Villa Verde consists of four hectares of open field flower production, with four polytunnel greenhouses measuring 400 square meters each. Here, Yulia and her mother grow hydrangeas, peonies, and other crops. The company is located in a village just a few kilometers out of Kyiv. Last night, Russian artillery destroyed it all.
Bullets hit a 500m2 building housing the boilers, fertigation units, machinery, and other equipment. These caught fire, burning it down completely. “Nothing is left”, Yulia tells us, “we couldn’t save anything. The greenhouses still stand, but these are now cut off from electricity, heating, and everything else. It’s minus 4 now, we tried to cover everything with textile to protect it from frost as much as we could.”
Luckily no one got wounded, but it is questionable if the crops can be saved. The cut flower grower sells its produce at the local market, mostly through florists in and around Kyiv.
The greenhouse in better times
In military terms, hitting the greenhouse is’ collateral damage’. “We have so-called self-defense brigade, consisting of civilians volunteering for military defense actions like protecting the roads”, Yulia explains. “In villages, they throw Molotov cocktails to tanks in order to stop them. Now Russian air forces try to eliminate these self-defense brigades. And that’s how they hit our building.”
For more information or help - needless to say, restoring the building and replacing all the machinery will cost a lot of money, "I estimate we will need around 200 to 300 thousand euro" - please contact Yulia through https://www.instagram.com/villaverde.farm/
14:01:04