Joe and I have been growing Hydrangeas for about 13 years now, we started with bare land and covered about 1.5 hectares with green shade cloth which minimizes the UV strength to 50%, to protect the hydrangeas from the burning effects of the sun We had a big task of preparing the ground and planting out thousands of little plants.

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Picking is usually one of the highlights, we pick them with stems around 40 to 60 cm stems, and we bunch them into 5 stems per bunch to carry them back up to the pack shed

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Then Joe carries them up to the trailer for transporting to the shed.  Sometimes we go a bit fast and get ahead of him

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Sometimes when we pick when it is still wet we have to dry the flowers overnight in the pack shed, this becomes quite a nuisance, especially in a wet season when we have to do this many times

Or if it is a nice morning we have a big avocado tree by the shed where we leave them out with fans on them to dry off

There are many challenges, insects are a big problem, and fungus is another constant battle.  This means that unfortunately we must spray every fortnight with fungicides and pesticides.

It is a big area so we use weedspray to control our weeds

The flowers are then chilled, graded and packed for export

If the flowers are of medium size we pack 50 stems into a big box and 25 into smaller box.  This will vary on the size of the heads

A couple of packed boxes  We export most of our flowers, we use half a dozen exporters out of Auckland.  A small chilled truck collects our boxes in the afternoon, overnight they are taken to the exporters by way of a bigger truck.  Some of the exporters can be pretty hard on us, we are dealing with a fresh product so inevitably things can deteriorate especially when a lot depends of the way they are treated when they leave us. 

We fumigate the flowers but they are hardy little beasts, and many of them sleep through the fumigation.  Sometimes we even dip them in a strong solution of pesticide, which we don't like to do, but even then sometimes live insects are detected at the exporters.  One of our exporters, NZ Bloom do really well as they have a fumigation chamber with a heavy duty product, and we get a small fee taken off.

At the end of the picking season we concentrate on maintenance, replanting and pruning

4 yrs ago we started to grow pinks in bags to control their medium, our soil is a bit acidic, so this way we can force them to stay pink

So that is what keeps us busy our of our sailing season.  Here now is a slideshow with some more photos of down on the farm