The Joy of Picking
In Ottawa, tulips are synonymous with the beloved Canadian Tulip Festival — where immaculate, manicured beds are to be photographed and admired, but not touched. Just outside of the city limits, however, lives a flower-loving couple that wants to share the joy of picking tulips with the world.
“We have to change the Canadian thinking that spring is flowers,” enthuses Manja Bastian, who co-owns Green Corners Farm with her husband, Allan Groen. “I want everybody’s thought process to be, ‘It’s spring, and I must go pick tulips.’”
Located just east of Ottawa in Edwards, Ont., Green Corners is the area’s largest “u pick” flower farm. Last May, more than 500,000 tulips flourished on the 13-acre property. Bastian and Groen — descendants of Dutch immigrants — welcomed about 12,000 visitors in 2022. Attendance is limited to 180 people per hour to ensure the experience is relaxed and enjoyable.
“Mother Nature dictates when we open,” says Bastian, who adds that they plant bulbs to stagger the readiness of the tulips in the spring. “We try to do a crescendo of blooms,” she explains. “We plant some that come early, a lot that come up in the middle season, and a few at the end.”
They plant about 50 varieties of tulips at the farm, mostly Darwins or Triumphs. Bastian adds that about 7,000 varieties of tulips exist, but many are unsuitable for the “u-pick” format. As for the art of picking tulips, it’s really all in the timing.
“You want them to be pointy still, and you want the colour just to be showing slightly between the green,” Bastian says. “So, you actually want them to be more green than colour.”
In bud form, tulips will last between 10 and 14 days in the vase. Unbeknownst to many, they continue to grow after they’ve been picked.
“They’ll still grow about two inches in the vase after you pick them,” Bastian says. “We recommend that you cut a centimetre off the bottom every day or second day, which gives them support and refreshes the bottom.”
Green Corners is also an official partner of the Canadian Tulip Festival. Each year, the festival gives bulbs to the farm. In turn, the farm supplies the tulip bouquets for sale at Commissioners Park, although depending on growing time and suitability, the tulips in the bouquets may differ from the gifted bulbs.
Putting down roots
Soon after they purchased their property and cemented a vision for their business, Bastian and Groen offered up a 10- acre section of their land to Canadian Foodgrains Bank — a partnership of 15 churches and church based agencies working together to end global hunger.
“It was a good partnership for us, too, because we could use their expertise,” explains Bastian, adding that the property hadn’t been farmed for about 40 years. “They came in, did soil samples and told us what fertilizers needed to be added.”
The volunteer farmers chose corn first — to break up the soil with its long roots — followed by a year of soybeans. This year, they’ll be growing late corn. In three years, the proceeds from the crops have raised about $40,000. The funds are used for emergency food assistance during humanitarian crises.
In those early days, Bastian and Groen also installed a tile drainage system — known as a French drain — six feet below the earth’s surface to alleviate excess water in spring, which would rot the tulips.
“It allowed this land to go from being weeds and grass to being productive,” Groen says. “We’re trying to make the land as productive as possible.”
Bastian and Groen launched Green Corners Farm in the fall of 2019. While they jokingly describe themselves as “the most boring couple you’ll ever meet” — Bastian was an accountant, and Groen was a librarian — they recount a colourful life of working and travelling in interesting locations around the world.
Just months after they unveiled the business, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. Fortunately, the spring of 2020 arrived late.
“It was a cold spring, so we didn’t open until May 19,” recalls Bastian of 2020. “The stars aligned for us because that same weekend, the Ford government said that if you were a garden centre, you could open.”
To respect social distancing, the farm limited attendance to 50 people an hour that spring. Groen recalls customers’ joy at being able to venture outside their homes during the pandemic.
“Even the second year, people were saying, ‘this is the first time I’ve been outside in a year,’” he says, adding that many customers would pick their tulips and wander for several hours. “Sometimes people come through the tulips, but also the summer flowers and some of them are just in tears — just absolutely overwhelmed by how beautiful it is. It gives me the chills, some of the reactions.”
Growing the offerings
In just three short years, the couple has grown — pun intended — its business to include a wide array of u-pick summer flowers. Starting in July, customers can choose from sunflowers, zinnias, snapdragons, marigolds, cosmos, carnations, rudbeckia, amaranth, celosia, basil, cardoon, yarrow, purple millet, pennycress, statice, calendula, delphiniums, baby’s breath, eryngium, allium, mint, Liatris, dara, salvia, bupleurum and sedum.
Green Corners offers a “looking” ticket for $5, enabling customers to enter the fields and enjoy the flowers. For those who want to pick flowers, a “picking” ticket is $20 and includes 10 tulips during the u-pick tulip season in May. During summer (starting in July), a picking ticket includes “25 points” of flowers (sunflowers are worth two points, while everything else is one point).”
Advance tickets are sold online and are strongly recommended; it avoids disappointment if the farm is over capacity and people are turned away. Tickets purchased onsite at the farm are $1 to $2 more expensive than online tickets. The farm closes from noon to 4 p.m. in the summer because it would stress the plants to be picked in the high heat.
In addition, the farm now offers “bouquet subscriptions,” meaning customers can pre-order bouquets for weekly or monthly pick-up from the farm. Typically, bouquets include snapdragons in June, zinnias in July and sunflowers in August. Bastian and Groen often enhance bouquets with additional flowers not part of the U-pick offerings, such as dahlias, eucalyptus and gladiolas.
Of course, rows upon rows of beautiful colourful flowers make Green Corners a coveted location for photography.
Typically, late July or early August is the best time to capture photos of the sunflowers at their peak. Sunflowers depend on the sunlight they get; a cloudy week means the sunflowers will be behind schedule.
While customers with looking or picking tickets are welcome to take photos, the farm asks that professional photographers pay a $25 site fee when planning a photo shoot with clients in addition to the clients' picking tickets. (The clients need their own looking or picking tickets as well, including at least one picking ticket per group so that flowers can be picked before, during or after the shoot).
Beauty is meant to be shared
The farm started on social media with a strong Facebook following. Not surprisingly, it has steadily gained followers on image-rich Instagram over the years. Bastian notes that the shift in social platforms has also shifted the demographic of customers to include an increasing number of younger visitors.
“This is the year that we crossed over, where we have more Instagram followers than Facebook followers,” she says. “You definitely see a difference in the crowd.”
Appreciating the beauty of flowers is an experience, evidenced by the fact that the farm is very popular on several non-English speaking social platforms, too.
“There are other social media platforms around... that apparently we’re quite a hit on,” explains Groen, pointing to Weibo — known as the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. He adds he’s been told the business is also quite popular on Filipino and East Indian social apps.
The couple loves that its offerings appeal to such a broad audience; they embrace every opportunity to learn about flower culture around the world.
“There was a Lebanese family who said, ‘You call it snapdragons? We call it the Kissing Fish in Lebanon,’” recalls Groen. “It grows as a wildflower on the side of the road, and they were just in awe; it was the first time they’d seen them since they left Lebanon.”
They also appreciate the traditional clothing that some customers wear for photos on the property.
“Last year, two ladies showed up in their traditional Korean [hanbok],” Groen says. “They spent the whole day here, just wandering and talking and taking pictures; it was really neat.”
Bastian adds that the summer season is longer and more intimate, which gives them more time to talk with customers.
“I feel bad during tulip season because there’s so much going on, and I love talking to people and getting to know them,” she says. In summer, the farm limits attendance to about 25 people an hour to ensure that the “cut and come again flowers” — those plants that put off new shoots after being cut — are picked properly and not too often.
In the future, Bastian and Groen hope to share more of their own culture with customers — in the form of stroopwafels, a beloved treat in the Netherlands.
“Our long-term goal is to have a café with a Dutch theme,” Bastian says. The couple checked out several Dutch food trucks on a recent trip to Holland.
Plans are also afoot for more permanent buildings, such as wrapping stations, storage and event space. Bastian and Groen already work with a number of their neighbours; a small partnership with Rochon Gardens saw their CSA customers receive a small bag of tulip bulbs from Green Corners as a season-ending gift. It’s a way to cross promote local business, and Green Corners is open to new collaborations.
This summer, they look forward to welcoming a group of students who work with a community garden in Russell; the students are coming to Green Corners for a field trip.
“We don’t keep our cards close to our chests,” says Bastian, adding that she’s happy to discuss their business and share their knowledge. They’ve drawn inspiration from Red Roof Family Farm in Kelowna, B.C. and Flower Hill Farm in upstate New York — and they’re happy to return the favour for anyone who asks.
“The way I look at it is, if you look at the Netherlands, everybody is growing tulips, and they’re all making money and making a livelihood. So why can’t we all do that here? “Life is too short; let’s be friends.”
Green Corners Farm
1259 Yorks Corners Rd., Ottawa,
greencorners.ca | 613.898.1801 | @green.corners.farm
