Perhaps Helen Skiba was destined to become a flower farmer. Her last name means “clump of dirt” in Polish.
Actual dirt collects under her fingernails.
“It’s the time of year where your hands crack and bleed because it’s dry and you’re in the dirt.”
While Mother’s Day is go time for the floral industry as a whole, it is merely the start of Colorado’s relatively short flower-growing season, which peaks in August and September. The flowers themselves tend to be shorter, too, Skiba explained.
“We have really intense sun here, and so they don't have to stretch up for light. So we're always looking for ways to make our flowers taller.”
Under hoop houses at Artemis Flower Farm in Longmont, ranunculus and anemones grow – along with foxglove, bellflower, feverfew, and poppies.
Skiba co-owns the business with her husband. While they sell directly to the public, many of their flowers will end up in a cooler at the Colorado Flower Collective in Lakewood. The wholesaler in turn sells to florists who prize homegrown inventory.
“We aggregate flowers that are being grown along the Front Range,” said the collective’s founder, Stefanie Hofmeister. “We work with farms from Fort Collins all the way down to Cañon City, between 20 and 30 farms that we source flowers from.”
Hofmeister has high hopes to expand to the High Country, but the cost of overhead year-round is tough for a seasonal business.
“You have to ramp up big time when it’s the growing season, and then you have space to house all those flowers, cooler space, and everything.”
Children and spouses eager to score locally-grown, more sustainable flowers for a mother in their lives can go directly to the source — a flower farm in their neck of the woods — or they can check with a favorite florist, Hofmeister suggested.
“Definitely ask your local florist for local flowers. We’re lucky to have a lot of florists here that do see the importance of sourcing local flowers. But the more you ask, the more they’re going to look into it.”
The joy, she and Skiba believe, is a fresher bouquet that comes with a sense of time and place.
“I think people think of flowers as a luxury, and that’s true in that you don’t have to have them, but we should not only be able to survive and feed ourselves, we should also be able to appreciate and enjoy our lives.”
