ORRINGTON, Maine — Julia Violette laughed when asked if her last name meant she was destined to grow flowers. But then admits growing them is "a passion."
That becomes quickly evident when you step inside the small barn beside her house, which has been converted to a nursery for growing early season tulips.
"I still get excited by tulips, and there’s no way in my lifetime that I could exhaust all the varieties we could go through in growing," Violette said, surrounded by thousands of the green and growing flowers.
Violette's Paint Box Flower Farm is a business that works year-round to grow and sell flowers to Bangor-area florists and multiple retail stores. In summer, she hires additional staff to grow and tend large swaths of outdoor flowers, as well as some inside "tunnel" greenhouses. In winter, Violette is on her own, using a technique called "forcing" to get tulips growing and blooming months earlier than they would in nature.
The tulip bulbs are planted in crates, 66 bulbs to a crate, in October, then put into dark, chilled rooms to mimic being planted in the ground.
Then, a few at a time, the crates are brought out and warmed up, and the plants begin to grow.
"I pull 20 crates a week of tulips [out of the chilly darkness] and have been pulling 20 a week since mid-December, so we have already gone through a lot of tulips," she explained.
They are harvested just before the buds are ready to break open into bloom, ensuring the maximum life of the blossom once a customer takes them home.
Some 30 miles away in Exeter, Mary Lou Hoskins is doing much the same thing, forcing her own tulips to bloom early, to sell to a few florists and at a farmers’ market. There are other flower varieties also growing in her small greenhouse. Hoskins says working with them at this time of year simply feels good.
"Absolutely," she said of the good feeling on a sunny winter day in the greenhouse. "It’s the only thing that keeps me sane through February."
For both flower farmers, the pace of the work will start to speed up as spring approaches, then go into high gear as flowers begin growing throughout their farms in summer.
At the same time, the marketplace for their flowers will also expand considerably, thanks to the Maine Flower Collective. It’s a marketing co-op created last year by about 20 growers and some buyers, to help the farmers have a wider market for what the grow and help buyers access more varieties of Maine grown flowers.
"Not just cut flowers," Hoskins said. "It's local cut flowers. Those grown locally are that much fresher and alive. Most of the flowers sold in this country come from overseas."
Hoskins and Violette say florists especially are happy to get locally grown flower, because of variety and because they last longer. The Collective, Violette, helps everyone.
"So my product can hit other florists or event designers I would never be able to touch," she explained, pointing to buyers or designers in the Portland area, far from her farm—too far to make individual delivery feasible.
"They are getting product from farms they wouldn’t normally have access to," Violette added.
The Collective provides an online site where buyers can choose flowers and growers, then the collective makes the pickups and deliveries.
The ultimate goal, Hoskins said, is to get more locally-grown flowers into the market, which they all believe will be better for farmers, buyers and customers.
"Local flowers are such a big deal," Hoskins said, "because they’re better, they are fresher, and you’re supporting local business when you buy local flowers."
They hope that will all translate into better profits for flower farmers, and eventually, encourage more farms to open up, as Mainers begin to demand Maine-grown blooms.