Flower Production

The day starts early for Flamingo Holdings, who provide 600 million flower stems each year to the high street in the UK, and over half of these are grown on their own farms in Africa in greenhouses which would cover over 200 football pitches..

Flower Production


In Kenya alone, 400,000 stems of perfect roses are picked each day. Craig Oulton, Farm Manager: “We grow roses in Naivasha because we find that it’s the ideal climate. We have excellent daylight and light intensity. We have fairly cold nights, for Kenya, and also the lake, which is our main water supply here.
In Kenya we have periods of the year which are very hot. What will happen to the roses is that they will grow much faster, but the head size will become smaller.What we are trying to achieve is good quality, and so we will cool down the greenhouses, so if it is 28° outside we will have our greenhouses at 21°, and that will be controlled by pad and fan”.
In order to grow the best roses, flexibility is the key, and technology has taken the rose out of the soil and into a modern type of growing medium. Craig Oulton, Farm Manager: “The thing about hydroponics is that you can actually irrigate and know exactly by testing your fertiliser and your water excess what you have in the way of nutrients.
This information goes back to the computer, and then we adjust it, and the irrigation is then adjusted for that day. You can’t do that on soil, and that is the beauty of having this, and that is why we get the extra quality on growing on substrate”.
Also, with the use of integrated pest management, harmful pests and diseases are kept at bay. This science has been developed by Dudutech, one of Flamingo’s companies. Near total vertical integration within the group means that all the roses and fillers needed to make up the very best bouquets in the supermarkets are grown on Homegrown’s farms.
As soon as the flowers are cut, they are taken to the pack house to be graded, packed and then put into cold store to keep them in perfect condition.Then on to Nairobi, where they are put onto one of the fleet of aircraft dedicated to getting some of the world’s most perfect flowers to the UK in time for the next day’s delivery to the supermarkets.
Once in the UK, the flowers are sped to either of the two Flamingo companies, Flower Plus or Zwetsloots. Here they meet up with flowers from Europe and the million chrysanthemums picked each week from Flamingo’s high-tech farm near Johannesburg. Samples from every batch of flowers are monitored in order to make sure that quality and shelf life are kept at consistently high levels.
Computer-controlled stock and production management mean that the flexible production lines create over a million bouquets weekly, and their services also include direct mail bouquets. Each order is coming in on the computer is logged, and the gift tags are written by hand to personalise the message. So these 600,000 million stems end up as the finest flowers and bouquets available to all of these supermarkets each and every day.