The Dilemma of Mother’s Day

Today I read that 1.9 billion  dollars is spent on Mother’s Day flowers in the US every year. That is a lot of flowers. If you live in Baltimore or DC or any of the surrounding counties and your mom or gram or anyone else you may want to buy flowers for lives close by, you have SO MANY OPTIONS for buying locally grown flowers for them. 

• You can check out the Local Harvest website for a farmers market close to you. There are markets all weekend so get out there and support your local farmers.
• You can go to the Whole Foods and choose the “locally grown” cut flowers
• You can go to a local nursery and buy potted flowers that can be planted in a garden.

But what if your mom doesn’t live in Baltimore. What if she lives at the beach in a little town in Florida-20 miles from a real town and 45 miles away from a city.

Here are the options I’ve explored:

I looked in the ASCFG Buyer’s Guide to see if there were any farmers near there that might be able to deliver a flower arrangement. There was only ONE Florida grower listed. Cheney Farm in O’Brien, Florida. It was 172 miles away and they don’t ship.

I looked up florists in Clearwater (closest big town) and in Indian Rocks (the small town where she lives). I even called a couple to see if they had local flowers. None said they did.

There is Organic Bouquet.  They are an online company specializing in organic flowers for bouquets and for DIY’ers. They have Eco Standards, they buy organic-but most of their products are coming from outside of the country (as far as I could tell from the website). I could NOT tell where the actual arrangements were being shipped from.

And then, there is the option of not sending her flowers. (I’ll be visiting her next week-so I could take her out to dinner or something like that-but it’s not the same as flowers).

I’ve got to make my decision soon, since my mom’s birthday is Saturday and Mother’s Day is Sunday.

What would you do?