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.
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!
Next we were off to visit Myriad Flowers in Carpinteria, California. They grow lovely ‘California Grown’ Roses, and many other flowers.
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:
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.
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!!
Beautiful post! Great to see a feature like this on our American flower farms. Thank you Alicia! Looked like you guys had a grand tour.