Sacramento Digs Gardening Article
Your resource for Sacramento-area gardening news, tips and events

Articles Recipe Index Keyword Index Calendar Twitter Facebook Instagram About Us Contact Us

Celebrate American Flowers Week! Buy local

Sacramento Digs Gardening
BY Debbie Arrington PUBLISHED JUL 1, 2019

A dress covered in gerbera daisies, designed by Jenny M. Diaz, represents California in American Flowers Week's botanical couture collection. (Photo courtesy Jenny M. Diaz/American Flowers Week)

Support California growers of ‘Slow Flowers’

The last time you bought flowers, did you wonder: Where did these come from? Who grew these blooms and how?

This is American Flowers Week, a celebration of the nation’s flower farmers. It’s the ornamental equivalent of farm to fork. This is field (or garden) to vase.

Getting to know more about the source of bouquets is at the crux of Slow Flowers and American Flowers Week. Like Slow Food and its connection to locally sourced ingredients, Slow Flowers emphasizes locally sourced blooms and decorative material.

Slow Flowers expert Debra Prinzing came up with American Flowers Week in 2015 to draw attention to attempts to bring back commercial flower farming to the United States. About 80 percent of all flowers sold in the U.S. are grown overseas.

“I get asked this question often: Why should I care where my flowers come from?” Prinzing said. “The parallels between the Slow Food movement and the Slow Flowers movement are obvious. When we know where, who and how flowers are grown, we vote with our pocketbook.”

To show off some eye-popping blooms, Slow Flowers floral designers across the country created dresses entirely out of flowers. The botanical couture collection is featured in Florists’ Review magazine and at AmericanFlowersWeek.com .

Jenny M. Diaz, a Fresno-based artist and graphic designer, represented California in the collection with a '60s-style mod shift studded with hundreds of California-grown gerbera daisies. Diaz photographed the stunning pink and orange dress in her hometown.

“It's projects like these that help elevate and raise awareness about U.S. domestic floral agriculture and sustainable floral design,” Prinzing said. “The public and professionals are invited to download a library of free resources from the website (AmericanFlowersWeek.com), including graphics, images, floral coloring sheets and social media tools. Participation in American Flowers Week is open to all.”

Is American Flowers Week catching on?

Prinzing measures its impact via social media. In 2015, American Flowers Week made 400,000 social media impressions (Facebook shares, Instagram hits, etc.). Last year, it topped 4 million.

Its impact continues all year long as more farmers get into growing flowers.

Said Prinzing, “What I find really exciting is the amazing diversification, especially in small-cut flower farms, including those in the Sacramento Valley, who are growing unusual and heirloom annual varieties of cut flowers from ageratum to zinnias, highly valued garden roses for the floral marketplace, and flowers that the home gardener might never try growing, such as lisianthus.”

Comments

0 comments have been posted.

GENERAL GARDENING

An article about gardening.

Keywords:

American Flowers Week cut flowers Sacramento Sacramento Valley commercial flowers farms events farm to vase gardening Fresno Slow Flowers blooms flowers

Newsletter Subscription

Sacramento Digs Gardening to your inbox.

Taste Spring! E-cookbook

Find our spring recipes here!

Local News

Thanks to our sponsor!

Sites We Like

Garden Checklist for week of May 19

Temperatures will be a bit higher than normal in the afternoons this week. Take care of chores early in the day – then enjoy the afternoon. It’s time to smell the roses.

* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. If you haven’t already, it’s time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.

* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.

* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.

* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters.

* Plant dahlia tubers. Other perennials to set out include verbena, coreopsis, coneflower and astilbe.

* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.

* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.

* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.

* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.

* Don’t forget to water. Seedlings need moisture. Deep watering will help build strong roots and healthy plants.

* Add mulch to the garden to help keep that precious water from evaporating. Mulch also cuts down on weeds. But don’t let it mound around the stems or trunks of trees or shrubs. Leave about a 6-inch to 1-foot circle to avoid crown rot or other problems.

Taste Summer! E-cookbook

Find our summer recipes here!

Taste Fall! E-cookbook

Find our fall recipes here!

Taste Winter! E-cookbook

Find our winter recipes here!