Our story of the time spent in Santa Barbara, California is not quite over. In addition to a fabulous time at Florabundance Inspirational Design Days, I had the opportunity to visit some flower farms and meet more awesome people in the floral industry.
Joost took Rebecca, Sunny Brooks Floral of Seattle and me to visit Florabundance, Myriad Flowers and Ever-Bloom Gerbera Farms.
Joost and Rebecca, notice Rebecca’s bag is filled with flowers??
Our first stop was at Florabundance Wholesale in Carpinteria, California. I didn’t realize that Florabundance is located in the center of many independently owned flower farms. Talk about fresh flowers – need something? They get a lot of their flowers from farms just footsteps away!
First stop – Florabundance Wholesale house!
Inside the cooler at Florabundance.
I had to take this photo for Chuck, he loves Hellebores! Such a beautiful color..
Jose working away inside the office at Florabundance.
need manzanita branches?
Next we were off to visit Myriad Flowers in Carpinteria, California. They grow lovely ‘California Grown’ Roses, and many other flowers.
Here’s Joost with the owner of Myriad Flowers – Erik Van Wingerden.
Just a few roses…
love these Super Green roses
how pretty are these Sahara Roses??
Roses sorted and ready for the cooler.
It was really cool to see the rose sorting machine at work, it sorts the roses by size! It then bunches them together and automatically bunches them into 25 stems and bands them!
So cool:
First the roses go through and are measured for size.
Here they get sorted into bunches by the size.
See the machine arm dropping the roses after being sorted .. so cool.
Next we visited the largest grower of Gerbera Daisies in the States, Ever-Bloom. They also grow Anthuriums. I’ve used Ever-Bloom Gerberas for years and it was nice to finally see where they come from! We visited with Ed van Wingerden, he took us through the greenhouse and coolers.
Gerberas, so many Gerbera Daisies..
The quality is absolutely fantastic, very strong stems.
So many color varieties! Which color do you think is most popular? If you guessed pink, you are correct.
I had to take a picture of this, reminded me of all the bikes we saw inside greenhouses in Holland
Racks filled with gerbera daisies, all sorted and ready for packing.
this is just a small section of the gerber daisies in the cooler, there were so many!
All packed up and ready to be shipped to wholesalers across the country.
Thank you, Joost, for taking us to visit these flower farms! Driving through the area was so fun and inspiring, great to see where so many of our California Grown Flowers are coming from!!