When we first bought our land, it was covered with a thick growth of 20-year-old cedar. Little by little, as we could afford it, we had it cleared with a bulldozer, but we left a few pockets near the house. One grove was just across the driveway, and we wanted to clear the branches underneath so our children had a shady place to play. We had a Mexican fellow , Emiliano, who worked for us a little bit. He spoke no English, and back then Frank’s Spanish was rudimentary, at best (“I could order a beer in a border cantina, but not much more,” he says). Frank asked Emiliano to please “cut the cedars up to here”, using hand motions to indicate how high he wanted to clear up to. Emiliano looked puzzled, but said sure, no problem. About an hour later we looked over, and the trunks of the cedars were sticking up out of the ground to about six feet, with no branches above that! Emiliano had lopped them off cleanly at six feet and dragged the tops away. Cripes!

He was about halfway through the grove when we noticed, and we went running over. Because they were only cedars, we weren’t too upset, but what was he thinking? Well, it turns out that, in Spanish, Frank said “cut them to here” without telling Emiliano what direction (top or bottom) to measure from! Emiliano figured we wanted to cut them down, but he said later he couldn’t understand why we wanted to leave those ugly trunks sticking up six feet! By this time we were all in stitches laughing at how absurd the trees looked. Emiliano explained that we should have said limpiar abajo (clean below) if we wanted to clear underneath. It was a good lesson, and one that didn’t cost us too much.

That story illustrates how hard it is to communicate what you want done. One of the hardest jobs for us here is to try to teach a new crew to cut flowers just the way we need them. We have learned that the puzzled look that we first saw on Emiliano’s face means that something is about to go terribly wrong! It means we are heading for the floral equivalent of chopped cedars, only this time it’s delphiniums about to go down! Over the past few years, some of the same guys return every year for our summer crew, so we have some experience and continuity in our cutting crew, but this winter we are training some new folks, and we realize again just how hard it is to explain something that you’ve done so much that you just take it for granted.

The biggest problems come from the fact that there is no hard-fast grading standard for field-grown specialty cuts. Every farm has a different standard, and ours is pretty high. A lot of folks think that we are pretty tough to work for because we are so picky about what we send out. We are perfectionists – we have to be. But how did we come to learn, or see, what the quality has to be?

First of all, we always tell people that you have to be a flower buyer to be a good flower grower. We firmly believe that you need to buy flowers in the off-season and keep flowers in your house all the time. We buy flowers. Even in the peak of our field season, Frank will come home with a big bunch of South African proteas or even Ecuadorian roses when they are just too exquisite to pass up. As flower growers, it’s important that we keep flowers in our lives all the time.

We are always amazed at the number of flower growers who don’t buy flowers for themselves. The most important reason to buy flowers, we believe, is that it shows you what your competition is doing, and what they are doing right. The standards that those flowers had to pass to make it through a Dutch flower auction or a Miami wholesaler are the minimum standards that we have to shoot for. When we buy an exquisite bunch of flowers, we analyze what it is that makes that bunch so exquisite. what made us want to buy it as an impulse item in the first place? That is the standard that we shoot for with our flowers. We want customers to be unable to pass them up.

We have two different “standards” for our cutting – one for bouquets and one for straight bunches. These standards may differ in stem length or flower size, but they can’t differ in quality. Bouquet flowers have to be as high quality as the straight bunch material. As we always say, if you put your #2 flowers in your bouquets, you end up with #2 bouquets. That’s not good enough for Martha Stewart and that’s not good enough for us!

When we start to train new pickers, we try to impress upon them an image of the person who buys our flowers. In our case, it is generally a person who is educated, sophisticated, and financially secure enough to shop at an upscale grocery store. These folks read Martha Stewart Living, Southern Living, and Metropolitan Home, and they want flowers just as nice as the arrangements in the articles and ads they read. Our customers at the farmers’ market would also fall into this category. These folks want high quality flowers, and are usually willing to pay for them.

One of the first things we try to train is to cut consistently. First and foremost, we need all the stems in a bucket to be cut to the same length. This is important for several reasons. When the flowers are all the same length, you can tell if one or two stems aren’t in the water because they are sticking up. Secondly, you don’t have flowers on shorter stems being crunched and damaged by the longer stems. Thirdly, when the buckets are evenly cut and packed, you can consistently estimate the number of stems or bunches you will be packing. For instance, we know that one bucket of marigolds, straight out of the field , will usually pack out as 12 bunches for sale. This gives us a way to estimate at a glance how many buckets will be used for bouquets, and how many buckets we have available to straight bunch. If the stems are picked too tall or too short, it changes the number of stems in the bucket, and throws us off.

The main reason we like to cut consistent lengths in the field is that it eliminates a lot of work in the packing shed. We have a set length that we need stems to be for bouquet-making, and when they are too long they slow down the assembly line because they are awkward to handle. Even worse is when the stems are too short. These are just plain unusable, and a waste of time and money. We tell our workers that for bouquets, the stems have to be a minimum of 20 inches long. Frank uses his forearm, plus 4 inches, as a measurement, measured from the inside of the elbow. This is about 21 inches. But Frank is over 6 feet tall, and most people have shorter forearms, so everyone has to find their own measurement.

For the bouquets, we don’t need the stems to be over 24 inches long as a rule, the exceptions being flowers like lilies, snapdragons, or delphiniums that we want to sit up above the bouquet as a focal flower; also, the spiky flowers have to rise above the bulk of the bouquet. Anything longer is hard to work with, and in the case of flowers that regrow below the cut, such as zinnias, wastes buds that could grow into more flowers. For our straight-bunched material, we cut them to varying lengths depending on the crop. But it is still very important to be consistent within every crop, because it makes the packing so much easier. In the past, we have run into problems with workers trying to be too consistent. People try really hard to get all the flowers in the bucket really even, but they will find very inventive ways to do it! The worst case is when a person cuts the stems at different lengths, but then puts all the flower heads together and trims the bottoms to match. This wastes a great deal of time, and also wastes the potential future production from the plant material that is cut off. One day, all of a sudden, all the zinnia buckets looked too good to be true. When we checked, the whole crew had started re-cutting the stems. It is much better to learn how to cut the right length on the first cut.

Another problem is when a cutter tries to cut consistently with the shortest flower in the crop. We had this happen with our lily crop last spring. All the buckets came in looking very consistent, but were at least a foot shorter than they should have been. Turned out that the person cutting was cutting everything even with the shortest stem, and was leaving 8 to 12 inches of stem sitting in the field! Ouch! So these are some problems to watch for.

On the subject of stems and recutting, it is SO important that the ends of the stems are kept even as you cut, so they are all in the water in the bucket. We teach all our workers to tap the stem ends together every few cuts with the side of their Felco cutters, so the bunches stay even. We also count on one person to carry flowers to the buckets for the cutters, and it is his or her job to double check that the stem ends are even.

Cutting to a certain length is somewhat easy to explain because it is quantifiable – either it is or it isn’t 24 inches long! Cutting for flower quality is a whole ‘nother matter. What we consider old or damaged, other people see as just fine. Sometimes we have groups or events that need some flowers as a donation, and we’ll tell them to come out and glean some beds that we are through with. It’s downright scary what some folks will pick! So when we train new cutters, we have to work really carefully with them so they see just what we need. Sometimes it is easy. For instance, we say pick larkspur when at least one flower is open. This is pretty straightforward. But how do you explain when a zinnia is just right or past its peak, even though it looks fine? As long as you pick every zinnia that is ready every week, the situation is less complicated. Worse yet is trying to explain how to cut lilies when you are cutting just before the first bud opens. You have to go by bud color and size, and that is different for each variety. In these cases we have to work very closely with new cutters for several weeks, until they finally have enough experience that they can see what we need.

Consistency in packing the final bunches and bouquets is just as important as consistency when cutting, if not more so. This is when we can give our flowers that look that makes them an impulse item. There are so many little subtle things that need to be learned. For example, we are fanatics about how high a sleeve goes up on a bouquet. Sometimes people think we are irrational about such things, but it really makes a difference. If a sleeve is too low, some flowers hang out the side, particularly sunflowers, which not only damages the flowers, but makes the whole bouquet look sloppy. But put the sleeve too high and you can’t see the flowers. It also matters to us how the bunches and bouquets are arranged in a bucket. We like to see the bouquets standing straight up in the bucket. If they are put in the bucket in a crisscross manner, the bunches stick out over the side of the bucket. This means that more flowers will be damaged in shipping. But it also means that the bucket just looks sloppy – there we are again.

To sum it up, we try to work on the WWMD principle–What Would Martha Do? Presentation is everything in this business, and if flowers are cut, packed and displayed with consistent “panache,” your reputation will precede you. But just like anything else in the fashion world, we have to stay up on the latest trends, and you have to know “how the other half lives!” So buy yourself flowers this winter – nice ones. Flowers that you’d be proud to have grown yourself. Next month we’ll talk about a visit to a “Dutch” flower auction, and some more specific info about grading flowers. Feliz Navidad!

Pamela and Frank Arnosky are the owners of Texas Specialty Cut Flowers in Blanco, Texas. They write about cut flowers in this space every month.