It’s all coming up roses for Murambi boss
IN THE cloying heat of a rugby field-sized greenhouse women have been hard at work collecting blood-red longstemmed roses from 20 000 red rose bushes ahead of Valentine’s Day next week.
This is the busiest time of year for Murambi Roses rose farm owner Barbara Allen and her staff as they harvest thousands of blooms to supply florists in Port Elizabeth, King William’s Town, Komani and Port Alfred.
“We force our red roses to flush [bloom] by trimming them between Christmas and New Year so that six weeks later, they are ready to pick but still in tight bud,” explained Allen, who opened the Sunrise-on-Sea farm in 2003 with 35 000 rose bushes and doubled the multi-span greenhouse to 70 000 bushes three years later.
When the Saturday Dispatch visited the rose farm this week, gloved women were cutting red roses in the far reaches of the sweltering greenhouse and wheeling rose-laden wheelbarrows to the prep room work counters.
Here women removed lower stem thorns before plunging them into buckets of “post-harvest treatment” water for hydration.
The roses will spend the weekend in two walk-in fridges before couriers whisk them off to florists province-wide.
On Wednesday – Valentine’s Day – orders with East London florists will be filled and this is the day Allen pulls in help from friends and family.
“Some florists top up their orders two or three times on Valentine’s Day, so I need lots of help as we rush back and forth. People also pop into Murambi to buy roses here.
“Some schools also order roses and sell them as fundraisers. I hate waste, so I donate roses that are already open to some old-age homes for Valentine’s Day.” —