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Flowers:
Budding Personalities
Our farm business is built on three flowers. Peony is our spectacular crop, lilac is our demure, though somewhat cranky flower, and snowball viburnum is both prudish and troublesome but very lovely. The tendency of my spouse and I to personify our flowers seems to have crept in ever since we entered the business six years ago and launched Plainfield Flower Company. It doesn’t help that at least half of our peony varieties are named after people—“Sarah Bernhardt” and “Monsieur Jules Elie” for example. (My favorite name—though we do not grow this one ourselves—is the peony known as “Fat Concubine.”)
All together, we have approximately 40 acres of these three flowers, two of which were a legacy of the previous owner of our farm, Ed Pincus. (We added the peony ourselves.) We grow these particular flowers not only for their salability in wholesale markets beyond Vermont, but for their adaptability to the Vermont climate. All of our crops are known as “field-cut flowers,” meaning we do not grow greenhouse flowers, but we are able to use the harsh northern climate to our advantage: our flowers require a hard winter and so are not available in warm climates.
Working with the local conditions has been, historically, a successful strategy for this farm, but recently we have had a real taste of climate change, and we have already begun planning to sell off half of our lilac crop as nursery stock. For the last two years, an abnormally early spring—accompanied by a late frost—has ravaged our lilac. And according to Ed Pincus—who trained us and continues to give us excellent advice (a farm mentor is so important!)—this particular weather pattern is highly unusual.
As for most small farmers in Vermont, one of our biggest challenges is distribution. Because of the quantities of flowers we grow, we must ship the majority of them out of state; the local market is simply not big enough. But with the rising price of gas, our main shipping options keep inching toward unfeasibility. Like almost everyone else, we are constantly re-thinking our farm’s business model. We aim to sell a higher percentage of our flowers locally, to cut down on lilac, and expand our peony fields. And last summer—inspired by a vineyard in California that first tested this idea—we acquired a small herd of Old English Southdown sheep (considered a miniature breed) to help us with “mowing” around the lilac and viburnum. Their eating habits have helped us quite a bit.
And as a small piece of our new business strategy, we have invited a new variety of peony to the farm: “Ann Cousins” (a fragrant white peony). She will make her first appearance here in June.
—Erica Da Costa
More info: plainfieldflower.com