Like your flowers just so? This farm delivers

Meet a Calgary-area greenhouse operator who grows what the market demands.

Patty Bretin knows what her customers want, so she grows what her customers want.

“Last year, about 75 per cent of our business was based on pre-booked orders,” explains Bretin, of Bretin’s Flower Farms, a greenhouse operation that farms flowers under 13,000 square feet of glass a half hour drive from Calgary’s eastern border. Some customers specify the colour, variety and number of bedding plants they want. Others bring in everything from baskets to containers for Bretin and her staff to pot up and nourish for several weeks before delivery, which is free for orders over $300.

Advance-order clientele range from business executives who don’t have time to do their own buying and planting, to seniors who want the convenience of our service, to people who simply want a particular look.

“If these customers have anything in common,” she says, “it’s that they want their flowers delivered and, from the first day, looking fabulous.”

August snowstorm moved the farm indoors

A former extension horticulturist with the Calgary parks department, Bretin and her husband Vern, a Calgary firefighter, bought their acreage in 1986. Bretin left her full-time job in 1989 and the couple, who now have two young children, haven’t looked back since.

Today’s business includes a field operation for fresh-cut flowers (most of which are sold directly to consumers at the Millarville Farmers’ Market, the rest to wholesalers) and four greenhouses. Together, they produce some 400 varieties of plants, provide full-time employment for up to three people and seasonal work for another 19. Like most family farm operations, there is a clear division of labour. “I indulge in the culture of plants because Vern keeps the farm working,” says Bretin.

Greenhouse production, including a bedding plant retail business that is open May 1 to early June, is now the lion’s share of the farm’s income. But it wasn’t always that way. She credits a punishing August 1990 snowstorm for the business’s steady shift from field to glass.

Weather. For Alberta entrepreneurs like Patty Bretin, it’s the other mother of invention.