How Is Our Farming Different?

We take great care to tend the soil that sustains us with good food and livelihood.  We are committed to regenerative farming practices-- we don’t use chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.  Instead, we practice the art of biodynamic farming and regularly use the biodynamic preparations and biodynamic compost in our field.  We rely on the moon and stars to guide us with our planting times.  It sounds hard to believe, but growing over 200 different varieties of flowers and foliage on 1 acre is possible!  Our diversity is achieved with good planning, healthy crop rotations, consistent soil building through cover cropping, composting, and natural amendments, growing both annuals and perennials, and using unheated greenhouses, low tunnels and an indoor growing room to lengthen our harvest period.  We grow what is appropriate for our climate in its proper time, and we responsibly wildcraft greenery from local forests to add to our offerings.

Our approach to flower farming is significantly different than that of conventional large-scale flower production, where flowers are cloned and grafted in laboratories, grown in chemically-intensive monocultures that harm farm workers and the earth, harvested by machines, dipped in chemical fungicides prior to shipping, and packed and transported across oceans and continents.  These are how most flowers available at the grocery store and florist’s are grown.

Imagine the carbon footprint and toxic load of a bouquet of roses!  In contrast, at Flora we limit our use of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals on the farm by growing primarily from seed and bulb (not starts), by primarily practicing no-till preparation of our soil and operating the tractor conservatively, in harvesting by hand, and by strictly following organic practices .  If we need to buy in additional flowers for an event to satisfy a customer’s request, we only source material from other local, organic flower growers in Southern Oregon.