Flower farming in the Fraser Valley
The cheery colours of tulips celebrate the arrival of spring. And in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, tulips also form a significant part of the agricultural economy. We recently visited two of the region’s top flower producers to learn more about how they are tapping into agri-tourism during the spring tulip season.
The Harrison Tulip Festival is billed as Canada’s largest. The Onos family was the first in B.C. to open their bulb-growing farm to visitors and start a tulip festival.
“In order to grow bulbs, you have to let them go to bloom, and we had these fields that we enjoyed with family and friends,” said owner Kate Onos-Gilbert. “In 2006, I wanted to open the fields to the public to enjoy as well.”
It started slowly, but over the years the festival grew. This year, the 109-acre farm near Agassiz and Harrison Hot Springs had 45 acres in flowers, including 150 tulip varieties and an estimated 14 million blooms.
With the riot of colour and mountain backdrop, it was named the World’s Most Instagrammable Tulip Farm at the World Tulip Summit in Holland.
Paths run throughout the flower field so visitors can wander around and take photos. Other draws include bouquet-making workshops, yoga among the flowers and food trucks specializing in Dutch food. New this year, they added a special night garden with illuminated flower displays over five nights, along with music and food. It proved so popular that it sold out.
Besides hosting the festival, Onos Farms specializes in growing and selling a variety of flowers in addition to tulips, such as peonies, hyacinths, daffodils and double tulips that look like peonies to the untrained eye.
“Everything that’s in the field is grown for cut flowers, so they are tried and true ones that work well for us,” said Onos-Gilbert. “We import a lot from Holland for our greenhouses, and then we try to figure out what grows best in this climate.”
The Abbotsford Tulip Festival is run by Lakeland Flowers, a farm operated by Nick Warmerdam and his partner, Elena Middlemass. Tulips cover over 30 acres, plus there are four more fields of the same size, so that they can rotate production from year to year.
The family has a long history of growing flowers. Warmerdam’s grandfather was in the flower bulb business in Holland before immigrating to Canada. Then his dad, Peter, started growing tulips and other flowers, such as daffodils, in 1974.
Coming to the festival is much more than simply looking at flowers. Food trucks offer plenty to eat and drink, and innovative photo props, such as brightly coloured benches, gigantic Dutch wooden shoes, and even canoes looking as if they are floating on top of the flowers, keep visitors snapping away. Some days artists are on site painting the colourful scene. Warmerdam said that a lot of marriage proposals take place here.
The most innovative props are the old grand pianos sitting among the flowers. Occasionally, a professional pianist performs, but most of the time the pianos are there for visitors who feel like cranking out a few tunes among the flowers. Warmerdam rigged up a mount on the piano legs so that it can be easily picked up with a front-end loader and moved around.
For many years, selling cut flowers and bulbs was the central part of the business. While still important, Warmerdam indicates that the main source of income for the farm now is ticket sales for the tulip festival. Last year, they had around a hundred thousand people visit. They expect numbers this year to be down a bit because of warmer-than-usual weather.
“I’m in partnership with Mother Nature,” said Warmerdam. “If Mother Nature is not co-operative, it shortens the amount of time we can stay open. If it’s cool, the blooms last longer.”
They have found other ways to extend the flower viewing season. Tulips usually finish around early May, then almost immediately after, there are 30 acres of lupins, peonies, lavender and a variety of meadow flowers that often last into summer.
As in all types of farming, weather plays a crucial role. Heat can shorten the flower season, rain can make the fields muddy for visitors and hail can abruptly end a dazzling display. Parts of the Fraser Valley are also prone to flooding. The atmospheric river of 2021 was especially devastating, killing the bulbs on the Warmerdam farm. (Atmospheric rivers, long, narrow and concentrated regions in the atmosphere, carry moisture from the tropics to higher latitudes, bringing heavy rain/snowfall which can cause significant flooding.)
But the business can be rewarding as well. “You see smiling faces when you walk through the fields,” said Warmerdam. “Somewhere between six and eight thousand people came yesterday, and they all left happy.”
