- Maggie is a one-woman flower farming force of nature.
- My name is Maggie, and I am the owner/operator
of Green Light Farm in Prairie Farm, Wisconsin.
- She came to Prairie Farm to realize her vision
of growing locally produced, sustainable cut flowers.
- So a lot of people think more and more
about where their food's coming from,
but people don't necessarily always think about
where their flowers are coming from or how they're grown.
So when you seek out local flowers,
that supply chain is so much shorter, so much simpler.
You're getting a product that is fresh.
Every flower that I sell was sold
within days of being harvested here on the farm.
- One of the things I really enjoy about Maggie and her farm
is following her social media.
She's always posting the most beautiful pictures
of just this amazing variety of cut flowers
throughout the year.
And this spring, she showed me how she cares for
and harvests her tulips,
the first cut flowers of the year.
[groovy guitar music]
- So this year and the past couple of years,
I've grown about 20,000 tulips.
They're all harvested by hand
and sold here on the farm, throughout western Wisconsin,
and in the Twin Cities.
Tulip season is only a couple of weeks long.
It's very energy-intensive.
We harvest tulips one, two, sometimes three times a day,
seven days a week until they're all harvested.
- For me, it is so interesting
to see this different style of farming,
so different than dairy farming,
and realize the amount of work and knowledge
that really goes into this.
- When I harvest tulips, I pull the whole thing up,
bulb and all, outta the ground.
I harvest them into crates.
I then take them into my barn.
I wash the dirt off the stems.
[hose spraying]
Put them in the cooler.
And then when I'm ready to sell them,
they come out of the cooler, we snip off the bulbs,
put them in water,
and then they go out into the world from there.
[whimsical music]
- Is a hoop house something that you definitely need to have
to be growing your production flowers in Wisconsin?
- So I don't think that you necessarily need to have it,
depending on what you're growing.
But for me, my production
is increasingly more and more focused
on early and late season, and then perennial crops,
so when I grow things inside the hoop house,
I have a lot more, just control.
So I can grow things earlier.
I can grow things later.
And also the quality of the flowers is nicer
because I get longer stems in here.
I also have control over water and things like that.
So it just gives me higher quality flowers
earlier and later than I could otherwise have.
- How do you choose which flowers to plant?
- Some of it's trial and error.
Some of it is guessing on what I think demand will be.
Some of it is just colors that I'm drawn to,
that I just really want to grow.
So it's a little bit of a lot of things.
- That's the way it should be.
It should be what you wanna grow, right?
Tell me about those early seasons.
I notice on your Instagram,
it's like my favorite thing about spring
is when you're posting these beautiful pictures
of these tulips.
And the colors of the tulips are just,
I've never seen anything like it before.
It's just the most beautiful tulips ever.
Is that how you start your season?
- It is.
So every season ends with planting tulips
and then begins with harvesting tulips.
So it's very labor-intensive,
but it's also just one of the more important crops
in terms of the business, but also I think it's the crop
that really connects with people most
coming out of the wintertime.
And one of my favorites to grow.
[gentle music]