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Rene Van Wingerden has been growing flowers on the Santa Barbara County coast for nearly 50 years.
Fresh as a daisy A gerbera’s journey from
Van Wingerden’s farm to your home actually begins more than half a year earlier, when gerbera plants arrive at the farm as tissue cultures in trays. “It takes 10 weeks from that stage in our propagation house,” Van Wingerden said, “then another 10 weeks before we pick our first flowers, and then it takes another 20weeks before we actually have a commercial production.”
Blooming business Rene Van Wingerden works to bring floral beauty to your home
Story by Kevin Hecteman • Photo by Stephen Osman
Carpinteria, roughly halfway along the coast between Santa Barbara and Ventura, has long been a hotbed of flower farming. Nestled among all those greenhouses, some of which you’ll easily see fromHighway 101, is Ocean Breeze Farms, started nearly 50 years ago by a Dutch immigrant with family roots in farming that go back centuries. Rene VanWingerden launchedOcean Breeze Farms in 1973, usingwhat he learned fromhis father and fromFuture Farmers of America in his school days—as he put it, “I went to the College of Hard Knocks.” Once upon a time, VanWingerden and his relatives grew chrysanthemums, but he discontinued that flower several years ago amid intense competition from imports. “Now, we are focusing on gerbera daisies,” he said. “We have oriental lilies, andwe do have some hydrangeas. We try to try different things and seewhat fits into our marketing program.” Cut flowers grown in California contribute more than just beauty—the state accounted for 74% of the country’s wholesale production value, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, at $4.02 billion in 2019—the most recent year for which statistics are available.
Carpinteria
Going coastal Why Carpinteria? After Rhode Island and Colorado proved too snowy for the VanWingerden brothers, they made their way to California. One morning at breakfast in Santa Barbara, one of the uncles noted the ideal coastal climate and said, “This is it, guys.” Flower farmers want warm days and cold nights, VanWingerden noted, something the Central Coast and interior have. “So they kept going down the coast to Carpinteria, and they found 28 acres,” he said. “That’s how history was laid out.”
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May/June 2021
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