Surviving the Workday

If you were to send your mother flowers rather than clipping them from your garden, you might give try California Organic Flowers. I sent ranunculus to my mom for her birthday, and due to my own zip code error, there were issues with them arriving on time, but California Organic Flowers sent another batch for free after I developed a relationship with Marc trying to track down the flowers, which became world travelers. Again, that was due to my error, not theirs. 

You can also see Marc below, which is funny only that my husband stumbled across this video when looking for information on organic cover crops, and not organic flowers.

And why would you even care if the flowers you send are organic? About 70% of the cut flowers in the U.S. are imported, and often from countries that use pesticides and fumigants that are banned in North America. Furthermore, there are some serious labor issues with who cuts the flowers:

Meanwhile, two-thirds of Columbian and Ecuadorian workers suffer from problems associated with pesticide exposure, including nausea, conjunctivitis, neurological disease, reproductive problems, and birth defects. Plus, the International Labor Organization estimates that 20 percent of flower workers in Ecuador are children, who are even more vulnerable to hazards these chemicals pose.

This entry was posted by Ms. Theologian on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under ethical consuming You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.