Mark’s Bloomin’ Journal

Safely past the guy with the revolver! Rose farms are huge sprawling affairs in Ecuador. The smells in the greenhouses are a mixture of growing vegetation and warm plastic, plus an agricultural input or two in the form of fertilizer and fungicide. They are very familiar smells to those within the grower community. Outside the greenhouses the sunlight bounces off hectares of plastic, snow melt water gurgles through the properties via eucalyptus lined irrigation canals, and everywhere there is fresh mown grass, manicured pathways, and landscaping, along with perhaps a soccer field complete with rustic stadium or even a bull ring! (more…)

Today is exciting, rewarding, much anticipated and somewhat overdue. Today being the day we hit the refresh button on www.flowerbud.com. While the concept, intent, and spirit remain intact, the grubby fingerprints, aging ideas and methodologies as seen on the screen of the past are wiped away. Today’s refresh button gives a fresh start indeed. Never fear, it was change much needed, not simply change for change’s sake.

It is almost eight years to the day since the original concept, rudimentary conversations, and scratchings on paper aboard a returning SAA flight from Johannesburg to Portland, OR were painstakingly transformed into a web presence and an electronic market stall for some of the USA’s finest and freshest flowers. The original process took six months an inordinate amount of money, and it broke much new ground. It held up, albeit in these last few years with unseen chewing gum and baling wire.

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The scream of turbofan jets seems omnipresent in this city high in the Andes, whose ranges and valleys are interrupted by the snow clad volcanoes, Cayembe, Pichincha and Cotopaxi amongst others. Morning, noon, and night huge aircraft thread the eye of a needle that is the narrow valley, with its densely house-clad slopes making up the environs of this city astride the equator. As passengers come into the recently updated (and vastly improved) airport, the boxes of roses depart in even greater numbers. Some go out on the scheduled airlines beneath the feet of tourists returning from the Galapagos while others fill the freighters’ holds, destined to satiate global demand (more…)

Inevitable as is the inexorable push by the Chinese into all arenas, the reasons behind those that draw a bead on us in the flower industry are very much of interest. One is new while the other has been heard of before.

It has happened with sneakers, with software, and with textiles. It has happened with just about everything in our day to day lives. No matter the laws, the tariffs and trade barriers, the arguments about intellectual property, it keeps on happening. For it to happen there needs to be collusion in the form of markets willing to accept and purchase goods at lower and lower prices, all the while staring their own diminishing industries brazenly and unsympathetically in the face. China now turns at least a little of its attention to Roses and their export. (more…)