Poinsettia growers enjoy steady market
FALMOUTH — One of the few things that seems likely to be normal about Christmas this year is a poinsettia on the table or the mantel.
Avon Valley Floral in Falmouth will ship 15,000 poinsettias to small florist shops, though they're not a big money maker.
“Growers will call them poorsettias instead of poinsettias,” said Joanna GouldThorpe, vice-president of business development and operations at Avon Valley Floral.
“The market will only bear a certain price to sell these at, and it costs a fair bit to grow them because they have a long crop time. These are planted in July, about the 17th of July was when we started planting. With a long crop time like that, there's a lot of care involved in them and you can't short circuit that in any way. It eats up costs after a while.”
Poinsettias sold in Atlantic Canada are grown here but come from mother plants in greenhouses in Ontario.
“Cuttings are taken off those, rooted, and then those rooted cuttings are shipped here and we plant them in the pots and in the soil,” GouldThorpe said of the plants that can come in a wide variety of colours but are almost all red.
“Red is by far the highest percentage that people want; typically it's 90 per cent plus of what we grow because that is the classic colour that everybody wants. A few people
have a preference for white or variegated or pink, so we grow a little bit of that, but really it's about red.”
Gould-Thorpe said the wholesale price of poinsettias is up about 10 per cent this year, though she declined to say what that price is. She did say the retail price is all over the map, to the point she can't say with confidence what it will be.
“The volume is up a little bit and price points, I'm sure, will be up,” she said.
“Any florist you walk into in any small town in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, P.E.I., Newfoundland, they're probably buying poinsettias from us. That's our main customer. We do sell to a couple of smaller wholesale markets. You're not going to see our poinsettias at the big boxes; it's just not a market that we're pursuing.”
But it is a market pursued by the Rise and Shine Nursery in St. John's, N.L., where 30,000 poinsettias go out the door each year. That's seven greenhouses' worth and, as at Avon Valley, at least 90 per cent are red.
“We sell on site ourselves, to some of the local florists, and we sell to Kent. Our biggest market is our own shop,” said Jeannette Putt, whose husband, Wayne, is the owner of Rise and Shine.
Prices range from $14.50 for a six-inch pot, which is the most popular, to $39 for a 10-inch and $49 for a 14-inch pot.
Back in Falmouth, GouldThorpe said one of the biggest challenges of the poinsettia business is getting them into homes in good shape, as she describes them as very delicate.
“They don't like to be cold, and yet they're not ready until the first week of December. They very quickly will shrivel up on themselves if they get too cold,” said Gould-Thorpe, calling the transition from a truck into a store the challenge.
“We select our days for shipping based on watching the weather, so if it's looking like it's going to minus 10 overnight, we'll hold the shipment until we can have a temp that's a little more positive,” she said.
“They like room temperature. They don't mind a few degrees transition. They're in
a box, they're in a sleeve, the box taped, so they are insulated. We've done a variety of tests on whether extra insulation helps or not. It doesn't. The cardboard box they're in is good insulation for them.”
Gould-Thorpe, who will have three or four differentsized plants on the mantel and a centrepiece on the table for the holidays, said the most common mistake is to water poinsettias too much.
“Don't love them to death,” she said.