Flowers

Rocky Ravine Turned Into Thriving Cut Flower Business

March 4, 2010 Farming & Agriculture

While most of the commercial cut flower business is being put out of business due to exceedingly cheap imported Colombian cut flowers, Kendall Farms in San Diego County, California, is growing with “new, trendy and hot” Australian and South African cut flowers. The farm was started in 1987 by Dave Kendall on 50 acres of [...]

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Portland’s Yard, Garden And Patio Show

February 15, 2010 Flowers

Flower and Garden Shows are full of excited people. The winter months have dragged on and most people don’t have greenhouses so they have survived without a lot of plant stimulus, so when the garden shows start to happen, they go. And so it was at the Portland show this past weekend.
Either I wasn’t paying [...]

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Flower Petal Nanoridges Attract Bees

February 7, 2010 Flowers

According to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tiny structures form on the surface of the plant, called nanoridges. Researchers found that the ridges are made of “cutin polyester,” a material in the waxy outer layer of plants that helps protect them from drying out.
While their exact function is still [...]

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The Death Of B.C.’s Cut-Rose Industry

February 6, 2010 Farming & Agriculture

This is the conundrum of globalization: how do roses from Ecuador and Colombia compete with locally grown roses with prices equal or lower when they have been flown thousands of miles on jets powered by expensive fuel? Steve Whysall writes in The Vancouver Sun,
Today, only three growers remain and two of them are struggling to [...]

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Sustainable Prisons Project

January 24, 2010 Farming & Agriculture

In the old print version of The Growing Edge, I published numerous articles about prisons that had greenhouses and gardens which supplied both the prison cafeteria with fresh produce but also sold some produce to restaurants and supermarkets in the local community. An equally important goal was to train the inmates with a useful job [...]

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Emotional Impact Of Flowers

January 22, 2010 Flowers

Every spring, with the emergence of fresh blooming flowers, most people get an emotional lift after a long, dreary winter of only store purchased flowers, if they have any at all.
Flowers have flourished – their beauty evolving over time – simply because we like them, says Terry McGuire, associate professor of genetics at Rutgers and [...]

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Big Box Nursery Stores Now Drive Out Growers Too

January 13, 2010 Farm/Garden Politics

Criticism of big box stores such as Walmart is that they put out of business small, local independent stores that have been in the area for decades. Now they are having the same effect on nursery growers who used to supply the big box stores with green plants but now are outside looking in.
As Kevin [...]

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Unproductive Garden Center Customers

December 29, 2009 Farm/Garden Politics

One possible New Year’s resolution for a gardener could be: I will regularly support and actually purchase plants and garden products from a local, independent garden store instead of a big box store…
On a forum of retail garden store owners and employees, a question was put forth on how to deal with “unproductive customers” who [...]

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Organic Farm Spotlight—Boogy Creek Farm

December 27, 2009 Compost

Boogy Creek Farm is a five acre organic urban farm in Austin, Texas started in 1991 by the husband and wife farmer team of Carol Ann Sayle and Larry Butler. Earlier, Carol had a 20-year career in painting, but she enthusiastically put down the brush to take up the hoe. Her canvas is now Boogy [...]

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Baltimore Greenhouses Spur Hope For More Urban Farming

December 27, 2009 Farming & Agriculture

Timothy B. Wheeler, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, writes,
Three portable greenhouses outside a Baltimore high school campus provide a model that could be repeated around the city, bringing locally grown food to schoolchildren and to poor neighborhoods where fresh produce is rare, urban farming advocates say.
Though it’s nearly freezing outside, fresh arugula, kale [...]

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