How to Retroplan Your Flower Farm
When talking with new flower farmers and growers, a big question is how do you decide what flowers to grow?
There are many species of flowers to grow, with hundreds of varieties and cultivars to try out. Each flower variety has its own merits and negatives, and it can honestly be quite a bit confusing trying to determine which flowers you may want to grow. It’s kind of like falling down the rabbit hole - your head starts practically spinning so fast with the possibilities that it can make you dizzy.
There is however another way - a way that can allow you to plan out the flowers that you’re growing so that it can perfectly align with your goals. Whether you’re looking to grow for colorful market bouquets, selling rare and unique floral materials to floral designers, doing full design weddings or providing fields of blooms for customers to cut for a U-pick operation, it’s easier to actually pick which flowers you want to grow based on your desired end goal in mind.
So in essence, we’re going to plan backwards from what we want our desired flowers to look like and then plan our plantings based on that.
For example, if I’m going to be growing for weddings I know that I’ll probably want a lot of white and green and chartreuse and ivory and pale green colors. This is a pretty good bet because white and green are always going to be in fashion for weddings, while some of the other colors can be a bit hit or miss.
As a result, I know that I’m going to need a steady stream of materials in white and green throughout the season to supply the flowers for wedding design. Ideally I’d like a good mix and variety of the types of materials, but I’m aiming for consistency more than anything else. It’s important too that I also aim for as long a window of harvest as possible, with overlap if possible to ensure that I will always have materials in the colors required for weddings and that everything is compatible with each other (so that in the odd chance there’s quite a bit of overlap between spring and summer blooms that they’ll still all go together).
So what does this look like?
For spring, it means that I’ll be planning white flowers - white ranunculus, white Icelandic poppies, bachelor buttons, along with foliage like white seed peas (on the vine), salvia ‘white swan’ and frill flowers like ammi majus and orlaya.
For summer, it means that I’ll be planning on Benary Giant White zinnias, Cosmos ‘Psyche White’ and ‘Snowpuff’, ‘Oklahoma white’ zinnias and ‘Audray White’ gomphrena paired with basil ‘Mrs. Burns’, euphorbia marginata and eucalyptus.
Knowing this, we can then start planning what we need to grow to be able to provide that mix. I’ll get into it in the next post as far as how many of each to plant, but if you have the necessary “ingredients” for your designs or bouquets, that’s half the battle!
Our first year growing, we had a lot of great flowers but not a lot of them went together. Bright yellow sunflowers, bright blue bachelor buttons, orange cactus zinnias, wine-colored cosmos and pink Oklahoma zinnias were pretty and colorful on their own but they didn’t actually work out well as far as working into our bouquets and floral design.
Our second year, we did much better, aiming for blush and burgundy flowers (based on what was popular for us the previous year) and found that it was far easier to harvest and design because we kept our color and style in mind, so although the temptation to grow other flowers outside the spectrum was great we were able to stay focused and were much more successful with the limited color palette.
A few notes:
When it comes to selecting varieties of flowers, I usually opt for cut-and-come-again varieties like zinnias, marigolds, dahlias, basil, cerinthe, scabiosa, strawflower, bachelor buttons, Icelandic poppies, salvias and sweet peas. You can of course grow single cut flowers - agrostemma, nigella, bupleurum, single stem sunflowers and certain celosias - but just know that they require a bit more work and space in terms of succession planting.
I tend to plant a lot of “bridge” flowers - flowers with multiple hues such as the ‘Queen Red Lime’ that has bits of bright pink, chartreuse, muddy mauve and rosy pink mixed into a single flower. Bridge flowers like the QRL zinnia are excellent because they allow you to highlight and connect with other colors contained in the flower - meaning that the zinnia can connect greens, pinks and purples together by bridging between the different colors.
As you may have heard me mention before, there’s the general rule that brighter, bolder colors work well for farmer’s market and farm stand flowers, while wedding flowers tend to be more of the light, pastel, muted colors like blush, ivory, burgundy, white, mint-green and peaches and corals. For us, we tend to grow more for wedding design so the muted design palette works well, thus we grow a lot of peaches and blush and ivory-colored flowers. You can of course do a mix if you have multiple markets, but I usually recommend picking one or the other because it makes things a lot easier (and there are plenty of examples of flower farmers who sell muted colored bouquets at market as well, so don’t let that stop you from doing it either).
It’s better to grow a lot more of the same variety of flower than it is to grow small quantities of many different types of flowers. There’s the economy of everything (the larger the quantity of seed, the cheaper it is when you’re buying in bulk) as well as the simplicity of growing the same variety of flower en masse, but more importantly if you have a large volume of the materials you are growing, things are far easier in terms of keeping things consistent for designing and supply. Wholesalers want to buy large quantities, florists would like to have consistent flowers to buy from you, and your customers will like to buy and will come to anticipate certain flower varieties from you (to the point where it can become almost a sort of branding for you).