San Benito flower farmer Audre Songer was having a busy week even before Winter Storm Uri’s approach on the Rio Grande Valley. On Feb. 11, with just days remaining until Valentine’s Day, the owner of Acres of Harmony Flower Farm was a blur of activity cutting, prepping, and arranging flowers for orders and a pop-up market over the weekend.
Started in 2016, the farm operates on a half-acre of the 15 that Songer and her husband live on and formerly kept in cotton, corn and grain before Songer moved from growing flowers in her yard to their fields.
Songer started the business after her father retired and sold the farm equipment they’d used to work their fields.
“I said, ‘What can you do with 15 acres?’ And one of the big things the USDA’s website said was cut flowers,” Songer remembers.
Songer soon became a fixture of the Saturday Brownsville Farmer’s Market with the bright and whimsical arrangements she sold from her booth. In addition to the market and client orders, she makes the occasional appearance at markets and pop-ups in nearby cities when she has extra flowers on hand.
While growing flowers seems simple, Songer is no stranger to the knife’s edge that every farmer walks in relation to their crops. Between pests, bad weather and staying on top of timing her plants for their growing season, anything unexpected can leave her with little to nothing for her business. The past two Junes she’s lost flowers and greenery to flooding and again after a freeze in December.
“Mother nature can destroy you like that,” Songer demonstrated, snapping her fingers.
With guaranteed poor weather on the horizon, in between filling her orders for Valentine’s, Songer and her husband Barry worked to cover the half-acre of flowers that needed to be in hay to protect them from freezing. They also winterized the greenhouse where Songer starts her plants that can’t be directly sown into the ground.
“I’m hoping there’s just about a 20% loss. I think the hay will save most of it,” she said in a phone interview on Feb. 19. She had peeked into some sections and it looked like things were doing well, so the plan was to uncover them later in the day and see if the hay had done its job.
It hadn’t.
After uncovering her half-acre Songer was shocked to find that she’d lost an estimated 65% of her existing stock.
“It’s devastating,” Songer said.
“It was just too many days of freezes” she laments.
While a terrible loss, Songer knows that she’s just one of many flower farmers in Texas who are now dealing with the aftermath of a devastating combination of freezing weather, electricity outages and limited access to alternative heating options.
“We’re very small, but there are some really large farms that have had lots of problems. Even up in areas where they are used to somewhat cold weather, the loss of electricity has prevented people from heating their greenhouses. No electricity and running out of propane to heat them that way, it’s been a problem,” Songer said.
In Songer’s experience, the seasonal nature of flowers means that some varieties, like her dahlias which didn’t make it through the freeze, might not be able to grow back in time before the heat of summer here gets too intense for them. With the weather affecting so much of Texas, florists may have to search to find new sources of normally available flowers.
In a stroke of luck, Songer’s small greenhouse survived the freeze. While she has a number of plants that will be needed to keep her in stock for the busy season from March to early June, one of her premium cut flowers, the lisianthus, is thankfully among the survivors.
Used in wedding bouquets because of its resemblance to a rose, it produces throughout the end of summer so it will be available when much of her stock has run its course in the heat. However, it needs to get in the ground by the end of the month. If the plants she’d started in November hadn’t survived Songer explained that she wouldn’t have enough time to restart them.
Songer allowed herself just a day to come to terms with her loss, before getting back to work. At the moment she’ll have to see what might recover and move forward with her planting to be ready for the upcoming season and hopefully get back to selling in March.
“I’m not ready to throw in the towel. Persevere, I’ve got no other choice,” she said.
To check on availability for orders and market appearances you can call 956-245-9989 or visit Acres of Harmony Flower Farm on Facebook.
