Cherry Blossom Festival puts petal to metal Tuesday
Family business part of British Columbia’s fourth largest agricultural sector
Few sights are prettier than a field of daffodils in bloom — unless you’re a flower farmer.
Daffodils destined for market must be picked at “pencil stage,” when their slender stems taper to a yellow point. A field of blossoms represents a missed opportunity.
On a recent morning in Abbotsford, thousand of flowers on the verge of bursting into colour are being harvested by hand. The stems are bundled into bouquets and then transported to a grocery store.
The process makes Peter Warmerdam smile and shake his head.
“I never thought it would be like this,” said the 90-year-old farmer, recalling the small patch of daffodils he planted as a sideline more than 50 years ago.
Since then, daffodils and tulips have become the family business.
Lakeland Flowers produces more than 10 million field-grown daffodils in the three weeks before Easter, in addition to millions of tulips from October to the end of spring. Now run by Peter’s son, Nick Warmerdam, the farm is part of B.C.’s fourth-largest agricultural sector measured by farm cash receipts. Floriculture growers generated about 82.2 million cut flowers worth $284.6 million in 2016, according to statistics provided by the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture.
Lakeland is also the force behind Bloom, the wildly successful Abbotsford tulip festival run by Peter’s granddaughter, Alexis Warmerdam. In its first year, the event attracted 100,000 people, tripling expectations, and caused lineups on Highway 1. The traffic problems were solved, and although rainy weather hampered ticket sales, 80,000 people attended the festival last spring.
“It’s nice to do something that makes people happy,” said Alexis. “But the best days are the ones when Grandpa visits.”
Peter and his wife Betty remain a presence on the farm, which now encompasses almost 200 acres on Abbotsford’s Sumas Prairie.
Peter was born in 1927 in Sassenheim, one of the best bulb-growing
regions in the Netherlands, known for its bulbs. Married, he immigrated to Canada in 1948 and was eventually joined by his family, including five brothers and a sister. He married Betty, his second wife, in 1960, and together they tended several rented fields in the Bradner area. “All the kids would sit in the back of our little truck, and we’d go from field to field to pick flowers,” recalled Betty, now 82.
The daffodils were stored in a cool barn. A Vancouver Sun truck, empty after delivering newspapers, would pick up the flowers on its return trip and bring them to a wholesaler.
Betty remembers rushing to her children’s school one day during a particularly warm spring, asking
for them to be released from class to help pick the flowers that were suddenly blooming all at once.
In 1974, the farm moved to the Sumas Prairie. By that time, Nick was involved in running the business, which had gradually shifted from producing bulbs and some cut flowers to almost exclusively cut flowers. While bulbs are still collected from the fields to grow the following year’s crop, many more are imported to grow millions of tulips in a large greenhouse. From October to early spring, the family supplies several grocery chains in B.C. and Alberta with greenhouse-grown tulips before the field crop is ready.