Early Bloomers

Joanna Puza of Raspberry Bouquet Farm is a professional photographer with a passion for gardening. She uses her gardens as a backdrop for photo sessions.

Brighten your home with locally grown tulips.

If you are looking for local flowers that haven’t traveled thousands of miles from a foreign country where they were grown using harmful chemicals and pesticides, see what these New Hampshire flower farmers are doing to fill that niche.

Raspberry Bouquet Flower Farm

A professional photographer for 19 years, Joanna Puza’s true passion is gardening. Marrying the two interests wasn’t difficult, and she has developed gorgeous gardens around her Henniker home that serve as backdrops for many of her photo sessions. The flowers proved to be so successful that friends urged her to sell them. Puza went so far as to attend an online workshop for aspiring flower farmers given by the prestigious Floret Flower Farm but decided it wasn’t a good fit for her active family. “I didn’t want to sell flowers at farmers markets all summer,” Puza says. She already had scaled back on photographing weddings after years of being tied up on weekends and missing family events.

However, the idea of winter growing appealed to her. “I thought it would be magical to offer locally grown flowers in wintertime, when others don’t have them,” Puza says. That led her to attend a tulip-forcing workshop given in Vermont by Emily von Trapp—yes, of “The Sound of Music” von Trapps. She is the third generation to farm on the property her grandparents bought in the 1940s, starting as a dairy farm and then turning to greenhouses and flowers. Von Trapp began forcing tulips into bloom to extend the season for her market bouquets. Her hands-on workshop covers things like pests and diseases, climate control techniques, steps in forcing, necessary materials, harvesting and marketing—everything a flower farmer needs to know to successfully grow tulips in the winter. Ongoing mentoring and advice is also part of the program. “Emily is so supportive of people following their passion,” Puza says.

For her first year, Puza ordered 10,000 tulip bulbs. She and her husband Matt turned an empty 8-foot-by-10-foot chicken coop into a tiny greenhouse. Plastic crates planted with bulbs were put in the basement for a cold treatment, and when she ran out of room, her parents let her turn their workshop into a cooling and growing space, too.

Different varieties of tulips require different periods of being in temperatures around 40 degrees, usually from 12 to 16 weeks. After the bulbs rooted and met their chill requirements, they were placed in the warmth and light of the wood-heated greenhouse to grow. As soon as the buds started to show color, they were cut and packaged for sale. “The flowers brought everyone so much joy!” Puza says. “We would deliver to people’s homes, they would ask us to bring more bouquets to their friends, and it just snowballed! It really warmed my heart.”

The second year, Puza increased her order to 37,000 bulbs. This meant a larger greenhouse was needed. “It is homemade—nothing fancy about it. I love that we heat it with wood, but it was so cloudy that winter that we had to stoke the fire nonstop.” For a cooler, Puza uses an insulated storage unit placed on the north side of the greenhouse—which eliminates a lot of extra lugging of crates. There were so many flowers that year, Puza ended up doing some farmers markets at the end of the season and her whole family came to help. “They actually enjoyed it so much, they are looking forward to doing it again!” she says.

This year, she ordered 50,000 bulbs.

But with the perfect storm of crop production mishaps and high demand, Puza only received 42,000, which were delivered late due to worldwide shipping issues. Some were pre-cooled bulbs that she was able to force into a super-early bloom in time to ring in the new year. The rest started to blossom later in January, and she had plenty to sell for Valentine’s Day. She will continue harvesting flowers into spring when the bulbs she has planted outside in the ground start to bloom. “It is a whirlwind experience,” she says. “Once they get going, it is nonstop.”

Bear in mind, these are not your average “garden variety” tulips. They are specialty types—some are multicolored, ruffled, double or peony-shaped, and many have a subtle fragrance. Some of Puza’s favorites are “Apricot Parrot,” “Gabriella” and “Columbus.” “I also love double ‘Negrita,’ ‘World Expression’ and the Impression series, which are classic, single blooms larger than my hand,” she says.

Puza has a tulip community-supported agriculture (CSA) with 25 members getting weekly bouquets, and she also wholesales her flowers to local markets in the Monadnock Region, Concord area and beyond. Most of her marketing and communication about tulips is done on Instagram at Joanna Puza.

To extend the life of your tulip bouquet, Puza recommends giving the stems a fresh cut and fresh water every other day. “The bouquet can last two weeks in the vase. The flowers are huge drinkers and continue to grow after being cut if they have fresh water,” she explains.

This is definitely her passion project, and she loves that her gorgeous, chemical-free tulips bring others so much joy. She feels she has finally found her ikigai—a Japanese concept where what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can get paid for all overlap. The sweet spot where your passion, vocation, profession and mission in life converge. “It warms my heart to share these beauties with the world. Truly, I am honored that our local communities are so supportive,” Puza says.

Vera Flora Means True Flowers

Sarah Barkhouse, of Vera Flora Farm in Gilsum, had been growing her tulips outside until last year, when she planted about 4,000 bulbs in her new 26-foot-by-48-foot-high tunnel. “The ones in the tunnel started to bloom early, around April 1,” she says. They were a welcome sign of spring, and her tulip bouquets sold out fast.

Even though she has a degree in horticulture and has been actively farming for many years, Barkhouse is always looking for new ideas. To learn how to get tulips blossoming even earlier, she attended one of von Trapp’s workshops last fall and decided to give it a try. “We ordered 500 bulbs to plant in crates as a trial,” Barkhouse says. “They need about 14 weeks of cooling and two to three weeks to force into flower. They should start blossoming in early March, about three weeks before the ones in the tunnel.”

She did not get any pre-cooled bulbs, though. “What I’m growing will not be blooming in ‘winter,’ technically, just really early spring. I’m hoping to do this trial and go all in next year!” Barkhouse says.

Like Puza, Barkhouse only grows specialty tulips. “These are not your ordinary grocery-store tulips,” she says. “There are so many varieties to choose from, and they are so unique. Every year, I fall more in love with them.”

She is also experimenting with hyacinths, planting 100 bulbs to force into bloom. The fragrance alone will make them a big hit with her flower customers.

Vera Flora is a small-scale flower farm that grows hundreds of varieties of cut flowers on only three-quarters of an acre.

Vera Flora is not certified organic but follows organic methods, using only organic potting soil and organic seeds when possible. All amendments are OMRI certified, and Vera Flora uses only biological or OMRI-certified insect controls.

All beds are dug by hand, and Vera Flora is a low-till farm.

Vera Flora supplies the 75 members of their CSA with weekly bouquets, offers special arrangements and wedding flowers, and sells wholesale to local florists and the Monadnock Food Co-op in Keene. “Keeping all these markets in mind, we need to grow a large mix of things,” she says. “One thing the pandemic taught me was to be diversified.”

The addition of the high tunnel helps to extend the season from April into November. The forced tulips will enable Vera Flora to have flowers even earlier.

If you need a hopeful spring bouquet of tulips—and who doesn’t this time of year?—please look for one grown by a New Hampshire flower farmer: true flowers grown by people who love what they do. You’ll be glad you did!

RESOURCES

Monadnock Food Co-op • (603) 355-8008 monadnockfood.coop

Raspberry Bouquet Farm • (603) 491-9645 jpuzaphoto.com

Vera Flora Farm • veraflorafarm.com

Emily von Trapp • thetulipworkshop.com