Santa Rosa U-pick flower farm features stress-free bouquets

At the Poppies and Petals U-pick flower farm, customers get a dose of floral therapy with their take-home bouquet.

Customers have an hour to wend their way through rows of riotous early-autumn color, picking impetuously or with great intention whatever captures their eye, while classical music plays soothingly in the background.

The quarter acre of field-grown flowers in west Santa Rosa opened to pickers in late June and is proving to be a respite for the pandemic-weary. And that’s just what owner Stephenie Chow had in mind when she turned over a fallow field her husband had owned for 20 years to a flower farm during the middle of the pandemic.

The idea came to her last year, after she invited friends over to pick some crops from her small vegetable garden on the same Sanford Road property. She also was growing a few flowers in the garden, and her friends were delighted to take home some blossoms as well as food for their tables.

If a few brought so much happiness, why not grow a field of them and spread the joy?

So last year Chow brought in a load of organic soil and mixed it with a special compost tea recipe recommended by a mentor and prepared to become a farmer.

Chow, who spent years in a high-powered banking job before dialing back with no regrets, dove into floriculture research. She obsessed over which flowers to grow, bought seeds and bulbs and planted her first seeds in trays in January.

Eight months later, after fits and starts and first-year mistakes, her field is in full bloom with dozens of different kinds of flowers, including celosia, zinnias, basil, dahlias, asters, sunflowers and lilies, to name a few.

She named her little farm Poppies and Petals after the wild California golden poppies that pop up in the field each spring. And the farm, open three mornings a week, is having the desired effect of giving flower pickers a pleasant getaway.

Decisions, decisions

Every visitor is handed a colorful pair of clippers and a white ceramic pitcher. They are then set loose to roam the fields. For $35, they can pick as much as the vase will hold. Their cuttings will then be transferred into take-home containers.

On a recent Saturday, Tracy Cannobbio, who drove up from Novato after reading about the new U-pick farm on a Marin mommies blog, was having a hard time deciding what to clip.

“I’m just picking the ones I think are pretty, and once I get home I’ll split them up into different arrangements, said Cannobbio, a publicist. “I love these U-pick farms. Usually they’re for fruits and vegetables. I’ve never seen one for flowers. There’s something relaxing about being among things that are growing and picking something yourself, taking it home and remembering where you got it.”

At the end of another row, Judy Garner was gathering flowers for a bouquet to take to a baby shower that day. This was a return visit. Two weeks ago, she brought her 92-year-old mother. Chow allowed Garner to drive through the 9-foot-wide rows to make it easier on the elderly woman, who used to be an avid gardener.

Garner said her mother was thrilled.

“I’ve been to the flower mart in the city, but this is just such an experience. It’s beautiful,” she said. “When I’m with my mom and looking at all the different kinds of flowers — it just brought tears to my eyes.”

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 played softly in the background and a gentle breeze cooled the September sun beaming down.

Chow this season grew about 50 different flowers in her nine rows. She plans to double that next year after seeing what works and what doesn’t in her particular corner of the world.

She has the help of Traci Wittke, who for many years did FTD floral arranging and ran a cleaning business. After enduring a battle with breast cancer, Wittke was ready for healthy change and jumped at the chance to be operations manager for the little farm.

“It’s invigorating, frustrating and it’s worrisome,” Wittke said from behind the counter of the small check-in kiosk. “I found myself worrying in the middle of the night about the earwigs eating our dahlias. We lost about 40% of our tubers, and it was devastating. So we got some frogs and lizards out here and they controlled it. And we invited the birds. We don’t want pesticides.”

Trial and error

Chow started planting at the beginning of May, after all danger of frost had passed. She waited anxiously to see what would crop up.

Tulips were the first to emerge from that hard clay soil she had worked so hard to amend and make fertile. “But they came up with short, stubby stalks,” she said.

“Then I researched on the Sonoma County Gardening Facebook page and I found out I wasn’t the only one” with too-short tulips, she said. “It didn’t rain enough, and I wasn’t watering them. That’s why they were stunted.”

There were other fizzles and disappointments, like the poppies she planted but which never emerged.

But when the honeywort appeared in May, she took heart. Then came the zinnias, cosmos and calendula.

More difficult were the rose-like lisianthus, the larkspur and the dahlias, the less-common flowers people would not be apt to grow in their own gardens.

“This year has been experimenting and seeing what the possibilities are,” said Chow, who was born and spent her early years in Bavaria, Germany, where she fondly remembers making daisy chains from tiny flowers growing in the meadows.

In more recent years, Chow ran a race tire shop at Sonoma Raceway. Like her husband Dr. David Petruska, she’s drawn to precision machines and speed. Her passion is Italian motorcycles, her “midlife crisis,” she said.

But Chow gave up the sport after Petruska, a former emergency room physician who loved racing sports cars, suffered serious injuries in a motor sports accident. The farm is a gentler pursuit they can do together.

Chow said her husband has been helping with deadheading but has begged her not to grow any more cosmos because the huge mounds of blooms take hours to clip.

Chow’s goal is to grow specialty cut flower varietals which are longer, sturdier and bred for bouquets and arrangements. In this first year she has grown more than 100 varieties of dahlias and dozens of varieties of pollen-less sunflowers. She’s also grown zinnias, cosmos, lisianthus, mixed colors of longiflorum, Asiatic hybrid lilies and ornamental grasses.

Although the drought year has severely impacted many farmers and home gardeners, Chow said she uses relatively little water to keep her fields in bloom. That’s mainly due to the enriched soil she started with.

“It just takes a little bit every day to keep the soil moist and wet. I don’t need to do 45 minutes (of watering). I just need to do 25 minutes.”

Chow expects to keep her fields in production year-round. Lilies will be proliferating in early November, when she plans to close to U-pickers for the seasons.

In addition to doubling the size of her field, Chow is determined next year to grow sweet peas and peonies and hopes to launch a CSA bouquet subscription service, like many area farms offer for produce. She’s ordered 1,000 rununculas corms.

“I want it to be worth people’s time to come here,” she said.

She also hopes people “will come and create good memories” as well as beautiful flower arrangements to take home and cherish.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. OnTwitter @megmcconahey.