MONROE, Maine — At just 8 degrees Fahrenheit, it was too cold on Monday to take any chances with the armloads of tulips that Lisa Kalan and Angela Baglione grow in their heated greenhouse at Seek-No-Further Farmstead in Monroe.
Especially not on Valentine’s Day, one of the most important days of the year for flower growers, and a day when Kalan and Baglione had many tulip bouquets to wrap and deliver to local stores.
Not bad for a couple of farmers who had never even dreamed of growing flowers until a few years ago, when they went on a tour of a Bowdoinham flower farm. That’s where they learned that tulips are always in great demand.
“When we looked into whether it was a good use of our greenhouse space, we learned you can grow so many in such a small space that we thought we would give it a try,’” Baglione, 30, said. “We started with 4,000 bulbs two years ago and we’re growing 40,000 this year.”
The flowers come in a dizzying variety of colors and petal shapes and have become a big part of the offerings at Seek-No-Further Farmstead, especially in the winter months when the landscape outside the greenhouse is marked by shades of white and gray.
Baglione and Kalan, 32, business and life partners who met at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, bought the farm in Monroe in 2017. They spent the next two years learning about the area and the community and finding out what other farmers were doing.
“We didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. We really wanted to find a niche that nobody else was doing,” Baglione said.
The farmers also milk goats, and sell yogurt, cheese and caramel sauce they make from the milk. Last year, they got a soft-serve machine to make frozen yogurt with their milk, and are looking forward to making that more of a focus of their farmstand this year.
“We serve it into a dish and put fun toppings on it,” Baglione said. “We’re excited to go full-tilt on fro-yo this year.”
They also grow vegetables, and are proud of their farm share program, which last year had 40 people who signed up to get 20 weeks of fresh produce. The farmers run the program on a sliding scale that starts at $0 and goes to twice the cost of the share, which this year is valued at $650. Although most people round either up or down from the full cost, paying a little less or a little more, as they are able, some do pay double the cost to help their neighbors.
“Which is amazing,” Baglione said. “We ask that if you can pay a little extra, please do. It helps us fund those who pay a little less. We just really don’t feel like food should be a luxury.”
Growing tulips — arguably more of a luxury in Maine in the colder months — also makes that kind of work more possible, they said.
“They allow us to have cash flow at the front of the season, which lets us do more food access things with our vegetables,” Baglione said.
Over the last three years, they’ve been experimenting with how early they can start the growing season. Tulips like it cool, so they set the thermostat in the propane-heated greenhouse at 60 degrees. Every square inch in the greenhouse is filled with milk crates of tulips in various stages of readiness, from green stems poking up through the soil to unopened but colorful blossoms that are ready to be picked.
The farmers pick the flowers before they have bloomed, so that their customers will get the longest vase life possible, they said.
“We try to catch them in their prime, so that they’re really putting on most of their show for our customers,” Baglione said. “Which is funny, because we almost never see them all the way open, unless we snag a bouquet for ourselves.”
When they harvest, they pull the whole flower, bulb and all, out of the soil. Although tulips in home gardens are perennial plants which come up year after year, they treat the flowers as if they are annuals.
“Part of that is because when we use the whole plant to get the longest stems possible, there’s not enough foliage left for it to photosynthesize and store up energy to use next year,” Baglione said. “The other reason is because we’re growing them so intensely, we’re really managing for the potential for disease all the time. Because we’re not reusing the same soil every year, we just clear them out.”
They’ll pick from the heated greenhouse until March, at which point they’ll switch to the beds of tulips they’re propagating in an unheated greenhouse.
Growing 45 varieties of tulips ordered from the Netherlands, they never get tired of the tulips.
“We just have no idea what will be blooming. Every morning when we come in here, it’s always a surprise,” Kalan said.
So far, at least, their customers have shown no indication of getting tired of tulips, either. The farmers sell bouquets at the Belfast Farmers’ Market on Fridays at the Aubuchon Hardware greenhouse and also through the Daybreak Growers Alliance, Bahner Farm, the Belfast Co-op, the Blue Hill Co-op, the Lincolnville Center General Store, the Monroe Country Store, the Marsh River Co-op in Brooks and the Maine Beer Shed in Kingfield.
This time of year is a bit of a whirlwind, but that’s fine by the farmers. Two years ago, in their first tulip harvest, they didn’t know what to expect.
“We were about to pick our first tulips when everything shut down in [March] 2020,” Baglione said. “We were nervous. Four hundred bouquets felt like so many.”
But more people wanted tulips than they could have dreamed.
“Everything was so uncertain and everybody just wanted something bright and colorful and spring-timey,” Kalan said.
That desire for a bit of spring in the waning months of winter is something that hasn’t gone away. They feel it, too, and so do their employees.
“It’s so refreshing to come in here to the warm propagation house and see some green,” Victoria Violet, an employee who was busy wrapping bouquets of tulips, said. “This time of year, it’s an itch. And this soothes the itch.”