Is indoor winter growing regenerative?

I’m standing in front of a vase of leftover blooms from our first attempt at extending the season to sell blooms for Valentine’s Day.

Red Amaryllis. White lilies. Deep red parrot tulips.
Snow outside the window.
February in Maine.

The flowers are beautiful, but I keep asking myself:

Is growing flowers indoors in the winter really aligned with our goals of being a regenerative farm?  

If regeneration means working with natural cycles…
If it means reducing extraction, inputs, and artificial energy…
If it means honoring seasonality…

Then what does it mean to grow flowers in February in Maine — and why do it?

Outside of the regenerative question, the answer of "why" is both practical and economic.  Winter growing allows me to engage with new potential customers early in the season, before the whirlwind of spring and summer takes over.  And if our farm is going to be resilient long-term, it needs income streams that extend beyond the short growing season. 

And part of the answer is also personal.

In other places I’ve lived, the first daffodils are pushing up by mid-February. Here, realistically, that moment is still six to eight weeks away.

The Maine winter is long.

And I miss flowers.

If that rationale was not sufficient, there is another tension:

Aren't local flowers an ecological improvement, even if not purely regenerative?

Valentine’s Day flowers are rarely local.

They are typically:

• Grown in heated greenhouses or warm climates
• Shipped thousands of miles
• Produced in systems that rely heavily on chemical inputs

But ecological improvement over the status quo is not the same as regeneration. 

So, what makes it regenerative? 

The answer lies in how and where we grow our winter blooms.

One of the central ideas in regenerative economics is designing out waste — not just material waste, but wasted energy, space, and opportunity. And where elimination isn’t possible, the next question is whether those flows can be redirected into something useful.

Our winter growing is enabled by space and warmth that would otherwise go unused. The blooms are housed in an unheated insulated air gap between our house and workshop — originally designed to prevent heat loss during frequent winter trips between the two.

That space naturally stays between 40–55°F — cooler on the bottom floor, warmer upstairs — conditions that turn out to be surprisingly well suited for forcing bulbs.

No propane.
No electric heaters.
No added fossil fuel heat.

We simply redirect warmth that was already there — thermal energy that would otherwise dissipate unused.

In that framing, leveraging this underutilized space for growing inside feels aligned with our regenerative charter, even if slightly outside the natural cycle. 

But, we will continue to evolve the design of our regenerative system.  Even though our winter growing experiment doesn’t feel fundamentally misaligned with regenerative principles, in the future we hope to find more ways to eliminate waste rather than simply redirecting it.   And hopefully, after another full growing season, the abundance of summer blooms will be enough to carry me peacefully through the flower-free winter months.

I don’t have a final answer about whether winter growing in Maine is truly regenerative.

But I do know this:

If we want to build systems that give back more than they take, we have to be willing to sit with the hard questions — even when the flowers are beautiful.