How 5 friends and a field of tulips fought the COVID-19 meltdown

When the Mount Vernon High School Bulldogs faced off against their basketball rivals a generation ago, five friends from the class of 1994 were the spark plugs, game after game. Three were on the cheer squad, stoking school spirit; two were on court, scoring points.

They stayed in touch after graduation as they went on with families and careers, from military intelligence to law, finance and tech. And when Andrew Miller contacted them about a year ago and said he had an idea — maybe crazy, maybe great, maybe both — to get the band back together and become tulip farmers back in their old hometown, the chemistry still worked.

Miller, who had been a yell leader with the cheer squad, then a trilingual Mormon missionary before careers in the military and corporate crisis management, was just as persuasive, his friends said, as he had been back in the day.

“We went out to a happy hour and ended up buying a farm,” said Angela Speer, who went from cheering to sociology to information technology before veering back into agriculture at Tulip Town, the 30-acre farm the partners bought last summer.

The timing of their leap back together was stupendously awful.

As the first crucial spring approached this year — tulip blooms flash and fade like fireworks in March and April — so did the global pandemic of the coronavirus.

A delicate and gorgeous symbol of spring that for growers reaches a financial peak on Mother’s Day — one of the biggest flower-gifting days of the year, alongside St Valentine’s Day — quickly became another victim of the pandemic.

The annual tulip festival that draws hundreds of thousands of people north of Seattle to Skagit County, where three-quarters of the nation’s commercial tulip crop is grown, was cancelled. And that put every other element of the tulip economy into free fall as well: No festival visitors paying to stroll through the blossoms and no money spent on restaurants, hotel stays, bouquets and bulbs for growing at home — a $65 million hit to the local economy that only compounded the economic blows of the state’s shelter-in-place orders.

The blossoms were gorgeous, but few could see them. National retail chains that typically buy millions of bouquets cancelled their orders as they retrenched to selling quarantine supplies and basics like toilet paper.

“You put down 10 months of preparation and plan for a spring payoff, the season when we generate near all our annual revenue, and this year basically disappeared,” said Brent Roozen, a third-generation tulip farmer at RoozenGaarde, one of the nation’s biggest bulb growers, who raises tulips and daffodils on 800 acres spread across Skagit County.

The company, started by William Roozen, an immigrant from the Netherlands in the 1940s and Brent Roozen’s grandfather, is now trying to decide whether to retrench and plant fewer bulbs this summer and fall to save money, or go deeper into risk by betting on a better spring next year. “If we want to hope for a future, we have to make some tough decisions now,” Brent Roozen said.

But the five newcomers on their much smaller farm — they named their partnership The Spinach Bus in honour of a rickety old vehicle that some of them rode as teenagers to and from their summer jobs in the fields — also realized something powerful. Coming in new, however harrowing the collapse, meant that everything about how the tulip business was supposed to work was also new, to be tried and tested and improvised around to keep from sinking.

“Ninety percent plus of our revenue comes in that four-week period,” said Randy Howard, who studied accounting and taxation after high school; he played forward for the Bulldogs and now serves as the partnership’s chief financial officer. “So we had to pivot.”

And there was another element too, the partners said — a deep well of confidence in one another, based on their shared history.

“I knew who they were,” said Donnie Keltz, who played guard on the Mount Vernon basketball team. Keltz — like all the Spinach Bus crew, in his mid 40s — had started his own insurance firm after college. “Anytime you get partners, you’ve got to have trust,” he said.

So, in adapting on the fly through March and April, the Spinach Bus partners took an ancient flower — evidence of cultivation goes back more than 1,000 years, and seed banks in the Netherlands, the heart of the global industry, have specimens grown continuously since the late 1500s — and ignored much of what had been done before in selling it.

“Part of the great thing about our group is that there are five of us, and we take turns having our moments of stress or anxiety or sadness because we all went through all of those feelings,” Speer said. “Almost on a daily basis we were pivoting our business model.”

The first improvisation came a few days after stay-at-home orders were issued in Washington state in mid-March.

Andrew Miller strolls up and down the rows of tulips at Tulip Town streaming live on Facebook in Mount Vernon, Wash on Friday, April 24, 2020. The New York Times

Phone calls started coming in from people who were not going to be able to come in person to visit, said Rachael Ward Sparwasser, whose journey went from cheer squad to lawyer and investor to tulip partner. “Would you be willing to ship blossoms?” the callers asked. The old business model had mostly involved shipping bulbs to gardeners, not fresh bouquets.

Their company had 600 shipping boxes in storage, and Sparwasser figured they might get orders to send 100 or 200 boxes, 20 stems each.

“Within the first day, we sold through all of it,” she said. Within weeks, they boxed and sold 8,000 bouquets, a completely new business line started from scratch.

Then, as a wave of appreciation grew around the country for health care workers and others at the front lines of the virus, the idea struck that people might pay to have a bouquet of tulips sent as a donation and statement of support. So came their new Colour for Courage business line — and more than 4,700 more orders at $15 a bouquet.

In late April, the partners committed to planting a pick-your-own strawberry patch, which they figured could go well with the new beer and wine garden they started before the coronavirus shutdown. Parents — once they are able to come back — can sip a Skagit County brew while the children play in the dirt.

Then Miller had an idea: Daily strolls up and down the rows of tulips at sunrise and sunset, streamed live on Facebook.

“How is everyone? Welcome to Tulip Town and thank you for your orders,” he said in opening the webcast on a recent cool spring evening.

Frogs croaked from a nearby ditch; birds trilled from the field’s edge. Miller, walking slowly, panning the field with his phone, bent down to capture a blossom up close, then backed up to answer viewer questions that were scrolling across the bottom of his phone.

As other partners stood chatting on the dirt road at the field’s edge, he was eventually just a small figure in the distance in the sun’s narrowing rays. One man in an otherwise empty field of bloom. Get ready for the sunset, he told viewers as the sun melted into a field of red. “It’s going to be a good one.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company