Castle Hayne Farms in Castle Hayne, NC, has been growing iris for three generations. “We have nine acres of greenhouses and about 25 acres of outdoor production,” Mark Hommes, owner at Castle Hayne Farms, told The Produce News. “We grow about five million stems of iris each year. During our production season, we plant a quarter of a million bulbs per week.”

Hommes shared that the industry and the farm’s customer base has really changed over the years. “Ten years ago we were strictly producing for wholesalers,” said Hommes. “But with the recession and all the florists going out of business, we shifted to supermarkets. Because of the scale of their floral departments, we got into the bouquet business — we ship consumer bunches to supermarkets as well as bouquets.”

There is both an art and a science involved in iris production. “What we do is give them artificial winter. To trick the iris, we keep them dormant and in a comatose state,” Hommes explained. “With iris, that temperature is 86 degrees. The reason is that iris is genetically indigenous to Spain and Morocco, where it flowers in May and stays green all summer and then about August it goes dormant as the soil temperature gets really high. The bulb starts to form a tunic, or brown skin, around itself and it stays dormant until autumn when it starts to produce a flower within itself. And when the temperature goes back down in the spring, then it starts to come up again and makes roots and produces a flower. We take that cycle and apply it artificially by keeping the bulbs warm when they are harvested in Holland in August and September and shipped to us. Then each week we will take a quarter-million of the bulbs out and put them in a cooler at 48 degrees. What this does is trigger the bulb to think it is wintertime and it forms an embryo inside itself. After eight weeks of cooling, we take it out and plant it in our greenhouse. Again we have tricked the bulb into thinking it is spring. As soon as we add water, it roots and it will send a flower up. It takes 10 weeks from planting to flowering. We can plant 250,000 bulbs each week and we will have 250,000 flowers every week all spring. We have to quit after Mother’s Day because it becomes too hot — it gets in the 90s in North Carolina and it’s hard for us to produce good quality when it gets that hot.”

The only downside to the iris is its short vase life. “We have some new varieties that are better than the old varieties, but the vase life is still within a week,” said Hommes. “We have to cut them tight and ship them quickly to where the consumer can enjoy the flower opening. It is unique because when the iris opens, it is truly a three-dimensional flower.”