How Many Flowers Do I Need To Grow? (as a Flower Farmer)
There are two big questions I get from a lot of flower farmers
What do I plant to ensure it all goes together?
How much of each do I need?
These are great questions to ask, and really get to the heart of the flower farmer’s business. It’s important to ensure that you have enough volume of material in order to supply your sales and income streams, but it’s also important to know that information (And actually, the majority of flower farming’s stresses can be attributed to these two questions!)
Now if you’re growing something like a U-pick or if you really are growing for variety (I.e. for florists and they will buy every single stem of what you grow) then you don’t have to worry about limitations on crop selection.
On the other hand if you are like us and are smaller scale, growing for design work and mixed bouquets and subscriptions, planning things out to ensure you have enough of the right types of materials to put together a wedding or your mixed bouquets is important.
The way that I’ve learned to plant is to follow the proportions of a typical bouquet or centerpiece and then work backwards from there.
In a bouquet, you generally have the following elements:
Focal flowers
Foliage
Filler flowers (spray-type growth of flowers with multiple buds on each stem or branch that “fills” a bouquet).
Frills (also called textural, air, lace)
And in that bouquet you have a certain percentage of those elements
Focal: 30%
Foliage: 30%
Filler: 30%
Frill: 10%
(Of course your own design style may vary. I’ve seen where it’s just 50% focal and 50% filler flowers and that works just fine too, it’s all about what your design style needs).
As a result, you can now plan and ensure that you just have those same proportions of materials growing out in the field based on your “recipe”.
To do this, calculate the total surface area of your beds (not including walkways and areas being left fallow of course) and divide by ten. If for example you were growing on 4,000 square feet:
4,000/10= 400 ft sq
And then you can multiply through to get the areas devoted to your flower ingredients
400x3=1200 ft sq
Therefore for your total areas
Focal = 1200
Filler = 1200
Foliage = 1200
Frill = 400
Now that we know the size of our area devoted to each ingredient, we can then select our varieties to fulfill them.
I usually pick a spring lineup and then a summer/fall lineup. We’re lucky enough to where our summer materials will produce well into the fall until last frost (benefit of living in a dry environment) but if you live in a area where you need to plan successions or if you want to change your flower colors for later in the season you’ll need to have spring, summer and fall plantings.
When it comes to selecting varieties, I try to pick multipurpose flowers. For example, a sweet pea plant can obviously be used as a filler flower but if cut on the vine can add a lot of leafy green to double as a foliage material. And if you include the long and strong tendrils into a bouquet, suddenly it becomes a frill element. Because of its versatility, we can therefore harvest and design according to what we need it for that week.
There’s a thing that flower farmers try to do (especially those of us who are into stats and numbers and get happy knowing the data) where we try to estimate the average number of stems per plant over the season. While this is definitely a laudable thing to do, it does have issues because it is affected by many different factors - temperatures, weather, vigor of the seed you’re growing from that year, soil, moisture and watering, nutrients and fertilization, harvesting and cultivation techniques etc.
Instead of estimating stem count, I just try and estimate the area that I’m growing into and therefore that will give me the volume that I need. And since I’m growing cut-and-come-again varieties, I know that they will continue to produce well over a period of time.
What is great about this is the fact that once this is all setup, I don’t have to worry about having enough materials. In theory I should be able to go out and have enough material of the four types at any given point and put together enough mixed bouquets or throw together a wedding.
There’s no more stress because I didn’t plant enough filler material or that it needed.
It creates a very great sense of reassurance and faith in your flowers. In a way, your flowers are all like your employees and working hard for you. When you’re able to depend regularly on your flowers and be able to have them provide the correct ratios of materials so that you don’t have to worry about it, it allows you to focus on other things instead. I’m not having to worry about thinking if I have enough filler or foliage because I already know that due to my pre-planning I will have enough.
It’s just one of the few ways that I’m able to streamline things and reduce the stress and thinking about what it is that I’m growing and have to plant. The more I can in essence put the flower farm on autopilot, the better it is for me and less energy I have to put towards that.
So as an example, here is what my spring line-up looks like right now following the ratios:
FOCALS
15% Icelandic poppies
10% Ranunculus
5% Calendula
FOLIAGE
15% Cerinthe
15% Pea vines
FILLERS
15% Phlox ‘Cherry Caramel’
15% Viola ‘Antique Shades’
FRILLS
5% Daucus
5% Orlaya
For summer and fall, here is what the line-up looks like
FOCALS
15% Dahlias
15% Zinnia ‘Queen’ series
FOLIAGE:
15% Basil ‘Cinnamon
15% Bells of Ireland
FILLERS
15% Oklahoma zinnias
5% Strawflower
5% Phlox
5% ‘Cosmos Apricot Lemonade’
FRILLS:
5% Daucus
5% Celosia ‘Texas Plume Mix’
A couple notes:
In our environment, phlox will bloom an entire season from one planting which is why they are kept in place throughout the entire year. I may potentially need to reseed a second succession if the first one poops out, but as long as they’re kept deadheaded and fed they should be fine. YMMV with these varieties of course.
In the summer and fall, I like to have a little bit more texture to break up the large and fluffy heads of the zinnias that are the mainstay of the lineup. Anything to contrast or compliment them works, so the composite forms of the cosmos and strawflower are complimentary while the linear forms of the basil and the flat flower heads of the phlox are a good contrast, and the daucus and celosia are wonderful textural additions to arrangements.
Most of our flowers go towards design work and some retail bouquets when we have leftovers. This would also work if you were growing for wholesale (i.e florists) or for a farmer’s market or farm stand, although you would probably want to adjust the flower varieties as necessary (selling to florists for example, I would probably focus on more white flowers and green foliage).
When you’re transitioning from spring to summer, it can be difficult to let go of crops. We’ll usually transition in 50% of each type of the spring flowers with 50% of the summer flowers (i.e. 50% of the Icelandic poppies are pulled and replaced with 50% of the zinnias that will be taking their place) in order to ensure that we have as much overlap as possible of each type of flower during the growing season. There may inevitably be a gap in certain materials of course, but we try to minimize it as much as possible.
Although the ratios are set at 30:30:30:10, you can modify it based on your needs and even your design style. Some designers utilize far more focal and filler flowers in comparison to the foliage and the frills, while others may use mostly focals and frills and less of the fillers and foliage, so know your designing needs and plant accordingly.
As I mentioned there are some varieties of flowers that are “dual” varieties that can perform differently based on what you’re using them in an arrangement. These are some very important varieties because they are flexible to your needs. For example if we’re short on frill elements one week, we will allow our basil to bloom a little bit more fully to get some nice flower spikes that add texture to our arrangements. Alternatively if we’re short on foliage, we can utilize more violas in our arrangements and keep on more of their leaves - thus substituting for foliage in terms of bulk and volume and surface area. It’s also why we’ve chosen the varieties that we’ve selected - they are great as far as their versatility.