At just 8 degrees Fahrenheit, it was too cold on Monday to take any chances with the armloads of tulips that Lisa Kalan and Angela Baglione grow in their heated greenhouse at Seek-No-Further Farmstead in Monroe.
Especially not on Valentine’s Day, one of the most important days of the year for flower growers, and a day when Kalan and Baglione had many tulip bouquets to wrap and deliver to local stores. Not bad for a couple of farmers who had never even dreamed of growing flowers until a few years ago, when they went on a tour of a Bowdoinham flower farm. That’s where they learned that tulips are always in great demand.
“When we looked into whether it was a good use of our greenhouse space, we learned you can grow so many in such a small space that we thought we would give it a try,’” Baglione, 30, said. “We started with 4,000 bulbs two years ago and we’re growing 40,000 this year.” The flowers come in a dizzying variety of colors and petal shapes and have become a big part of the offerings at Seek-No-Further Farmstead, especially in the winter months when the landscape outside the greenhouse is marked by shades of white and gray.
Baglione and Kalan, 32, business and life partners who met at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, bought the farm in Monroe in 2017. They spent the next two years learning about the area and the community and finding out what other farmers were doing.
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