow more things, be home with their children, their aging parents, it's so much bigger.
