Why do we grow specialty cut-flowers?
We’re inspired by the abundance of beautiful, heirloom varieties of cut flowers. They offer something unique for our customers and contribute to our farm and community’s bio-diversity.
Our garden-inspired bouquets connect you to our farm and the natural bounty of our region throughout the seasons.
On our 15 acre organic farm we maintain wild corridors, hedgerows and plant diversity, keeping other species in mind. From the smallest insects to frogs, birds, and mammals. Growing cut-flowers helps us diversify our crop rotation, offers benefits to pollinators, and habitat for other species. This helps keep crops pollinated and disease cycles and pests in balance.
Most cut-flowers around are imported, shipped dry from thousands of miles away in lots of packaging, and re-hydrated upon arrival. They’re often grown in vast monocultures, necessitating the use of plenty of agro-chemicals. There are also abundant labour concerns. We wanted to offer an alternative in line with our values.
What flowers do we grow?
We grow a diversity of lush greenery and interesting grasses in addition to beautiful blooms (over 200 different flower varieties) that make amazing arrangements for your home or for a special gift.
We grow many annuals and biennial flowers and plant new perennials each year.
A few of the types we grow: zinnias, lisianthus, sunflowers, tulips, daffodils, snapdragons, cosmos, delphinium, sweet william, eucalyptus, foxglove, feverfew, love-in-a-mist nigella, rudbeckia, scented geranium.
Where and how can you buy our flowers?
We sell our beautiful bouquets of freshly-cut local flowers on Saturdays at the
Dieppe Market.
What about flowers for your wedding?
Local and seasonal-inspired DIY brides can request in advance bulk buckets of our sustainably-grown blooms and foliage. See
Details here.
Are our flowers organic?
We grow our specialty cut-flowers the same way we grow our organic produce but legally, we can’t label them as “Organic.” At this point in time, Canada has yet to regulate the term “organic” on items besides food, feed, and seed. There are people working on broadening the “scope” of the organic regulations to include things like flowers, other ornamentals, body care products, etc. If you see the word “organic” on any of these items, they would be imported products, being certified in the U.S. or Europe.
We never use any pesticides on our flowers (or on anything on our farm) – including organic-approved ones.
We welcome pollinators and often won’t cut flowers that are being “harvested” for their nectar or pollen by insects.
Each year, we save more and more of our own flower seeds since finding sources for organic cut-flower seed is a big challenge. We support seed companies that are offering organic flower seeds to encourage them that the market is there.
What to do when you bring your flowers home
- Remove the paper wrap and elastic band.
- Re-cut the stems (don’t do this step with daffodils – you don’t want their sap to start again and affect other flowers) to a suitable length based on your vase.
- Put in a vase with lots of fresh water – make sure all the stems are submerged and there aren’t leaves below the water line.
- Place the vase somewhere out of direct sunlight. Cut-flowers will last longest when kept in a cooler part of your house.
- The ideal is to re-cut the stems every 3 days and replace their water.
Our bouquets should last about a week, often-times longer if kept in ideal conditions.
As organic farmers, we don’t use flower food or preservatives in our water. Our well water is on the acidic side (and is definitely potable and tested regularly for bacteria as part of our organic certification) which seems to benefit our flower vase life (flower preservatives increase water acidity to reduce bacteria).
