On Valentine's Day, it's all about red roses

<p>Fragrance permeates the spacious packing shed at Neve Brothers ranch near Petaluma, where workers are busy bundling thousands of long-stemmed roses.</p><p>“It's hectic,” said Nick Neve, who runs the family-owned flower business with his brother, Chris. “Everyone wants their roses.”</p><p>By Valentine's Day on Sunday, Neve expects to sell 3,000 to 4,000 bunches of roses — at 25 stems per bunch — primarily to retailers and other wholesalers in the greater Bay Area.</p><p>It's not the busiest holiday for rosebud merchants, Nick Neve said. Mother's Day wins that distinction because, he said, “everybody's got a mother.” And mothers like roses of all hues — pink, yellow, lavender, orange, white, etc.</p><p>But for Cupid's Day, red roses are the rule.</p><p>And time is of the essence. Roses picked Tuesday morning in the 400,000 square feet of hydroponic greenhouses at the Neve Ranch on Bodega Avenue are immediately sorted, bunched and stored in buckets in the refrigerator, their long green stems immersed in water.</p><p>At midnight, the roses will leave by truck for the San Francisco Flower Mart on Brannan Street, where retailers will start buying in the predawn hours.</p><p>Rose orders are off this year, Neve said, another consequence of the recession's impact on discretionary spending. Florists also don't like Valentine's Day falling on a weekend, depriving them of lucrative office building sales, he said.</p><p>Nor is the rose business as sweet as it was two decades ago, when there were more than 100 growers in California producing most of the nation's roses. Growers are a “dying breed,” Neve said, with just 15 in California competing with a flood of imported roses from South America.</p><p>He's also candid about the cost of long-stemmed roses at Valentine's Day, saying they're about double the regular retail price.</p><p>The price of a dozen roses this week ranges from $70 to $80 at premium floral shops to about $22 at some supermarkets.</p><p>Roses grow year-round, blooming every 60 days during winter. To bring in a bumper crop this week, growers must literally nip their plants around Dec. 10, sacrificing a flower worth about 80 cents per stem.</p><p>Early February's roses, therefore, must sell for $1.60 a stem, he said.</p><p>The family business, which relocated to Sonoma County in the 1960s, includes a 90-acre ranch in Bloomfield. Owner Lou Neve has turned the operation over to his sons, with Nick as grower and Chris handling sales.</p><p>Relatives run Neve Roses, a separate company farther from town on Bodega Avenue.</p><p>Cut flowers accounted for $2.75 million in sales in 2008, about .5 percent of Sonoma County's more than $590 million agricultural bounty.</p><p>“It's a good business,” Nick Neve said. But tending the plants requires vigilance and smart moves, he said. Leaving a greenhouse vent open on a chilly night can wilt thousands of blossoms.</p><p>“You have to stay on top of it,” he said.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.</p><p>kovner@pressdemocrat.com.</p>