MILLIKEN — Five days a week, Marvin Bruce arrives just after dawn at his gladiolus farm armed with a penknife and a keen eye for blooms ready for farmers markets and flower stands.
He and his assistants walk down the furrows, slicing the spiky stalks punctuated with velvety flowers. The most popular with his customers are the magenta glads, and the cherry-red ones that form a shocking contrast with the pale green stalk and leaves.
“Those are the colors that go first,” said Bruce, who is trim and fit at age 68.
For 27 years, he has been a gladiolus farmer. When he started out, he was among more than a dozen gladiolus growers in Weld County. There were so many commercial growers that Greeley’s civic leaders named the gladiolus the city’s official flower.
But over the past decade or so, the number of Front Range flower farms shrank. Colorado once hosted many of commercially grown carnations, too — so many that in the 1970s, Colorado’s carnation harvest was the largest in the world.
Rising fuel costs and cheaper production in Latin America changed that. But Marvin Bruce’s Glad Farm tenaciously hangs in there.
It’s true that Bruce has scaled back. After surviving colon cancer 16 years ago, he sold the farmland he once owned. Now he leases two acres that yield up to 200,000 gladioli every summer, not counting the test-garden blooms cultivated for the North American Gladiolus Council.
“See the way that one bends?” Bruce says, pointing to a couple of gladioli with delicate blooms but distinctly crooked stalks.
“That one’s not going to make the cut. But that one,” a slim stalk with smallish flowers in a mix of buttercream yellow and pink, “that one looks good.”
He got into the gladiolus business by entering a glad from his garden in a flower show around 1991. Bruce is the first to admit he had no idea what he was doing at the time.
A former U.S. Air Force captain — he earned the Bronze Star during his service in Vietnam — and longtime maintenance supervisor for Greeley-Evans School District 6 Schools, Bruce impulsively decided to enter some gladioli from his garden in a flower competition.
“Initially, I didn’t even cut ’em right,” he said.
“I knew you were supposed to measure 18 to 21 inches, and then cut. But I measured from the top tip instead of from the bottom flower, so my stalks were too short. So some other growers in the show taught me to measure from the patella, the lowest flower on the stem, and go 18 to 21 inches from there to the bottom of the stem.”
Experienced growers sympathetically took Bruce under their collective wing. They taught him some tricks of the trade:
Cut the stalk diagonally, and remove the leaves below the lowest flower.
Snap off the top couple of blossom buds to persuade unfurled buds to open faster, or leave the tip alone and snap off the faded bottom blooms to make the stem last longer.
Put a teaspoon of sugar in a vase’s water before adding the cut stems, and change it every other day to make the flowers last longer.
Dig out the bulbs every fall, and wash them before drying them on flat trays. Bruce uses a cement mixer to wash them in; two acres’ worth of gladioli create a lot of bulbs.
Before harvesting, stand a bit away from the stalk and gently wiggle it to shake out any unseen bumblebees. If you’re allergic to their venom — and Bruce is — their sting can be deadly.
Over the years, most of the other growers went out of business. One sold his equipment to Bruce.
When a grower’s 10-acre farm went up for sale, he helped Marvin and Jane Bruce get a loan to take it on. (Later, the Bruces sold it, and used the money to help finance their son’s ranch in Wyoming.)
Bruce doesn’t compete in flower shows these days, but he and his wife help maintain the Gladiolus Hall of Fame in the University of Northern Colorado’s Michener Library. Every August, just before students arrive, the Bruces deliver 100 flowers to the library to dress up the Gladiolus Hall of Fame.
Over the past decades, the Bruces have acquired a following at farmers markets in Greeley, Boulder, Cherry Creek and Colorado Springs. One fan recently drove out to the Bruces’ flower stand near their farm, helped harvest some flowers, and then presented Marvin Bruce with a new Tilley bucket-style sun-shading hat.
“It was really nice of them to do that,” Bruce said.
Usually, he’s the one who finds himself presenting gifts. On one of his recent weekly trips to deliver flowers to a Colorado Springs seller, he stopped for coffee at a small cafe where a server was exceptionally kind.
“She was very polite, and Iranian or something,” Bruce said.
“Anyway, I thought she would like some flowers, so I gave her some.”
He was glad to do it.
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin
