Category:

Gardening

What’s Blooming in Utah in April?

by torriemeidell July 20, 2023

If you’re trying to plan a cut flower garden or flower farm in Utah and wonder what kinds of blooms you can expect in April, then this post is for you! This is also a good list to keep in mind if you’re planning a wedding or other event in Utah and want to use locally grown flowers for that.

Some important things to consider:

My data is based on my own experience growing in Central Utah in a high altitude town with a relatively short growing season. Our last frost in the spring is typically in early to mid-June, and our first frost in the fall is usually in late September. I would say that the majority of the more populated places in Utah, such as the Wasatch Front or Utah Valley, are typically around 5-10 degrees warmer than we are at any given point and also have longer grower seasons. Because of that, if you live in one of those places, you will likely need to adjust your own expectations of what’s blooming to be a few weeks ahead of mine. For example, our common spring-flowering bulbs like tulips and daffodils usually start blooming around April 20, but they’re often blooming closer to the beginning of the month in other places around the state.
I’m only focusing here on what makes for good cutting material in April. There are obviously many other flowers (such as crocuses) that grow during this month (or even as early as mid to late March), but I’m not including those here because they’re not something you’d typically use in a flower arrangement.
Keep in mind that pretty much anything that will be flowering in April will have needed to be planted at least the fall before, with perhaps the exception of anemones, which you can plant into a high tunnel around February after pre-sprouting them for a few weeks before.
A few of my favorite books for planning out your cut flower garden year are 1 / 2 / 3 (with obviously some modifications needing to be made if your climate differs from the authors’ climates). I also like these particular books because they name specific varieties that are among their favorites for cutting.

Note: There may be affiliate links to books and products mentioned.

April Cut Flowers

Hyacinths

I think hyacinths are overrated as a landscape flower, but I love them as a cut flower. They have a fragrance that will fill a whole room, and they come in a wide array of colors, including white, pink, peach, yellow, and purple. Make sure you buy the absolute tallest varieties you can find, but even still, you shouldn’t count on them getting much taller than about 10″. Because of their shorter height, I find that I can only use hyacinths in a vase or jar arrangement, rather than a wrapped market bouquet. To harvest them for the longest vase life and stem length, I follow the (somewhat unusual) method found in this YouTube tutorial. Hyacinths are usually some of my very first flowers to come on, reliably showing up for me around the middle of the month and going until the end and even into May. Hyacinths are almost always treated as annuals by flower farmers since you have to harvest by the bulb to get any kind of stem length.

Daffodils

Is there anything more cheerful than a bundle of yellow daffodils in the spring? I think not! And with all the fancy new varieties of daffs available today, you don’t even have to stick with yellow — you can go white or ruffled or peach or dainty or cream or so much more. Plus most of them are even fragrant!

A few things to keep in mind with daffodils: 1) They must be harvested into water and conditioned separately than any other crops because they leak a toxic sap that will drastically shorten the vase life of anything else otherwise. Just put them into water by themselves for a few hours, and you should be good to combine with other stems after that as needed, making sure that if you re-cut the stems again for length, you condition them separately once again. 2) You ideally want to harvest them at the “nodding gooseneck” stage, which is where the little brown paper sheath has started to pull back and you’re starting to see some color in addition to the “neck” of the bloom starting to point down. 3) Daffodils are treated as perennials by flower farmers because you can cut the stem without touching the foliage, unlike a lot of other spring flowers. 4) Daffs come in early, mid, and late season varieties. Some of my absolute favorites include the “bunch” flowering varieties such as Geranium and Cheerfulness, and I’m also a big fan of the butterfly varieties.

Muscari

Also called grape hyacinths, muscari is an interesting category of spring flowering bulbs. Growing up I only knew of the super short muscari that seem to pop up everywhere in the grass, but recent developments have meant that muscari has been bred to actually have a usable stem length (sometimes up to 12″), as well as come in different colors than just your standard white and purple. These are still short enough that you could basically only use them in a jar or vase, but they give such a fun, dainty touch and also have a pleasant, light fragrance to boot.

Tulips

Could any spring list of cut flowers not mention tulips? The bulk of my tulips come on in early to mid May, but ‘Exotic Emperor’ reliably blooms first, often right behind the first of my daffodils and hyacinths. Other varieties in the “Emperor” series as well as tulips in the “Prince” series are usually next. Early tulips are all over the place for me as far as stem length goes, but I always harvest by the bulb (like most flower farmers) so that I can get the maximum length possible. Since I’m often doing arrangements in small vases or jars in early spring, it’s not a huge deal that many of those first tulips only end up being around 12″-15″ or so (with the exception of Exotic Emperor, which tends to give me more like 18-20″). Make sure to harvest tulips right at the “color crack” stage for maximum vase life, which means you’ll need to be checking your crop about 2-3 times per day.

Forsythia + Flowering Fruit Trees

My two most reliable early spring shrubs/trees are forsythia (which starts to bud up by the middle of the month and can be forced even earlier) and the suckers that grow at the base of my plum tree. Greenery and fillers are hard to come by in April, so I’m always very grateful for some extra color and structure for my bouquets. I will also use stems of pussy willow when the white catkins are just starting to poke through, which is also usually around mid-April for me. By the end of the month, I usually have blossoms on my plum trees for sure, and sometimes on my peach and apple trees as well.

Anemones + Fall-Planted Ranunculus

If you’re lucky enough to have a high tunnel (or have constructed a simpler low tunnel), you can have anemones and ranunculus as early as April if you planted back in the fall. The stems are often quite short to start with (sometimes only 5-6″ or so), but if you’re quick to cut them, the plant will usually produce more usable stems by the end of the month. For me, the anemones are usually first by a good week or two (or more), with the ranunculus following behind, closer to May.

Did I miss anything? What are YOUR favorite early spring flowers?

July 20, 2023 0 comment

Flower Farming Gardening Small Business Owner

How to Start a Small Flower Farm [Part II]: Choosing Seeds + Planning Your Year

by torriemeidell September 5, 2022

written by torriemeidell

This is part two of a five-part series all about how to start a small flower farm. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out part one about formulating a business plan and choosing your planting sites first, which you can find HERE.

Note: There are affiliate links to the books and products mentioned in the series.

Deciding What to Plant

So you’ve selected your farm site, decided roughly how many square feet to plant, and decided on a business strategy. Now comes the fun part — deciding what to plant!

Now, it is imperative that you have a firm business plan (including your target customer/audience and marketing strategy) in place BEFORE you drop a single penny on seeds and plants. Why? Because what you plant is entirely determined by what and whom you’re planting FOR.

If you’re planning on selling to florists and wholesalers, you need to plant a high volume of the same kind of flower in the same color. It also might be good to specialize in a high value crop, such as garden roses, peonies, lisianthus, ranunculus, or dahlias. Additionally, you’ll need to be consulting color trends for whatever events (such as weddings) your florist or wholesaler will be most likely to supply. Another way to approach selling to florists is to grow primarily things that can’t be shipped over long distances, such as zinnias, ornamental basil, celosia, cosmos, or sweet peas.

If you’re planning on offering a bouquet subscription service (especially one that goes over your whole growing season), you’ll need to focus your attention on growing a wide variety of focal flowers, filler, and foliage, and you’ll need to carefully plan out your crops so that you have things in bloom throughout your entire growing season (which means you’ll definitely need to plant backups, and backups of your backups).

If you’re only planning on selling at a farmer’s market in late summer, then you only need to worry about planting summer crops, and doing multiple successions of them.

If you really have no idea which direction you want your business to go, pick the two you’re most likely to start with and go from there. However, unless you’re exclusively just selling a few select crops to florists or wholesalers, chances are high that you’ll need to grow a decently wide variety of flowers and plants that fall into the following categories: focals, spikes, filler flowers, foliage, and textural elements.

Why those categories?

Because those are the five elements you need to create a killer bouquet or arrangement.

Most beginning flower farmers only focus on the first one or two categories (the focals and maybe the spikes), and they completely ignore the rest. As a result, their bouquets LOOK beginner/amateur-ish, and they won’t be as likely to sell a lot of them.

Planning out plants from each category for each season takes a lot of work and a lot of planning, but having elements from all five categories means that you’ll be able to put together fabulous arrangements no matter where you’re at in your growing season.

Below, I’ll detail some of my favorites for each category, grouped together by season.

Focals

Focal flowers are the attention-grabbers — they’re often the whole reason people stop and even consider buying flowers from you. Without a big, punchy bloom to draw in the eye, you probably won’t sell much. Luckily, each season comes with its own stunning focal flowers in a wide range of colors and styles.

Again, it is essential that you have backup crops in case your main focal flower crop fails. For example, this last spring I was highly counting on my tulips to pull a lot of the weight for my focals over about a 6-week period. Unfortunately, I suffered a massive crop loss. However, because I’d learned from my mistakes the previous year with having flowers not come on during their expected bloom times, I’d planted backups in my own backyard flower farm as well as planned backups through generous neighbors who had an abundance of certain flowers in their yards that they were willing to let me have, so even though the crop loss was disappointing, business could still go on.

Below are some favorite focal flowers for each period of the growing season:

Early Spring: daffodils, tulips, hyacinths
Late Spring: peonies, irises, ranunculus
Summer: lilies, sunflowers, lisianthus, zinnias
Autumn: dahlias, rudbeckia

Spikes

Spikes are anything that provides a vertical line in an arrangement. Often that will take the form of stems that have multiple flowers that blossom up a stem from the bottom, but sometimes it takes the form of interesting branches, too.

Spring: larkspur, pussy willow branches, bellflower, stock
Summer: snapdragons, anise hyssop
Autumn: orach, gladiolus

Filler Flowers

Filler flowers take many different forms: sometimes they’re the “froth” of an arrangement–as in the case of ammi or feverfew–and sometimes they’re just smaller, more secondary flowers that complement and enhance the look of your focal flowers.

Spring: lilacs, clover, alfalfa, bachelor’s buttons, spirea
Late Spring: alliums, sweet william, daisies, ammi
Summer: ageratum, balm (all types), feverfew (my absolute favorite), statice, annual phlox, gomphrena, yarrow
Autumn: celosia, china asters, rudbeckia triloba, fennel

Foliage + Greenery

I cannot overstate the importance of having foliage and greenery in your arrangements. In my opinion, most arrangements that skimp or skip out entirely on foliage and greenery will nearly always have a more amateur look about them, and they also will feel like they “need” more flowers simply because they lack the bulk and background that good foliage provides.

I personally plan to add a lot more shrubs to our flower farm in order to give myself more options (I’m looking specifically into several different types of ninebark as well as lady’s mantle), but the ones below are the ones that I’ve tried already and that I use regularly.

Each one of these has become an absolute staple for me, and I’d find any single one of them hard to live without.

Spring: raspberry greens, artemisia, tulip leaves
Summer: basil (lemon, cinnamon), euphorbia, Aurelia’s verde amaranth or other green amaranth, mint, honeywort
Autumn: mahogany splendor hibiscus, red spike amaranth, hot biscuits amaranth, Hopi red dye amaranth, amoratto basil, goldenrod

Textural Elements

If you have all the elements above, your bouquets will usually look lush and full and definitely like something people would want to buy. But if you’re able to add an airy, textural element that kind of floats above all the rest? Pure magic. For me, it’s these textural, whimsical pieces that almost always deliver the final WOW factor.

Spring: cress, saponaria, bleeding heart
Summer: frosted explosion grass (my favorite!), annual baby’s breath
Autumn: bunny tail grass, jewels of opar (talinum)

Other Considerations

Climate

I live in an arid, hot climate that is almost always suffering some kind of drought and where temperatures range from below zero in the winter to over 100 degrees in the summer. Our spring is generally a flash in the pan, and we definitely live in extreme temperatures for many months out of the year.

As such, I tend to struggle with some hardy annuals and other such plants that prefer mild, temperate conditions. The things that usually grow best for me are heat-loving and drought tolerant, although I have been able to grow some things successfully here that generally don’t love our climate simply by planting in part shade or using 50%-strength shade cloth (such as this).

While you can definitely try to grow whatever you’re drawn the most to, you’ll generally have the best success if you stick with plants that naturally do well in your climate. That may take some trial and error, but it’s worth working with what you have rather than moaning over what you don’t.

Fragrance

Fragrance wasn’t a huge consideration for me at first, but it’s become much more so now. I noticed immediately how often people would comment whenever I put in flowers or stems that were fragrant, and how much delight it seemed to bring to my customers. Nowadays, I try to never let a bouquet or arrangement leave my farm that doesn’t have at least one fragrant piece in it.

In fact, sometimes I’ll put in certain things simply for the fragrance alone, not because I necessarily love the look or texture of that particular thing.

Spring tends to have the most fragrant blooms naturally, such as peonies, daffodils, hyacinths, and lilacs. Once you get into high summer, however, you need to be a bit more intentional.

My favorite ingredient to use for fragrance in late spring and early summer is stock, and my favorite fragrant stem to use in summer and autumn is lemon or cinnamon basil. Sometimes I’ll slip in a fragrant rosebud, not because it will last as long as my bouquets usually do, but for the smell alone. It seems like a side note kind of thing, but people pretty much ALWAYS notice fragrance, and it can really make a big difference when it comes to the whole “experience” of your flowers.

Planning Your Year

The ideal time to start planting and such for a new flower farm is actually around October, when you’ll be putting in bulbs for spring, such as tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils. The next best time is wherever you happen to be now 🙂

Basically, no matter the season of the year you are currently in, there is something you can do to further your flower farming dream. Sure, you might not be able to have a whole growing season to realize all your dreams ASAP (not that that’s realistic, anyway), but whatever growing and harvesting and researching you can do right where you’re at will only serve to help you down the road.

Here’s a rundown of the general “arc” of our flower farming year, starting in late autumn, after a few frosts:

October/November: Plant all your spring bulbs, tear out dead plants and tidy up beds, add thick layer of mulch to everything to break down over the winter and enrich the soil, prune existing roses or shrubs. If you have a high tunnel, plant ranunculus and anemone corms or whatever you choose to try and overwinter.

December/January: Plan out your planting schedule, order seeds, start super slow-growing seeds like lisianthus or eucalyptus inside.

February/March: Start your first wave of hardy annuals, starting with the slowest to grow first (like snapdragons and rudbeckia). Note: If you haven’t purchased the book Cool Flowers by Lisa Mason Ziegler, which is all about hardy annuals, it is hands-down an absolute must-own for any flower farmer. Start prepping any beds outside (tearing out dead plants, adding compost, sending in soil samples to be tested) as the weather permits.

April/May: Start your first successions of tender annuals and start hardening and transplanting out your hardy annuals. After your last frost, plant out everything else. Harvest spring crops.

June/July: Keep succession planting to ensure you have a steady crop throughout your season. Start the hardy annual and biennial seeds you hope to overwinter for next year. Harvest late spring and summer crops to keep the blooms coming.

August: Try to stay on top of the weeding and harvesting the best you can. Do your best not to burn out 😉

September: Start ripping plants out once they’re spent and prepare beds to plant crops that will be overwintered. Transplant or direct sow hardy annuals and biennials for next year.

If you want a few more resources that help further break down a year in flower farming, check out The Flower Farmer’s Year by Georgie Newbery, A Year in Flowers by Erin Benzakein, and A Year Full of Flowers by Sarah Raven.

Drop a comment below with your favorite flowers to grow, as well as any questions you might have!

September 5, 2022 0 comment

Flower Farming Gardening What's Blooming Monthly

What Flowers Are Blooming in Utah in June?

by torriemeidell July 17, 2022

written by torriemeidell

In milder parts of the world like the UK, the month of June is one of the most abundant when it comes to what’s flowering and what you can harvest in a cut flower garden or farm. In Utah, however, June is a notoriously tricky time for flower farmers and home gardeners alike, simply because you’re past the spring blooming bulbs like tulips, but your summer flowers just aren’t there yet.

While there are obviously additional flowers than these that can bloom in June, I’m restricting my list exclusively to flowers that are good for cutting. I’ll start with the focal flowers that I count on to make bouquets, and then I’ll add a few supporting flowers and fillers/foliage to the list so you get a good idea of your options if you’re trying to start a cut flower farm in Utah.

For some background, we’re located in a high altitude town in Central Utah. Although we’re technically a Zone 6a, our growing season is actually extremely short when compared to most of Utah, especially along the Wasatch Front and then down in Southern Utah. For the past couple years, we’ve had frosts in mid-June and our season usually ends in late September. If you live in one of those areas in Utah with a significantly longer season (such as Salt Lake or St. George), your blooms are typically about 2-4 weeks ahead of ours.

Note: There are affiliate links below to products and books mentioned.

*red and yellow ranunculus, bridal veil spirea*, *wild buttercups*

June Focal Flowers

As flower farmers, we always have to have many, many backups in case certain crops fail in order to guarantee that we’ll still have flowers to fulfill our CSA bouquet subscriptions. In the list below, all the flowers are dependent on weather. If the spring goes by in a flash and the heat waves come early, the ranunculus crop goes dormant. If it’s a cooler, more mild spring, then the Asiatic lilies probably won’t start blooming until July. Therefore, because you can’t control the weather, we plant some of everything so that we (hopefully) won’t have any period within the month without focal flowers.

Ranunculus

While ranunculus is notoriously tricky to grow (and really grows best in Utah when overwintered in a high tunnel), it’s a high value crop that can go for up to 8 weeks in mid to late spring, which can be especially valuable in years when your tulip crop fails or blooms super early. Ideally, you’ll presprout ranunculus and plant it in a high tunnel in November, which means you can expect blooms the following April or so until the heat starts to pick up sometime in June. You can also plant it out in March with minimal to no protection, but your stems will likely be significantly shorter and the bloom time only 3-4 weeks or so.

Irises

I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of bearded irises as a gardener, but I quite like them as cut flowers in an arrangement simply because they’re so dramatic, plus they bloom at a time when few other things are available. In my experience, the Dutch irises tend to bloom first (ours did in May), and the bearded irises show up after, starting in late May and going into early June. The latest to bloom are the Siberian iris, which showed up around mid-June for us.

Poppies

Poppies don’t make great cut flowers just because they’re generally so short-lived in a vase, but there are exceptions. Icelandic poppies have a decent vase life if you can get them to grow for you, and Oriental poppies can last 5-6 days in a vase if you make sure to cut them right at cracking stage and sear the ends in boiling water or with an open flame immediately upon cutting (also note that they do shed pollen like mad near the end). Poppy pods, on the other hand, make a great statement in arrangements.

Peonies

Like tulips, peonies come in early, mid- and late-season varieties depending on the cultivar. Around here, the earliest varieties tend to start coming on in late May and the latest varieties can go almost all the way until the end of June. The hardest part about peonies is that you often have to wait a few years upon planting them bare root to get any kind of usable blooms off of them, but once they’re established and happy, they will produce masses of blooms for decades.

Roses

Roses are generally a pretty reliable June bloomer, especially if the bush is established. While roses will never win a vase life contest, most people are generally smitten enough with garden roses that you can still get away with using them as a focal flower, even if they do only last a handful of days in your bouquet.

Sunflowers

You’ll notice that pretty much everything up to this point (with the exception of some poppies and the ranunculus) are plants that are perennial. Therefore, if you want to consistently have blooms available in June, you pretty much need to plan on establishing several perennials. However, if you’re just starting out and don’t have established perennials yet (or weren’t able to plant bulbs back in the fall), you can get an early crop of sunflowers by starting them indoors in early April and planting them out 2-3 weeks later, which is about a month before our last frost date. They definitely won’t be as tall and perfect as sunflowers planted under hotter conditions, but sunflowers SAVE ME every single June from about the third week on.

Asiatic Lilies

In years when the spring tends to be a flash in the pan and the heat comes on quick, I’ll usually have the first of my perennialized Asiatic lilies blooming by the very end of June. Those will continue on through July, with the Oriental lilies taking over around August or so.

*double daisies, snapdragons, feverfew, bellflowers, larkspur, saponaria, stock*

June Supporting Flowers

While many of June’s focal flowers rely on perennials and bulbs, there are actually quite a lot of supporting flowers you can start in the same growing season, or that you can start the previous summer and overwinter. For how to do this, you simply MUST read the book Cool Flowers by Lisa Mason Ziegler. I think it’s a must-own book (since I’m constantly referring to it), but it clearly and thoroughly explains everything you need to know about the group of plants known as hardy annuals, which will absolutely save you come June since they’re basically the only thing blooming that early next to bulbs and perennials.

Alliums

Alliums are an extremely diverse group of hundreds of different kinds of bulbs that all tend to bloom in late spring or early summer. While I love the gigantic globe alliums that look like fireworks in my garden, I prefer the daintier varieties for cutting like azureum, drumstick, and the cultivars that look more like tiny sprays of flowers rather than spheres.

Star of Bethlehem

I was told this wouldn’t overwinter successfully in my zone, but I tried some anyway, and much to my delight — they did! I tried the classy, goes-with-everything white Arabicum, and I’m crossing my fingers that they’ll keep coming back year after year.

Bachelor’s Buttons

I can direct sow this out in the very beginning of March and reliably have blooms by mid-June. While bachelor’s buttons can be tricky to use as cut flowers just because of the growth habit of the plant, I’ve found that if you can pinch the central stem when it’s just 4-5″ high down to the lowest set of true leaves that it will then produce long, very usable and easy to harvest stems. You can still use it if you don’t pinch, but rather than having several long, single blooms to harvest, you’ll just be cutting a small bush basically. I love the pops of color that bachelor’s buttons bring to both the landscape and to bouquets.

Snapdragons

If you either overwinter your snapdragon plants or start them very early (like February) inside and then transplant them out by mid-April, you’ll generally always have blooms by mid to late June. Snapdragons are probably my favorite cut flower ever, just because they never seem to fail me, and I love their vast diversity of colors and bloom shapes.

Bells of Ireland

These can be tricky to 1) germinate and 2) get to a long enough stem length, but if you pop them in the freezer for a week or so before direct sowing them in early March, you’ll usually solve both problems. The lime green bells bring a freshness to whatever they’re paired with, and since many people have never seen them, they provide a great talking point as well.

Nigella (Love in a Mist)

Once you have nigella, you’ll likely always have it just because it’s such a prolific self-seeder, but I personally love that about it. (Free flowers!) The best and most usable nigella will come from seedlings that sprout up around September and that overwinter for you, which is what happened for us this year. By June, we had masses of the gorgeous, tall blue and white flowers that I cut on endlessly for weeks.

Stock

Stock is a tricky crop to grow in Utah just because of our volatile springs, but I’ve had the most success with growing the Iron variety (which tends to tolerate heat better), and planting successions of it every two weeks starting in late January and going into late April. My first successions I plant out in our high tunnel, and everything from mid-April on goes out into our raised beds under shade cloth.

Larkspur

For some reason, larkspur is super tricky for me to get to germinate (even when I freeze the seeds), but when I have been able to get some to germinate — and especially to overwinter — I absolutely love using it in arrangements. I find that it’s a more usable spike than delphiniums and foxgloves (which also bloom in June), and I also love that it’s more of a cut and come again kind of flower.

Daisies

Almost everyone loves a cheerful daisy, and they are just about the easiest perennial ever to grow. Also, bonus — they have an insanely good vase life.

Bellflowers

Bellflowers are a biennial, which means you need to sow them the summer before you want them to bloom. But I think they’re absolutely worth the extra bit of trouble! If you cut them just as the first couple of bells are opening, the vase life is often over a week, and I love the bubbly texture they bring to an arrangement.

Saponaria

This is a new filler flower to me this year, and I have absolutely loved it! I direct sowed a bunch in March and April, and I had quite a few of the long, dainty, bouncing flowers ready for me by June. This has a look very similar to Covent Garden annual baby’s breath, but for me, it’s far easier to grow and get a decent stem length on.

June Foliage/Fillers

Spirea

Spirea is one of the most valuable shrubs we have on our property because in the spring, its frothy white flowers spill romantically out of every wrapped bouquet I put it in, and then later on, its pretty foliage acts as a nice greenery in the late summer.

Cress

Cress is super quick from seed to harvest — about 60 days is all. If you sometimes struggle with getting your cress to bloom and produce seed pods on long enough stems, try overwintering it (as we do) — your stems will be much more usable. I loved the pennycress I tried last year so much that this year I’m trying two more varieties: a dragon cress from Floret, and Persian Cress from Johnny’s Seeds.

Mint

Mint might be a bully for the home gardener, but WOW, do I love it as a flower farmer for that exact reason! Nothing fills up a bed so fast, and it is one of my absolute favorite fillers and foliages to use in my bouquets for as long as I have it. In fact, I loved my mint patch so much (and was cutting off it so regularly) that I’m now trying to establish two NEW large mint patches.

Raspberry foliage

While our raspberry foliage isn’t the most ideal because it does have thorns, I still welcome using it every June just because it’s so reliable and it provides a great base for any arrangement or bouquet. If you are planning to use raspberry bushes for cut flower bouquets, please do yourself a favor and make sure you plant a thornless variety!

Feverfew

Near the end of June, one of my absolute fillers of all time — feverfew — takes the spotlight. Just a couple stems of feverfew completely fill out almost any arrangement, and the dainty, daisy-like sprays of flowers are so cheerful and loved by everyone. It does have an herbal fragrance that takes some getting used to, but it is SO worth growing, and growing a lot of.

Alfalfa

Finally, I have to include alfalfa on my list, even though I’ve never planted any. Often, despite my best planning and intentions, I still have to go foraging a bit in June to have enough filler and greenery to work with, and alfalfa is almost always what comes to the rescue. It lasts a surprisingly long time in the vase, and the purple flowers (which range from light tones to a super deep violet) are a nice bonus. Whenever I see a weedy patch of alfalfa start up somewhere in my yard, I always let it be in June in order to use it for greenery!

And there you have it! My favorite varieties of cutting material for June. Drop a comment below to add your own favorites to the list, and, as always, don’t hesitate to ask me any questions you might have!

July 17, 2022 0 comment

Flower Farming Gardening

5 Things I’ve Learned About Flower Farming This Week

by torriemeidell March 7, 2021

written by torriemeidell

Whew, it’s been a busy week! It’s crazy how fast this dream of doing a “little flower farm side thing” has evolved over the past few weeks. Basically what started out as a simple idea for how to gain back some of the money for my cut garden hobby has now grown into a legit business venture, and I’m putting in the hours to prove it. Not only do I need to do the actual WORK of producing flowers for selling, but I’m also having to learn a ton about marketing and business and all sorts of fun things.

I told my husband that I basically have 3 things I need to do every day for the flower farm:

1 – Spend time actually working on growing.

This week, that meant sowing hundreds of seeds both indoors and out, watering, preparing soil, building garden beds, etc. So far, almost everything I’ve sowed has come up (both indoors and out), which is encouraging but far from meaning that they will all actually produce for me. Time will tell.

2 – Spend time researching.

While I’ve grown a garden for years and have been fascinated by flower gardening particularly since I was a young kid, I still have a LOT to learn when it comes to not only cultivating all the different varieties, but also harvesting them, timing the plantings and succession plantings for market selling, and learning how to grow them (and WHEN) in this particular area. I’ve been spending a ton of time every day listening to webinars, reading books, studying flower farmers on YouTube, and more.

3 – Spend time working on actually building up the business side of things.

This week, that meant calling up local florists to see if there’s any interest in buying from me (the answer is a strong YES from everyone I’ve talked to so far, which is amazing!), looking into businesses that sell flowers and getting down contact information to call them down the road if I have extra flowers to sell, creating and maintaining a social media presence since that’s primarily how I’ll directly market bouquets (follow me on Instagram HERE and stay tuned for the Facebook page to be ready in a week or two), researching prices for both wholesale and retail, and nailing down how I’m planning to do my CSA bouquet subscriptions (which is my #1 preferred way to market my flowers, at least for this first year).

It’s been a steep learning curve so far, and I’m sure it will only get steeper once I actually start having my plants produce flowers (and start experiencing the inevitable plant and business failures along the way). I am super excited though, and I hope you’ll join me for my journey here and on social media!

Here are 5 fun facts I learned this week in my research:

1. You control the size of a sunflower’s bloom based on how closely you plant them together

You guys, THIS BLEW MY MIND! I always thought that the size of a sunflower bloom was entirely dependent on the type of sunflower, but it actually turns out it’s much more dependent on how closely plants are spaced out. This was great news for me because I was planning on having to space out all my sunflowers 9″-12″ apart, but now I’m going to be planting them every six inches. This means I can almost double what I can plant in my sunflower bed!

2. Around 80% of the flowers sold in the U. S. are imported from other countries

Originally I just wanted to start my flower farm as a (very) small little hobby business that would basically just earn me enough to pay for itself and not much else. However, the more I’ve looked into it, the more I realize that this is a profitable industry if you can manage and control your production really well. Local flowers are much fresher than anything that’s going to be sourced from out of country, which means they have a longer vase life and you’ll also be able to choose from a MUCH wider selection since you don’t have to worry about transporting them long distances.

3. Many hardy annuals can actually be planted in the fall for a much earlier bloom time the following spring

Okay, if you are into growing flowers at ALL, you have to check out the book Cool Flowers by Lisa Mason Ziegler (aff link). This book has changed EVERYTHING for me, and I only wish I would have read it last summer so that I could actually have put all the ideas into practice for this first growing season. In a nutshell, she basically teaches how there’s a huge class of plants known as hardy annuals (such as poppies, snapdragons, black-eyed susans, and more, that you can plant in the fall and then that will winter over and produce blooms much, much earlier the following spring than if you follow what it says on the seed packets and wait until spring or until your last frost date to first plant them.

Much of my planting outside right now is experimental (since technically I’m about two weeks ahead of what she even said to do, but that I chose to do anyway because our weather was forecasted to be quite warm for the first half of March), but based on what her book says, I actually think the flowers I direct seeded outside this week (larkspur, Bells of Ireland, poppies, love-in-a-mist, and bachelor’s buttons) should do all right.

I’m doing a lot of “experiments” this year with a TON of different varieties (I definitely have a seed-buying problem), but I figure that once I figure out what works well, I’ll know more which types of flowers to focus on in future years. For now, I’ve just got to try them all! 🙂

4. Tweezers are your best friend when it comes to taking care of seeds

I didn’t use tweezers with the first wave of seeds that I planted, and it shows—because some of the seeds are so tiny (yarrow, snapdragons, I’m looking at you!), there’s as many as 12-15 different seedlings coming up in a single cell in some cases! I got smarter once I noticed how often that was happening, and I used tweezers to carefully pull out the seedlings by the leaves and replant them into their own cells. I also started using tweezers to pick up the seeds and drop them exactly where I wanted them in the cells when first sowing new seeds, as well. (I’ve also heard that you can use a toothpick to do that too, esp. with the tiny, tiny seeds like snapdragons).

5. The difference between “biannual” and “biennial”

I hadn’t paid much attention before to these two different terms and were treating all things under this category as if they were the same thing. So, for future reference, a “biannual” is a plant that flowers twice in one year (such as some types of roses or irises), and a “biennial” (a much more common flower term) is a plant that only produces foliage the first year and then doesn’t bloom until the second year (such as most types of foxglove, hollyhocks, and more).

Hope you learned something new, and I’ll try to be back next week with a new Homestead Weekly!

March 7, 2021 0 comment

Our Garden Failures and What We Learned From Them

Failures + Lessons Learned Gardening

Garden Failures + What We’ve Learned // Vol. I

by torriemeidell May 13, 2020

written by torriemeidell

When I was 12 or so (and until I was 16 or 17), I wanted to be a landscape designer–I took out a subscription to Birds and Blooms magazine, I joined the National Gardening Association, and I asked for (and received!) thick gardening reference books for birthdays and for Christmas. I was responsible for our family’s vegetable garden one year (at my request), and I also tried my hand at sowing some flower seeds (cosmos–which thrived–and bachelor buttons, which are literally still coming up every year even now, almost two decades later). In my limited experience during those few years of intense passion for all things garden, the act of planting and keeping things alive and healthy was easy–my one near-loss was a tomato plant that my mom said probably wouldn’t make it, but in all my stubbornness, I declared it would not be so and I fertilized it regularly, watered it daily, constantly rooted out weeds around it, and literally said prayers that it would survive and produce for us. (And guess what? It did! It got basically just as big and was just as fruitful as the other tomato plants that year.)

What I hadn’t realized at the time was how much work had gone on in the background before my efforts–how much money and effort my mom had poured into the soil to make it balanced and rich, and how easy watering was when you just had an automated sprinkler system that did most of the work. Of course, sometimes we do tend to complicate gardening too much—we think it is hard, so we don’t try at all. Or we focus so much on the problems that we don’t fully appreciate the miracle that is throwing a plant in some dirt, putting some water on it, and watching life and fruit and flowers spring forth from it. Or maybe that’s just part of growing up and becoming an adult (or a gardener)—you look for ways to problem solve, to produce more, and to improve.

Below I’ll share some of our gardening failures and lessons learned over the past few years, but if you want to hear how to avoid common gardening mistakes from someone who is much more of an expert than I am, there’s a free webinar you can sign up for that’s going on this Friday (5/15) at 10 a.m. and then again 4 p.m. EST. It’s put on by the folks at Ultimate Bundles (of which I’m a proud affiliate!), and it’s totally free to anyone that signs up and wants to watch. The place to sign up for that is right here.

Here’s the rundown on our latest garden fails (and the lessons we learned from them):

Indoor Seedling Batch #1 – Mostly Flowers w/ Long, Leggy Stems: Majority Died During Hardening Off Process

This first seedling batch we planted was actually all the way back in 2018, but I include it here because it informed a lot of our choices (and reluctance) in trying out seeds again this year. With this first batch, we planted one flat of all sorts of seeds–zinnias, daisies, and marigolds are the ones I remember. We rotated them to the sunniest spots in the house throughout the day, and at first, the seeds thrived–most of what we planted seemed to come up, and we were excited at the bounty of blooms we were going to enjoy for a few dollars’ worth of seeds. We had the seeds inside for about two months (which was too long for some of them), and pretty much all of them grew very long and leggy, which we now know is a sign of lack of sufficient light.

When we started hardening them off for a few days before transplanting, they did okay…at first. But then, on one particularly hot day, 80% shriveled up from too much heat and lack of water. The other 20% that we were able to transplant mostly all died from being too leggy and not being strong enough to withstand the temperature and wind fluctuations, and we only had two marigolds survive out of the whole flat. (Though, I must say, those marigolds FLOURISHED! I’ve never seen marigolds get as big as those did!)

So, lesson #1 here: If seedlings are looking straggly and leggy, it’s because they’re getting insufficient light. And lesson #2: Make sure you watch diligently to make sure seedlings get enough water while hardening off outside.

Indoor Seedling Batch #2 – Hardy Spring Vegetable Seedlings: Died After Transplanting

This year, we decided to brave planting from seed a second time, and we tried to learn from our former mistake by buying an inexpensive grow light on Amazon to clip over the seedlings (this one (aff link) is similar, though we found ours for half this price). We also went for larger seed cell flats because we heard that peas and sweet peas (which we were planting in this batch) had deep root systems and needed bigger cells because of it. Also in this batch were other hardy spring seeds, such as broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, and leeks. We covered the seed tray with a plastic covering until they germinated, and we kept the flat by our sunniest window + had the grow light going at least 16 hours a day. We also watered from the bottom (since we heard that was better for the seeds than watering from the top, which can wash away seeds or be too hard on tiny stems). We had mixed success in this tray: Literally none of our cauliflower came up at all, and hardly any spinach. Our lettuce plants did okay, but not nearly as many came up as we’d planted. Our leeks mostly all sprouted, but they were so skinny and delicate-looking that we thought it would be a miracle if they survived. However, our peas, sweet peas, and broccoli all look great—they didn’t look too leggy, and they had 3-4 sets of leaves before we started hardening them off outside.

Because they were supposed to be hardy against frosts, we figured we wouldn’t need to harden them off that long, so we started hardening them off for a few hours at a time and gradually increased the time each day, and then we transplanted them out after about a week.

Every single one died, even though the plants had looked great.

I think our failure on these was due to two things: 1) We should have run a fan on the seedlings from the get-go so that the stems could develop thicker and stronger since we have heavy canyon winds here and then hardened them off for a longer period of time, and 2) I don’t think they got sufficient water for the first few days after being transplanted–we had counted on the rainfall being sufficient during that time, but we should have checked the soil daily to see if they were actually getting enough.

*One of our current lettuce transplants*

Indoor Seedling Batch #3 – Mix of Flowers, Herbs, and Vegetables: Most Survived, Except Those That Didn’t

The third batch got sufficient light and water and were hardened off for a loooong time before being transplanted (read: 3+ weeks). As a result, they mostly all had thick stems and several sets of leaves. This was the batch we transferred out most recently, and it included mostly snapdragons, though we had a few verbascum flowers in there too, as well as two lettuce plants and a lemon balm (herb) plant.

The seedlings have now been out for two weeks, and they all look quite good, except for one of the lettuce plants (which mysteriously got ripped up and displaced about a foot to the north—maybe from the wind? Or a bird?) and the lemon balm. I *think* our problem with the lemon balm was that we had a couple colder nights where the temps got to around freezing (33 or 34 or so), and it looks like that plant doesn’t tolerate cold well, as it has blackened. Other than that, the rest are looking healthy enough. I currently water all of them daily with a watering can, and though I haven’t seen a ton of new growth, they seem to be doing okay. Fingers crossed!

Outdoor Direct Sown Seeds #1 – Peas, Lettuce, Broccoli: Almost None Came Up

We direct sowed some seeds outside at the same time as we transplanted the indoor seedling batch #2, but none came up. I don’t *think* the problem was outdoor temperature, as I actually took a thermometer to the soil, and it was at 55 degrees—I think the problem was insufficient watering, since we were counting on the rainfall that was happening about 3 times a week to be enough when it actually appears that seeds should basically be watered daily unless the soil is still moist from the day before.

Outdoor Direct Sown Seeds #2 – Peas, Sweet Peas: In the Process of Coming Up Now

We direct sowed more peas and sweet peas when we transplanted indoor seedling batch #3 out, and since these seeds have been getting watered every day (and it’s significantly warmer now, as it’s over a month later), we had several of the (snap) peas come up this week, with more expected. Verdict is still out on whether they’ll reach maturity, but for now they mostly look good (although the one sweet pea that had come up has now shriveled…sigh…).

Outdoor Direct Sown Seeds #3 – Shirley Poppies: Still Haven’t Come Up

I also planted these poppy seeds at the same time as those peas and sweet peas above (in this last planting), but none have come up yet. However, as they were sown 11 days ago and the sprout time on the packet says 10-15 days, we still might have a shot. Shirley poppies are supposed to thrive more in cooler weather, so I think we nailed the planting time outside. We’re also watering them daily, which the seed packet said to do. You barely cover these seeds at all though, so if none come up, it might be due to the canyon winds blowing some away, or even the watering causing some to wash away or shift too much. We shall see!

*Some of our snapdragon seedlings in 100% compost*

Compost Experiment #1

In 2018, we built our first raised garden beds and were torn on how we should fill them up. As anyone who has built a raised bed knows, the most expensive part of them is often not the wood and supplies for the bed itself, but the dirt that goes inside. Looking for an economical option, we found that our local landfill sells a truck bed full of compost for just $20, which meant that we could fill both raised beds plus do a top layer on our ground beds for only $40. Literally everyone but one person (Matt’s boss, who did extensive graduate work in horticulture) told us that we absolutely had to mix the compost with something else in order for anything to grow in it. We decided to try an experiment and try straight compost to see if Matt’s boss was right. And it appeared that he was–we planted everything in 100% landfill compost, and our stuff THRIVED that year.

Compost Experiment #2

The next year (2019), we decided to build two more raised beds, and we (of course) were going to fill them with straight compost again since we’d had such good success the year before. Well, that time we didn’t get so lucky—the chemical decomposition of the compost materials appeared to be too “hot” for our plants, and few survived. (Those that did survive kind of had a sickly, parched look to them, despite ample watering.) When we talked to Matt’s boss about it, he said that planting things in compost made from 100% green material will thrive, but that if there is ANYTHING that’s not green material mixed in, that’s when you’ll get the result we got. So our plan for future years is to do one of two things: 1) if we get compost from the landfill, we will mix it with something else, like everyone else told us to do, or 2) if we get the compost from someone who can guarantee that it’s 100% green matter (or make the compost ourselves), then we’ll take the chance on it again.

Now, in case you are wondering, we haven’t amended that second batch of compost—we’ve just kept planting in it. Why? Because we heard that once it’s “cooled” off chemically (mostly thanks to lots and lots of watering and time), the matter in it is excellent. We have noticed that it doesn’t retain water well though, so if we stick around here for awhile (unlikely, since it’s looking like a move is more and more likely), we’ll go ahead and add some mulch and some specialized soil blend to firm it up a bit.

If, like so many others in the general population right now (thanks to the food stocking and processing issues in the grocery stores and such), you are going to try and grow some of your own food this year, make sure you check out that free webinar on the 8 most common gardening mistakes (and how to avoid them).

What gardening failures have YOU had? And what lessons have you learned from your experience?

May 13, 2020 2 comments