Flowers instead of gold
People love flowers. We’re in full “go to the garden centre and buy” season locally, with the weekend lawn farmers busy sowing and hoeing and doing all those busy as a bee things that follow the fallow of winter. I’m a minimalist, but at an earlier stage in my job history (when I was but a seedling) I was the industrious slave of a greenhouse operator in central Ontario. I loved the work. Even if I was too early in the season to actually see the blooms, I knew what awaited the buyers from having planted thousands of those informative plastic tags in the flats of plants. I was a walking horticultural encyclopedia.
As someone with only a teenage knowledge of economic value, I was left with the WOW factor after perusal of the seed catalogues, where I picked up the important factoid that petunia seed was worth more than its weight in gold bullion. Remember, this was the period before the price of gold started to fluctuate. It was pegged securely at thirty-five dollars an ounce Troy (we were just beginning to metrify our brains, so that meant 31.1034768 grams). I was paid about one dollar per hour, so my discretionary income wasn’t going into gold bars. Nor into bags of petunia seed. Depending on the variety, seed sold for about thirty-eight dollars an ounce avoirdupois (28.3495 grams). Now, one ounce of seed could number up to two hundred thousand individuals, and I didn’t count them; I planted them. And I never planted an ounce of seed at one time, as that would be overkill in the most obvious sense. We knew that flowers were worth money, but only if we sold them in flats of a dozen healthy little green seedlings, carefully nurtured and marketed to all those aforementioned lawn farmers. Did I mention that we also sold tomato plants? That was a whole other world.
So here we are, thirty-five years later. The price of gold was allowed to float free shortly after I left the humid sanctuary of the greenhouses (no connection), and as of this morning the price of one ounce Troy is stable at around seven hundred and forty-five Canadian loonies (that goldish coloured coin that we use in coffee machines).
Meanwhile, a bit of Google-shopping has found that the price of flower seed is also one that fluctuates. I found one company in Alberta that quotes in grams, and I can have a gram of seed for $225, which my handy calculator shows to be the exorbitant sum of $6998.28 CDN per ounce Troy. Let’s round that up to seven thousand and call it a day.
I’m no financial wizard, but methinks that this may be the year to remove the grass (a noxious weed in many ways) from the back yard and plant some of those pretty little petunias. I wonder how hard it is to harvest seed.
