Nightshade Flower Farm
Becca Greaney’s blooming on Rabbits Street
It’s hard to do better than “near the corner of Abundance and Rabbits” as the location for a farm. On a third of an acre in this out-of-the-way corner in New Orleans, farmer Becca Greaney is embarking on her second growing year at Nightshade Flower Farm. There’s no building at the address, just a number painted on a wooden fence in a cheery sky blue. Nightshade sits on a leased T-shaped footprint made of three lots meeting in the center. It’s not the showy landscape of blossoms you might expect: the farm instead offers expectation, as leaves and vines spill over mounds of dirt and early or late blossoms hint at their crops. Greaney and her workforce of apprentices and volunteers time their harvests to give customers blooms that will flourish and endure in their vases. As she showed me around, Greaney code-switched between the Latin and common names of her plants, doubling the poetry. A Chinese forget-me-not can also be a Cynoglossum amabile, Latin via Greek for "lovely dog's tongue." An open structure of clear plastic called a “hoop house” sits near the vertex of the lots, protecting fussy dahlias and other plants that benefit from more cautious care; a few yards away, a smaller greenhouse shades seedlings. Fruit trees dot the perimeter, including the two largest loquat trees I’ve ever seen. Greaney offered me my first of the year.
Greaney explained that she plants according to “ultramicroclimates”—rather than fighting the inevitable drainage problems, she plants moisture-loving species along miniature swales and makes use of the extra water to nourish sugarcane and irises. Detailed spreadsheets of what she has planted where help to maximize growing windows in spring, early summer, and fall. Summer is dedicated to food and restorative crops, when the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants feed Greaney and her friends—the occasional excess taking the place of her flowers at farmer’s markets. In addition to their use as nourishment, the greens, called cover crops, also replenish certain nutrients in the soil, enriching it for the fall flower season.
[Read this: The Natchez Poppy Guy Strikes Again]
This summer “food season” allows Greaney to return to her roots as a vegetable farmer. She began interning on farms as a Tulane undergraduate before embarking on an Americorps stint at Press Street Gardens and a subsequent position at Sprout NOLA, where she still works part time as a greenhouse manager. Nightshade was born as a result of Greaney’s mentor at Sprout, Margee Green, advising that flower farming was a more financially sustainable option (one is tempted to blame the low-veg American diet).
A few years in, Greaney is still figuring out the intricacies of what flower-shoppers want: “Last year people were buying anemones, but not this year.” She knows what pleases most people: bright, bold colors and a variety of textures. (More people touch the flowers than you’d think.) Greaney sells both to florists and directly to the public at farmers’ markets, in addition to occasional work providing flowers for events like weddings. At the markets, she sells both straight bunches—meaning clusters of the same flowers—and artfully-assembled bouquets, into which she sometimes throws in a sprig of kumquat or a tomato-plant accent. The strange economics of the industry mean she earns more selling by bunch to local florists, but the bouquets are important as “calling cards” showcasing what she can produce and arrange. (Also, she enjoys making them and does it well—good enough reasons in themselves.)
[Read this story on urban flower farming in Louisiana, from our August 2018 issue.]
In some ways, Greaney and other small flowers producers are competing with big growers, both here and abroad, but with a little research and know-how, she has been able to fill niches the heavy hitters can’t. (As a certified florist herself, Greaney is well positioned to look under the hood of the industry.) For example, sunflowers aren’t very picky and travel well: florists can buy as many as they want from a big producer and usually don’t need to source them locally. (Sunflowers will fly off the shelf at a farmer’s market, though.) More delicate flowers like dahlias are more likely to bruise or wilt in transit, and so the best ones come from just up the road. Additionally, smaller flower growers like Greaney have the latitude to take a risk and grow something simply because it’s weird or cool. She showed me a stand of false Queen Anne’s lace, which forms umbrella-shaped bells of small white blossoms on green sprigs, then pulled out her phone to show me a starflower: orderly bolls of tan and green bracts, charmingly alien.
Urban farming has a longer history in general and in New Orleans than its recent trendiness would imply. Before Clarence Birdseye froze his peas and markets became supersized, people used their yards to garden, growing what they could to supplement their diets and trade with their neighbors. Today, Greaney and other New Orleans growers with small batches or irregular production cycles share a farmer’s-market stall called Truck Farm Table, which is run by Sprout—find them at the Thursday market where the Lafitte Greenway intersects Norman C. Francis (formerly Jeff Davis).
On my way out, I asked to buy some flowers, and Greaney pulled bunches of maroon ranunculus and bright poppies from her buckets. She told me that to keep cut flowers around longer, I should invest in flower food, change the water every other day, and recut the ends of the stems—otherwise, bacteria will grow in the water and clog the transport channels in the stems, which continue to work even after the flower is cut. At stoplights on the way home, I brought the bouquet to my face for a sniff of the spicy-citrus ranunculus—a preview of arriving spring.