Petal Pushers: Expanding the Season for Local Blooms

January 15, 2025

By Kathleen McLaughlin

In October, when many Maine farmers are harvesting their last summer crops and preparing fields and beds for winter, Lee Cline is busily planting seeds and bulbs at Fox Hollow Farm in Lamoine, near Mount Desert Island. Time is of the essence: In a few short weeks the hard cold will set in and the days will dramatically shorten, limiting the light and warmth needed for the flowers to grow. But Cline knows the work done now will pay off in the spring, with an abundance of early blooms like tulips and daffodils, larkspur and poppies.

Cline’s farm, which specializes in unique, premium flowers, is in many ways typical of the average flower farm in Maine, and Cline is in many ways a typical flower farmer. Like most, the farm is small, just a few acres with one unheated tunnel and a half acre for field-grown blooms. A former tech worker from Silicon Valley, Cline views flower farming as a second act, similar to others who’ve come to it from different vocations. Still others are flower farming as a second job or side hustle.

Bloom season extended
Flower growers in Maine are pushing the season for local blooms, with the help of season extension tools like hoophouses and row cover. Lee Cline photo

And like all flower growers in Maine, Cline struggles with the constraints of a short growing season, averaging just 135 days statewide, and United States Department of Agriculture growing zones ranging from zone 3 in the north to zone 6 on the southern coast. Choosing which flowers to grow, and then coaxing harvests to coincide with popular flower holidays early in the year, becomes a real challenge.

“On our farm, we can’t control the light and we can’t really control the temperature. What we can do is play around with timing and crop protection,” says Cline.

Overwintering flowering plants is one way to coax earlier blooms the following spring. To overwinter more traditionally tender crops here in Maine, plants can be helped through the cold with fabric covers or structures, or sometimes a combination of both. Cline’s “experiments” in 2024 included overwintering normally cold-sensitive bulbs in an unheated tunnel with row cover to produce anemones and ranunculus for the local market by early April. She notes she was aided this year by a milder-than-normal winter.

Another common method of early flower production is forcing, in which tulip or other spring bulbs are stored in a cold, dark, dry environment for a period of weeks and then removed and exposed to more light and heat. With this method, tulips can be fooled into blooming at any point, theoretically, in the year.

Flower bulbs season extension
Bulbs of flower-producing plants, such as tulips, can be stored in a cold, dry, dark environment for weeks and then exposed to light and heat to force early blooms.  Lee Cline photo

Cline says this method worked for her last year for muscari, but she had less success with hyacinth and has not yet tried this method for tulips. She knows of at least one farmer in Downeast Maine who has gotten to the point of “programming” enough tulips for harvest throughout the winter. Another flower farmer, in the Brunswick area, used this method to bring flowers to the market last year by Valentine’s Day, the first big flower holiday of the year.

At its research facility in Albion, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, one of Maine’s biggest producers of vegetable and flower seeds, runs continuous trials in season extension and early flower production in unheated structures, the preferred method of season extension among Maine flower farmers because of its lower cost and sustainability. Joy Longfellow, Johnny’s flower product technician, says Johnny’s trials have targeted early May as a harvest date. “The focus of our trials was Mother’s Day with an unheated tunnel, seeing if we could extend our season four to six weeks using an unheated structure.”

Johnny’s flower trials have utilized something called the Persephone period, a term coined by renowned Maine vegetable farmer Eliot Coleman that refers to the time of year when daylight falls at or below 10 hours a day and plant growth all but stops. If plants can be brought to a certain level before the Persephone period begins in November, they can finish growing when it ends in late winter (February) and potentially be harvested early in May or even April.

The young plants should be close to the ground. “We want them to have a well-established root system and a little bit of top growth,” says Longfellow, adding that a fully developed plant entering the Persephone period might be more susceptible to cold and winter winds.

Since flower trials started at Johnny’s in 2016, more than 30 flower types have been tested. Of those, Longfellow says Icelandic poppies, foxglove, snapdragons, and sweet peas are among those that fared the best at hitting the Mother’s Day target date.

Flower trials JSS
Flower trials at Johnny’s Selected Seeds overwintered under cover, in bloom on May 20. Photo courtesy of JSS

“Along with earlier flowering times, what we’ve also seen is just overall better quality coming out of the overwintered tunnel,” says Longfellow. “What we see is longer stems and overall nice quality blooms.”

Longfellow says there’s no doubt that demand for local flowers is up, given the recent rise in flower seed sales at Johnny’s. Interest began mounting in the early 2000s due to the Slow Flowers movement, which sought to curtail U.S. over-reliance on foreign flower imports from Europe and South America. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and supply chains were cut off, however, the demand for local flowers took off. Longfellow says, “Across the country, across seed suppliers, demand just skyrocketed in ways that no one could imagine.”

Recent sales figures in Maine reflect that burgeoning demand. The latest USDA Agriculture Survey, based on federal tax information, shows cut flower sales at $3 million in 2022, more than double the $1.2 million in sales reported in the 2017 survey.

The Maine Flower Collective formed in 2022 to provide a centralized sales network for buyers and sellers of local flowers in Maine. Sofia Oliver, the collective’s operations manager, says they now boast 89 members, including florists, designers, and flower farmers from Berwick to Skowhegan to Mount Desert Island.

Oliver says their growth has been exciting, with their in-person wholesale market at Crystal Spring Farm in Brunswick seeing robust sales and record volumes throughout the 2024 market season, from April to December. She says the cooperative was even able to start establishing itself as a local flower source for destination weddings in Maine.

The collective is focused exclusively on wholesale flower sales but eventually could open up to retail. Oliver also sees the collective as not just a marketing funnel for local flowers but also as a grassroots network where farmers can share growing information and benefit from each other’s successes and failures, particularly with regard to pushing the boundaries of Maine’s not always friendly weather conditions.

“I think the more people that do it,” says Oliver, referring to flower farming, “the more we learn about it and share it with others in the flower community. It’s really going to help push the local flower movement forward.”

Season extension for cut flower production in Maine is a small bag of tools that goes beyond sourcing winter-friendly varieties, or heavy mulching, or row covers. It also includes experiments with overwintering certain types of flowers in unheated, covered spaces and coaxing them into bloom at times of the year they wouldn’t normally.

Lee Cline in Lamoine and other growers across the state, meanwhile, continue their field and unheated hoop house experiments for another season, bolstered by a warming climate and the trend of milder winters. Local flowers for Valentine’s Day in Maine? Not only is it possible, it’s happening now, says Cline.

Kathleen McLaughlin is a freelance writer and Maine Master Gardener Volunteer. She lives in Bath.

This article originally appeared in the winter 2024-2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.

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