Harmony Harvest Farm in Weyers Cave is featured in the November print issue of “Better Homes & Gardens” spotlighting the farm’s heirloom chrysanthemums.
“For us, this is a huge moment,” says Catherine Chase, the farm’s marketing coordinator. “We’re a small, women-owned farm working to bring back hundreds of nearly-lost American heirloom mums, the big football mums and spiders your grandmother might have grown, but you never see at garden centers anymore! To see them recognized on a national stage feels like such a win for not just our farm or the Shenandoah Valley, but for flower farmers across the country.”
Harmony Harvest Farm is a family and female run farm. Owned by Jessica Hall, her sister Stephanie Duncan and their mom, the farm has a team of about 10 people. It’s a 20-acre farm, with nine of those acres are farmed, and eight hoop houses.
“We are over the moon,” says Hall about being featured in the November print issue. “I am so excited. We consider our team quite like our family, and we’re really proud of the culture that we’ve grown here at the farm and what we’ve been able to do right here in the Valley and through our cut flower operation.”
One of the farm’s signature flowers has become the chrysanthemum.
“Everyone looks forward to those beautiful November bouquets of these coveted, long lost heirloom chrysanthemum blooms,” says Hall.
Bringing back heirloom chrysanthemums and the revival in American cut flower farming
After many years of offering these bouquets, people had been asking for years how to get the plants themselves.
“The chrysanthemum is difficult to find and source,” says Hall. “I hated telling people how difficult that they were to actually find, that we started offering them mail order a few years ago. We became really passionate about saving these varieties realizing how much work went into actually creating the varieties and how close they were to extinction.”
The farm team went on a journey and preservation effort where they combed the entire country going as far as the West Coast collecting private collections of rare varieties and bringing them back to Harmony Harvest.
“We have been working very hard behind the scenes to clean up and take care of these different varieties of chrysanthemums,” says Hall. “And then we release different varieties each season to the general public, and we teach people how to take care of them.”
The farm offers different classes and education tools online including a virtual two-day summit every year.
The cut flower industry as a whole is a multibillion-dollar industry, and over 80% of that is imported into the United States, says Hall. “This is not an agriculture commodity that comes domestically, and it used to, but in the 80s, we saw most of that turn into an imported product, and it made a big hole in U.S. agriculture.”
Harmony Harvest has found a niche with these heirloom varieties in the cut flower industry. An opportunity, Hall says, for what it could do for American floriculture and farmers participating on a global scale.
“We’re starting to see a revival of interest in American flower farming, and it looks much different than what it used to look like. We could see this being a very different landscape and a very different look at what floriculture in America could be, and it could all start with this one crop.”
Is it hard to grow chrysanthemums?
“No, and that’s one of the beautiful points about it is that they are really beginner friendly. If you are just beginning and growing, you can find easy success with them, but if you are an expert grower, you can really level up your skills with some advanced methods of growing them as well.”
It is a project plant that keeps you engaged throughout the season, says Hall.
“And your reward is at the end of the year, when most of the rest of your garden has kind of done its thing for the year, you’re rewarded with these beautiful blooms that almost iridescently glow amongst the dead of the garden.”
Come Thanksgiving when everything else is dead and gone, she says, customers are in their backyards collecting their holiday centerpieces.
“I love hearing the stories. I love hearing about how they heard about these from their grandmother and just couldn’t believe that such flowers existed, and now they get to grow them. I love people who remember these and haven’t seen them for decades, and now they’re back.”
How do you grow heirloom chrysanthemums?
“These plants are vegetatively propagated, and that means that we’re taking a small piece of the plant and forcing it to grow roots and create a whole new plant. We don’t actually grow from seeds, and we teach people how to do that with their own plants, so that they can make many more and freely share.”
Since these plants are not patented, they’re able to teach people how to propagate, a fundamental tool of gardening and horticulture that’s almost become a dead art, says Hall.
“Chiffon is one of my personal favorites in the garden,” says Hall. “I think that is an absolutely stunning mum for anyone to have in their collection. She changes colors and can fool even the most discerning gardener into thinking she’s a dahlia. She’s an absolutely brilliant flower to have in your collection.”
When do chrysanthemums bloom?
There are three different blooming categories to heirloom chrysanthemums. There’s an early, mid and a late category, and they can start blooming as early as late September and then bloom as late as November.
“This is one of the latest plants in the garden to bloom and to be resistant to frost. And it surprises folks with these beautiful, decadent blooms that they have, that they are resistant to frost.”
“Better Homes & Gardens” released a shorter online version earlier in the month so readers could start shopping the collection. Heirloom chrysanthemums are available now; click here to shop. To learn more, visit the farm’s website. The farm’s next virtual mum summit is coming up. Tickets are available here.
Monique Calello is a reporter at The News Leader. Story ideas always welcome. Connect with her at mcalello@newsleader.com.
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