Dona Flora Herbs: Four decades of hard, beautiful work
On Instagram, flower farming looks idyllic.
Beauty is a given when flowers are your main crop—but Beth Hailey of Dona Flora Herbs knows the grit behind the glamour.
One of the first small-scale flower growers in Skagit County, she has been raising flowers, herbs, and specialty vegetables for 41 years. She knows what it takes to start seeds and transplant, weed, water, pick, arrange, market and sell their blooms. She’ll tell you about coping with mud, drought, cold spells, heat waves, and wholesale clients who declare bankruptcy without paying you. About prepping flowers for a wedding until midnight and getting up early the next morning to set them up.
“My mom works harder than anyone I have ever known,” says Hailey’s daughter Maya Romero. “She works all the time. I don’t think she’ll ever stop.”
Hailey had been growing annual and perennial flowers for six years when her husband died in 1987. Romero was 13 and her younger brother Ole was 11.
The new widow faced a tough decision: get a job, or stick with her business? She listened to her customers, and today has four decades of flexibility and persistence under her belt. Flexibility, because small farmers who rent land have to be ready to move on short notice. Persistence, because she shows up day after day, week after week, year after year to work her magic, no matter the weather or economy.
She shows up to farm in rainstorms. Shows up at the Bellingham Farmer’s Market on days so chilly most other vendors have stayed home. Shows up for her Sunday job at the Skagit Food Coop and her twice-a-week spring gig at Christianson’s Nursery, because multitasking is how the smallest farmers make ends meet.
If you live in or visit Skagit County, you’ve enjoyed Hailey’s small tabletop bouquets during breakfast at the Calico Cupboard. Shop at the Skagit Valley Coop and her bunches of her sweet peas and dahlias are just inside the front door. Browse the fall Rexville Grange Art Show for her dried flowers and braids of garlic, and you can sip hot cider flavored with her mulling spices.
Most of what she grows she places directly into someone’s hands. At the Bellingham Farmer’s Market, her tomato starts and dahlia tubers meet enthusiastic gardeners, and her bouquets, herbal salves, peppers and tiny lemon cucumbers find eager buyers. Not to mention the hundreds of couples whose wedding flowers she has done. “Now I’m doing flowers for their children’s weddings,” Hailey says.
For the last 10 years, she has farmed at the eastern slope of Pleasant Ridge on Best Road. This one-acre plot, the sixth place she has rented, had never been farmed. “I didn’t realize that bindweed and horsetail were waiting in the ditches for me, and I never had to deal with reed canary grass before,” she says. On the other hand, the soil absorbs moisture better than her previous plot. Except in spring, when water can pour down from the Ridge.
Even her single acre requires year-round work. In January she orders seeds. In March, she starts those seeds in her home greenhouse or her three Best Road hoop houses. One is devoted to tomato starts, another to culinary peppers of all kinds. In the third are delicate gomphrena, celosia, ageratum, and early dahlias. Outside, as the weather improves, she plants rows of beans, a thick stand of dahlias, and flowers tall and small. A hundred-foot long border of hydrangeas yields gorgeous blooms in the fall.
In spring, Hailey and her seasonal workers keep weeds away from the “babies”—newly planted plants and transplants.
In summer, watering is more important than weeding. “I focus on things I have just planted and things that are reaching blooming time,” she says. “Things in the middle I can water last.”
In hot weather, she keeps the hoop houses cool and moist so their residents don’t burn up.
Summer has its own rhythm. Hailey gets up early to tend plants at her house, make deliveries, and irrigate. Workers arrive about 11 o’clock. Everyone eats together around 2. On Tuesdays, she and her workers pick flowers for deliveries to local restaurants and coops. She makes deliveries on Wednesday mornings. On Thursdays, some workers weed, mow and water; others pick. Fridays are long and intense, as the crew preps for the Saturday market and that weekend’s weddings.
As fall approaches, the focus is stretching out the selling season. The day before the first frost, workers cut every dahlia or dahlia bud with even a little color and put them in the farm cooler to ripen. The beans are cut from their poles and dried in Hailey’s sunny living room. Flowers that can be dried end up in holiday wreaths, swags and dried bouquets.
All the while, Hailey is keeping dozens of details in her head: what’s planted where, what’s in the farm cooler, what’s starting or drying in her home garden, what is needed for which market or wedding, what has to be loaded on the truck and delivered.
Hailey doesn’t mind. “It makes me happy,” she says. “I like doing puzzles, and every year is a puzzle. How will I rotate plants that shouldn’t be planted in the same place, which ones need more sun, which have to be staked, how to make sure dahlias are planted and labeled according to the map I make, and more.”
Janet Murray of Bellingham didn’t grow up around agriculture. Working for Hailey, “I was astounded at how close the margins are and how she was able to keep her business going,” she said. “But I also learned that being outside is a beautiful life. *#*!* miserable sometimes, but a great life in a lot of ways.”
Hailey can be a demanding boss—but she’s also kind, says daughter Romero, who makes bouquets very Friday during growing season. “I could call her at 11 at night and say I need help and she would drive over and help me. As busy as she is, she would do anything for you.”
And she asks a lot of herself. Hailey is over 70 now, with no plans to stop farming. “I will continue as long as my body will continue,” she says.
Until then, she’ll stay in motion. “I can’t just stand here,” she says on a summer day. “I have to cut.”
Story and photo with list by Anne Basye: info@skagitonians.org
All other photos by Marci Plank