Carbon Neutral Farming & Fever Dreams

In less than one week, the biggest flower day of the year is upon us – Valentines Day. While I personally have a deep dislike for this so-called holiday stemming from the fact that it’s completely unnecessary and if you love someone you shouldn’t have to express your love with gifts on one certain day or else your lover will feel unloved…or something like that, it’s a holiday that some people enjoy and celebrate with flowers.

Anywho, it’s that time of year. And that means people will be flocking to the grocery store and calling florists to buy/order bouquets for their special someone. For most of the northern hemisphere, it is the middle of winter. So where exactly are all these flowers grown? Shouldn’t a “holiday” that revolves around flowers occur during peak flower season?

These are the things I’ve been thinking about for the last week while stuck in bed with the flu. I find it funny that I am a flower farmer and I do not have any flowers for the biggest flower day of the entire year. If we insist on having a Valentines Day, can we reschedule it to summer?

There are workarounds, like forcing flowers indoors – but I haven’t explored that option yet. I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, having local flowers available for this holiday would be a great way to reduce carbon emissions generated by the massive importation of refrigerated flowers from outside the US that is happening en masse right now. But on the other hand, most of the bulbs that are flexible enough to be forced into blooming are also imported from outside the US. It’s not a perfect solution, but maybe it’s the lesser of two evils? You can fit a hell of a lot more bulbs on a ship than actual flowers so in that regard, it is a little better. And at least a portion of the bulbs that are imported will be purchased by local flower farms which will help them earn a profit – yay local flower farms!

A few days before I got sick with this horrid flu, Troy excitedly requested my presence at the compost bin. The compost bin is always full of surprises, so I had no idea what to expect.  I was quite pleased to see that some of the tulip bulbs from last season’s harvest that I tossed into the compost bin had sprouted!

This got me thinking, if I carve out space for the composted bulbs to grow and regain a bit of energy, could they potentially produce usable flowers in a few seasons? And if I did this every year, could I eventually have a rotating stock of tulip bulbs that I could use for future harvests? And if I built a large enough stock of these bulbs, could I eventually have enough bulbs to start forcing them indoors for Valentines Day as well? Maybe it’s the flu brain talking, but I am seriously thinking about giving this a shot.

And then I started thinking even bigger – we are far from perfect (no one is, and don’t believe anyone who makes that claim), but I still consider what we do far more sustainable than importing flowers and produce from another country. We check a lot of the boxes for sustainable farming practices by making and using our own compost whenever possible, being no-spray, avoiding single-use plastics, the list goes on. But imagine if we could do even more? Is it possible to be a carbon neutral-ish farm? Not attained by buying carbon offsets (that’s cheating in my book) but by reducing carbon emissions to as low as possible by producing as much as we can locally? I don’t think we can ever truly reach carbon zero (a girl can dream) but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do what we can, when we can. So yeah, I’m going to see what happens with my composted tulip bulbs. Even if this doesn’t work, at least I explored the option.