It can be more than a small sideline
The Farm: Franktown House Flowers has grown flowers and created bouquets for Ottawa and the Outaouais region since 2013. Deeply rooted in ecological farming practices, they are mindful of supporting a healthy habitat for all creatures great and small, including pollinators and other beneficial insects, soil microorganisms, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and other wildlife.
After selling flowers for ten years, they are now moving towards offering their farm as a quiet gathering place for small groups to slow down, ground, and connect. They wish to provide experiences that will help to calm nervous systems, strengthen community relationships, and promote healing from the effects of stress, burnout, and polarization.
Background and History: Although raised in the suburbs of Montreal, Danielle was drawn to farming at an early age and by her late teens enrolled in an international agriculture program. A volunteer work experience in rice paddies in Indonesia solidified her choice to pursue this field of study in the early 1990s at Collège d’Alfred in Eastern Ontario followed by a year at an agriculture college in Belgium. During this period, she completed an internship on an organic cut flower farm in California, and an agroforestry project in El Salvador. Following the agriculture college, she delved into urban agriculture and alternative food systems at university.
Among her first assignments out of grad school, was to help set up the COG National Office in Ottawa, under the executive directorship of Laura Telford in the early 2000s. Amidst the volumes carefully curated by COG library volunteers, she found The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower’s Guide to Raising and Selling Cut Flowers by Lynn Byczynski (1997), inspiring her to take the initial steps to seek out a farm and launch her business in floriculture.
After a year with COG, she was invited to coordinate NGO participation at the UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal, then spent the next thirteen years as a federal public servant supporting Indigenous and NGO engagement in environmental programs and policy development.
It is during that time that she met Larry, they found their dream farm in Wakefield and established Franktown House Flowers*, emulating the small-scale intensive farming model Danielle observed on the 2-acre organic cut flower and kiwi farm where she’d spent two summers in California twenty years earlier.
Growing and Selling Flowers: Since 2013, they’ve grown over a hundred varieties of flowers – annuals, biennials, perennials – in the open field and in an unheated greenhouse. In the early years, they relied on the expertise of Wayne and Joyce Keller of Belle Terre nurseries to start their organic seedlings in their greenhouses while Danielle continued to work full time in the city. She would deliver her seed packets to Belle Terre in February and by June would receive flats of seedlings by the truckload to plant into their 50-foot rows of flower beds.
Two primary seed suppliers are GeoSeed and Johnny’s Selected Seeds for high quality and bulk quantities. They also purchase from a dozen or more smaller and organic seed producers across Canada for packets of specialty varieties. As the cut flower sector has grown, it has become easier to source local and organic seeds in recent years.
Danielle selects seed and plant varieties based on characteristics that are specific to cut flower production:
- beauty and popularity (peonies, ranunculus, tulips, anemones)
- ease of cultivation (cosmos, sunflowers, bachelors’ buttons, cynoglossum, calendula)
- blooming period – to ensure a variety of flowers throughout the growing season
- bouquet composition ingredients – focal, accent, filler
- stem length and turgidity
- vase life
Growing cut flowers is comparable to growing vegetable crops – planning, soil prep, sowing, planting, weeding, harvesting. Post-harvest care involves stripping stems of lower foliage and cold storage in clean conditions to protect the longevity of the flowers, as well as assembling flowers into bunches and creating mixed bouquets.
The soil on their farm is a silt-loam, amended with a variety of locally sourced composts and manures to lighten the structure. This rich foundation helped with plant health, requiring very little intervention over the years regarding insects and plant disease. When necessary, they collect insects manually (e.g. Japanese beetle) into buckets of soap water or, from time to time, accept the loss of a crop (e.g. due to aphids) which would be offset by the great variety of flowers grown as compensation.
For weed control, geotextile landscape fabric with holes burned in intervals for plant placement has been helpful, a method learned from Erin Benzakein of Floret Farm in Washington State. Landscape fabric is reusable and can last 10 years or more. If starting over today, Danielle would opt for plastic-free alternatives to weed management.
Initially, they sold at local farmers markets and retail locations (grocery stores, food hub). Danielle tried her hand at different products – edible flowers, saffron production, winter wreaths and arrangements. As the business grew, they supplied bulk and full-service wedding florals, as well as flower arrangements for birthday parties and celebrations of life. Danielle has collaborated with many other local businesses – providing Patisserie La Toque with fresh blooms for cake adornments, offering Apiverte their first site to host beehives and co-lead workshops, partnering with La Confiserie confectionary for Mother’s Day flowers and chocolates combo packages. In addition, Franktown House Flowers has been supported by many others along the way, such as the Wakefield General Store, the first and longest-standing retail location selling their bouquets. The most important revenue channel became their bouquet subscription program. This reached a peak in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, when customers’ interest turned towards local products, particularly those that offered joy and beauty.
Flower farming has granted many rewarding experiences – hands in the dirt, harvesting gorgeous blossoms, special moments such as the stillness of observing a hummingbird moth in the Nicotiana patch, or when a customer reports that their subscription bouquet hosted a monarch chrysalis that the family protected and observed until that awe-inspiring moment when the butterfly emerges. The most lasting gift I’ve received is how our flowers have impacted customers – at markets, on their wedding day, at their loved-one’s celebration of life – including witnessing tears at my market stall as an anemone evoked childhood memories of a mother’s garden in Turkey.
An important component of the business has been education:
- teaching about the importance of organic flowers – organic is not only important for what we eat, but it’s also about healthy working conditions, soil health, and biodiversity
- promoting locally grown flowers, in the Gatineau Hills, Ottawa, and Montreal, and participating in annual Canadian Flowers Week activities
- mentoring new growers
- offering events at the farm and participating as a stop on garden tours
- giving workshops on flower growing and arranging
- raising awareness about fair trade flowers by selling certified fair trade roses at events organized in Wakefield, the first town in Quebec to achieve official “Fair Trade Town” status as designated by FairTrade Canada
Today’s Thriving Local Flower Sector: There exist today many resources available to new commercial growers and opportunities to take part in a greater movement. When Danielle launched her business in 2013, she knew of only one other small-scale ecological cut flower grower in Quebec; there now are some fifty producers in the province and the new Association des productrices.eurs de fleurs coupées du Québec, supported by the Ministry of Agriculture.
The growth in number of commercial flower producers has been similar in Eastern Ontario. In the Ottawa area in 2019, thanks to the vision and leadership of Rosalind’s Garden Blooms, a small group of growers organized to create a local flower market, inspired by the Toronto Flower Market founded in 2013. Opening day of the Ottawa Flower Market (ottawaflowermarket.ca/) was a celebratory event at Somerset Square Park and was attended by the then federal minister of the Environment, Ottawa-area MP Catherine McKenna. The market was an instant success with customers expressing much excitement for this new initiative, many of them expressly purchasing flowers from various vendors at each monthly market in a show of support for locally grown blooms. The market has now evolved into a collective format at Ottawa’s Parkdale Market and developed a wholesale service for florists.
Danielle is delighted to witness the evolution of the Slow Flowers movement locally and internationally and is proud of her role in nudging this effort forward in this corner of the world.
Danielle Schami
Franktown House Flowers
Wakefield, Quebec
www.franktownhouse.ca
www.instagram.com/franktownhouse
* The business name honours the 19th century log home that was moved 100 km from Franktown, Ontario in the early 1970s to be re-erected on its current site at our farm. Coincidentally, near Franktown is where Larry’s Irish ancestors settled generations ago and would have very likely known the people who occupied the house in which the family now lives.