How to keep your roses in full bloom

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One of the many challenges in managing a rose farm is to be able to match production output with demand for the product. In a conventional factory, this may be accomplished by adding a second shift or working extra hours, on a rose farm it's not that easy!

• For Valentine's Day, the normal demand for roses increases about five to ten times.
• The number of rose plants doesn't change throughout the year, so in order to produce more roses during peak periods the growers have to implement a procedure called "pinching"

Pinching Rose Plants

This procedure is done during the first three weeks in November. The farm selects the green houses to be dedicated for Valentine's production and proceeds to cut *every single * rose growing three nodes from the ground. In this way all the roses grow at the same time, creating major stress on the plants. To compensate for this, the plants are given extra nutrients during this time.

*Interesting Fact: * Because of //pinching// and the extra stress on the rose plant, during Valentine's, the rose's head size is a bit smaller than the roses grown the rest of the year.

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