SAN DIEGO — The beauty of a fresh cut flower never fails to affect Cathryn Henning.
Henning is one of the owners of BeeWorthy Farms, a women-owned certified organic flower farm dedicated to growing flowers worthy of the pollinators.
With their no-chemical, regenerative and organic farming practices, she is hoping to bring San Diego back to embrace local growers over flowers imported from around the world.
“When you get these local blooms, you can actually harvest them at this really, really open stage because I’m not putting them on an airplane and trying to ship it and cold storage for thousands of miles,” Henning said. “Their wildness and their beauty really speak for themselves. You can see the difference of a garden grown bloom sitting next to a greenhouse grown bloom.”
Henning said Encinitas is sometimes referred to as the "Flower Capital of the World” and is the world's leading grower of the poinsettia, a proud history that dates back to the 1920s.
According to Green America, 80% of flowers sold in the U.S. are now imported from other countries, and they say transporting fresh-cut flowers internationally results in excess carbon emissions that contribute to the climate crisis.
“These big events have really driven and fueled this global supply for flowers, as have major holidays as well," Henning said. "Wanting poinsettias for your Christmas table or wanting red roses for Valentine’s Day when roses really aren’t growing for Valentine’s Day. It’s kind of silly that Valentine’s Day is in February and it’s one of the biggest flower holidays, because flowers just really aren’t growing in February.”
Cristina Juarez is supporting local flower farmers with her shop, Inecui, the only flower shop in San Diego to offer only locally grown flowers that are grown using natural practices. She said all the flowers here are from farms that are less than 30 miles from their location in City Heights.
“If we look for local flowers, we’re getting really prime quality because they were harvested this week," Juarez said. "These flowers were harvested today and people can come and get them right now.”
She said they want to empower people to make better choices, whether it’s buying marigolds for Dia de Muertos or poinsettias for Christmas.
“Sometimes the market and the demand for things make you think that people don’t care and they’ll just buy anything but I think when you present options, people will choose what is best, not only for them but for everything around them,” Juarez said.
The team at BeeWorthy Farms hopes they can help everyone embrace the wild beauty of a locally grown garden bloom.
“They get to be a little wonky sometimes or become their full expression and I love that we get to share that part of the farm and bring it into people’s lives," Henning said. "I think we all need to feel a little bit more free and able to express ourselves.”
In 2018, Valentine’s Day flowers grown in Colombia and flown to U.S. airports produced some 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to estimates by the International Council on Clean Transportation. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to 78,000 cars driven for one year.