From Bulb to Box

We headed down to Pukekohe this week to spend the morning with Joost, the grower behind KJ Flowers and one of the country’s largest tulip and lily producers.

If you’ve spotted tulips or lilies in your Wonky Flowers box lately, there’s a good chance they started their journey right here.

Joost has been growing flowers in Aotearoa since 1997. What began as a small operation has grown into a farm producing more than one million tulip stems each season. This season has delivered a bumper crop. Brilliant for brightening up spring, but it also means more stems at risk of being left behind.

Walking through the tunnel houses, you quickly realise flowers do not grow themselves into neat little supermarket bunches.

Each tulip begins as a bulb, carefully planted and nurtured in line with the season. Temperature, light and soil all play their part. Too warm, too cold or too wet and things shift. Nature sets the pace.

A tight knit crew of hardworking women who truly know their craft move steadily through the rows, keeping a close eye on every stem and judging whether it is ready. They know exactly what they are looking for. Not too tight. Not too open. Not too long or too short. Just right.

Each tulip is picked by hand and wrapped straight away in homemade fabric bags stitched from recycled cloth. The bags fill as they move down the rows, cradling the stems until they are carried off together for grading.

There is something special about watching it. It feels less like a production line and more like a community at work. The same hands that check the buds, carry the stems and tie the bags are the hands that make sure every flower leaves the tunnel in its best possible shape.

It is skilled, careful work that has been refined over nearly three decades. And you can feel that care in every bunch.

_{WHAT MAKES THEM WONKY}

Here is something we love about both veg and flowers. Nature does not do identical. But when it comes to retail standards, flowers face the same cosmetic judgement as fruit and veg, sometimes even more.

Some stems grow slightly thinner than the rest. Some buds lean a little off centre before they open. Occasionally a flower is fractionally shorter than the supermarket spec sheet would like.

With the lilies, we have seen buds that grow with a gentle hook at the tip, unusual but still completely beautiful once they bloom. At other times, a stem might carry one flower less than the standard retail count. We are currently rescuing those too, along with the slightly shorter tulip stems that do not make the traditional grade.

None of this changes how they bloom. None of it affects their vase life. But in a wholesale system built on uniformity, small quirks can mean a stem gets left behind.

After harvest, the tulips run through a grading and bunching machine. The majority head off to retailers around the country. The ones that do not quite meet that tight brief are separated. They are every bit as fresh and carefully grown, they just do not tick every box on a retailer’s checklist.

While lilies are a big part of the operation here, tulips truly steal the show this time of year.

Row after row, colour after colour. Deep burgundy, soft blush, buttery yellow, classic red. And then the real showstoppers.

This season, we have been lucky enough to secure some parrot tulips for Wonky Flowers boxes. If you have not seen them before, they are something special. Ruffled petals, feathered edges, colours that twist and blend like they have been painted on. They are a little wild, a little dramatic and far less uniform than your standard tulip. Which, naturally, makes us love them even more.

Parrot tulips are a less common variety and more delicate to grow. They do not always behave as neatly as traditional stems. Petals curl. Shapes shift. They open wide and unapologetically. In a retail system that prefers everything straight and standardised, they can sometimes fall outside the brief.

Lucky for us, we have never been too fussed about fitting the brief.

If a tulip is a little shorter, a lily bud hooks slightly or a parrot petal goes rogue, we are still all in. Because the care is there. The quality is there. The colour is definitely there.

And honestly, a bit of character suits us just fine.