A Day in the Life: Working on a Flower Farm

For my service, I work in Cayambe with an organization called FACE. Under FACE there are other organizations; Casa Hogar, Sumak, Centro Medico Emmanuel, and Forever Flowers. They work together to help break the cycle of abuse and neglect in the community. Throughout service, I have been able to experience all the different branches, one being working at Forever Flowers.

The workers at Forever are at work by 6:30 in the morning, but on the days my SST classmate and I work, we arrive at 8 a.m. We walk to Casa Hogar every morning, about a ten-minute walk, unless one of the other team members sees us and picks us up! Once we arrive at Casa Hogar, we get in the flower truck and head up the mountain. The drive up to the farm is a little scary, especially when it’s muddy, but the view from the top is beautiful!

There are four workers at Forever and my classmate and I help out where we can. Our first job of the day is to pick all the amaryllis flowers. We picked them a few days before they opened so that by the time they get to the buyer’s home they are ready. We packed bundles of amaryllis, which have 25 flowers each. We put a rubber band on the end to secure them and then put a plastic cover over them to protect them in transit. These flowers are often used in bouquets with roses.

Our next task of the day is to check that every rose only has one bud. If the roses grow more than one flower, then it makes it difficult for them to be sold, so this is quite an important job! We go through each row and carefully inspect each of the roses. If it has more than one flower, we leave the biggest flower and pick off the rest. Often, we listen to music or chat while we inspect to make our time fly by. We also have two good friends who “help” at the farm, but often just beg for our attention. We gave them both their nicknames, Chad (the cat) and Osa (the dog)! They are so sweet and often follow us around the farm as our little supervisors!

When the driver of the flower truck is ready, we carry all the roses up to the truck. At Forever, the whole farm is on a steep incline so walking up and down with the flowers is quite the task; and with being at a high elevation, it really puts our lungs and legs to work. The workers at the flower farm can carry up to 12 bundles at a time, while I’m lucky to get 4! We bring them all up the hill and then put them in the truck, sorting by color and whether they are national or internationally sold flowers. The national flowers are loaded first because they have more than the 25 flower limit, and then we load the international flowers by color. They are put in this way because certain colors are more sensitive than others. Most days the truck is so full that often there are bouquets up in the cab with us!

Some flowers just can’t be sold at all so we give them to the cows. There are 3 cows, Luna, Canela, and baby Café. They all love their snack of flowers and it’s interesting to see which flowers they go for first! Luna is very territorial over her flowers and the other two just go along with it. They only eat the tops of the flowers and sometimes the leaves. That is the last task that we have on the farm, so we head back down the mountain.

Our first stop down the mountain is with the international flower distributors. There is a specific place where we take the flowers on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and then another one for Tuesday and Thursday. They only take the flowers which are good enough to be packaged and sold internationally. Another distributor takes the national flowers. For this location, we have to count all the flowers in each of the bundles, so that Forever can be paid for each flower. These flowers are sold for very little, so it’s important not to miss any of the flowers.