Hello friends,
We are so excited to let you know our Bouquet Shop is open! We are accepting orders starting today for delivery once our roses start blooming in mid-April. We sincerely appreciate the outpouring of support we’ve received, especially as we have lost nearly all our wedding orders this spring due to events being canceled. By purchasing a bouquet from us, you are keeping our farm afloat during this uncertain time. Our farm primarily serves event florists and with weddings being postponed, we need those who love our roses to purchase them and tell their friends about us. What we grow at our farm is unique and done so with the utmost love. Let me tell you about us and the lovely people who work with us…
I believe the perception of flower farms is that they’re small, have low overhead or could be a “hobby farm” for people with day jobs. This couldn’t be more untrue for us. Since our roses have been so popular amongst floral designers, we’ve consistently scaled up each year, which means our overhead increases year by year. Our farm is located on prime California land ideal for growing roses and our employees are provided with an excellent standard of living. We do not have other jobs and have invested everything we have into our farm. This all comes at the cost of our monthly overhead being very high. Our roses are tended to by hand, grown organically and require year round constant care. It’s an extremely expensive business to run, and with weddings being canceled and postponed, it’s a terrifying time for us as farmers. Being a seasonal business is hard enough on its own without the hardship of what we now face.
During our busy season (April through December) the dedicated hands of fifteen people are required to run our farm. They have thirty four children and significant others among them and we feel responsible for their livelihood. All three adult members of the Jaime family work for us. Juan is our property manager and has 30 years experience in organic farming. Juan runs our complicated irrigation and fertigation system and his knowledge is priceless. Dan is our production manager and coordinates hundreds of orders each week. Our florists adore Dan and we do, too. Juan’s wife (Dan’s mom) is Dolores and she is our lead rose processor who cleans and sorts thousands of roses by hand and beautifully wraps them for our clients. When you unwrap our roses, it was Dolores who tied that sweet bow around them. Ryan and I have deep gratitude for the Jaime family and want so badly to continue to employ them along with all our other employees who each have a special role at our farm.
To our floral design clients, our hearts break for you. As a background to those not familiar, we supply 30,000+ cut garden roses to floral designers for weddings each week starting in April. We ship our product to every state in the US and have a booth at the Los Angeles Flower Market. We hand select each rose for our clients to match their bride’s palette. Thousands of brides walk down the aisle each year with our garden roses in their hands. It is a wonderful role that we have in the wedding industry and we are so sad for all the florists who are waiting for this nightmare to end so they can continue creating beautiful celebrations for their clients. We are shipping care packages of our roses at no charge to our floral design clients so they can create, inspire and bring joy to others during this time. That’s the least we can do for the community that hasmade our farm successful for the last five years. We love you all and we will have more roses than ever for you when your weddings resume!
We are so thankful we had the foresight to start our "farm to table" retail business in 2018 and not just depend on selling roses to floral designers for weddings. I never wanted to be a business with all my eggs in one basket, which is way too risky in farming. We know there are thousands of you who love what we do and want to support us, so now is the time we are asking you to do so. While we hope weddings are rescheduled and the wedding industry recovers, we simply cannot predict the future. We will lose our farm and our employees will lose their jobs if we do not get our garden roses out into the world. This spring we must send thousands of our handmade garden rose bouquets to you in order to replace the income we are losing due to weddings being postponed. For every one average size wholesale order we fulfilled in previous years, we must ship four bouquets, which means we must reach exponentially more people than we ever have. Please tell your friends about our farm. When we send you or your loved one a bouquet, it will 100% come from our farm and no part of it is outsourced. We are a prime example of a “farm to table” operation founded by people who practice sustainable, organic farming. We are putting all our trust into our social media family and local community to sustain our farm during this period of weddings being canceled.
All of this comes at a very hard time for us. Our season abruptly ended on Halloween last year due to a killing frost that is not common for our area. As a result of the frost, we lost 8 weeks of production and sales. We have had to survive since November 1st without income and keep our core employees working. We expected to start selling roses for weddings now, but that will not be happening. Our financial reserves are low, but our roses have never been so healthy and ready to explode with blooms in April!
The renewal that spring brings is wonderful! Despite the challenges we all face this year, I am deeply hopeful. I believe our roses bring people joy and my mission is to spread awareness of American grown flowers. We are choosing to look at the current situation in the world not as a setback for our business, but as an opportunity to blossom in a new way and get our roses to people who have never known what a real, garden grown rose is!
We need and would love your support!! Our Bouquet Shop is open now and we will begin shipping our fragrant garden rose bouquets on April 20th. For those not familiar with our garden roses, I can proudly say they are the most beautiful, fragrant and timeless roses you could possibly imagine. Taken from my Mother’s Day blog….
“If you've never put your nose into a real garden grown rose and taken in its intoxicating scent, you are in for a treat that will be engrained in your senses forever. If you’ve never watched garden roses transform from a bud to fully open blooms to dropping their petals gracefully beneath them, you will be struck by the beauty of witnessing their life cycle. If you’ve never collected a rose’s fallen petals, dried them and saved them in a sachet, you will fall in love with their everlasting perfume. The experience of our garden roses is a memory you will keep forever.”
We are launching our 2020 Mother’s Day shop this coming week and you can pre-reserve a bouquet here! Last year we sold out of our Mother’s Day bouquets very quickly, so we’re hoping to do the same this year - and we will need to without our wedding income! There is nothing more beautiful that you could give a lady in your life than our roses. If you love what we do at our farm, we would be honored to have your business this spring. You can read about our Mother’s Day bouquet and order a spring garden rose bouquet for arrival in April.
Our promise to you is that by purchasing our roses, you are allowing us to continue to employ the beautiful people who work for us. They are not just “farm workers", they are our family. Fermin, Shelby, Dan, Dolores, Juan, Rosario, Manuel, Ruthie, Jessica, Rosalina, Joaquin, Jaime and Rufino are depending on us. They are deeply committed and talented people who love working with our roses. They are skilled tradespeople. They are home owners, lifelong farmers, knowledgable gardeners, mothers and fathers. We love them and want nothing more than for them to know their jobs are safe.
We sincerely thank you for your support and business! We cannot wait to send you our roses in April and for Mother’s Day!
