Great Spring Flowers for Small Scale Flower Farms

If you’re a small scale flower farmer that’s planning out your flower varieties for spring, look no further! I’m sharing with you today ten of my favorite varieties of flowers that are perfect for the small scale flower farmer.

I went through and selected for certain traits including:

High productivity - all of these are cut-and-come again varieties, a must for maximizing the space on your farm
Versatility: All these flowers are extremely useful when it comes to designing with, and generally can be used for mixed bouquets as well as for wedding work and centerpieces.
Easy cultivation: With perhaps the exception of ranunculus and anemones and tulips, all of these varieties can be grown easily from seed. And even with that, they are all relatively straightforward to grow and cultivate

Bachelor Buttons

Bachelor buttons often have a poor reputation with flower farmers due a few downsides - they are difficult to harvest, can get too large and flop over, and can come off as a bit too basic. Which I totally understand and do agree with on some level, and can sympathize since I’ve grown a twenty five foot row of them that got terribly tangled and I gave up after a few weeks.

However, if you grow a smaller quantity of bachelor buttons and take care of them (which is easier if you don’t have them in large quantities) they can be a wonderful addition to the small scale flower farm and can actually be quite an asset to a small scale operation by modifying your approach to them.

Instead of harvesting bachelor buttons stem by stem (which can make them difficult and time-consuming if you’re wanting to trace each stem backwards from the bloom to cut off a single stem) we instead harvest them as a spray - locating the stem towards the base of the plant and cutting deep into it (after which you can then divide up that branch into individual flowers as needed).

Because the plants are so vigorous, you are actually doing the bachelor buttons a favor - it will encourage the plant to continue to put out long and straight stems from the base of the plant as well as helping to keep them in check (so they don’t get overly tall and leggy and flop over).

We don’t grow the bright blue varieties like ‘Blue Boy’ - although their intense bright blue is beautiful, they are generally hard to pair with other flowers because of the saturation of the color, so we prefer the white varieties such as ‘White Ball’ or ‘Tall White’ that are more like a scabiosa or agrostemma in terms of their form and appearance (although some of the picoteed varieties are quite attractive) on long elegant and sturdy stems.

The form of the bachelor buttons can be used quite effectively with their feathery fine-leafed petals adding an airy texture and the silvery foliage and stems are quite beautiful as well. We will sometimes even use them as a spray - plucking the foliage off the branched stem and weaving it in between other flowers

And if you’re not 100% behind bachelor buttons but still like the look of them, you can also grow the perennial varieties like Centaurea montana (like a gigantic bachelor button on steroids) or Sweet Sultan (Amberboa moschata) that can give you the same esthetic.

Cerinthe

An unusual and unique foliage plant, cerinthe is also known as the shrimp plant given its overlapping “scales” of petals that create a crustacean carapace-like appearance. But don’t be put off by the similarity in description to molluscs - it’s a great floral material to grow and is quite wonderful to design with.

A cool-weather loving flower, it does have lovely little purple and brown bell-shaped blooms that appear from the ends of the long serpentine stems - but I don’t love them for the flowers, but for their overall shape as a foliage and structural element.

The blue-green shade of cerinthe is a glorious contrast to many of the pastel-colored blooms of spring as well as a refreshing change of pace from the bright verdant green that most foliage plants have available during the spring and early summer.

And even better is their form - long and gently cascading from their origin, their stems add a wonderful design element to bouquets and arrangements. I personally love cerinthe when added to bridal bouquets and spilling over the edges of compote bowls.

A decently productive variety, cerinthe has a very long “bloom” time for us, lasting well into the summer if kept watered and in part shade. It’s a cut-and-come-again variety, and will continue to push out lovely stems for most of the season. We don’t grow a ton of it - just a small patch is enough to keep us well supplied - but it is such a wonderful textural element that it’s a must-have for us.

Icelandic Poppies

Icelandic poppies are of course one of our favorite flowers (and I’ve written many a post about them). Their translucent, gorgeous, crepe-paper-like petals are magical, and are truly a very special flower to offer.

Even better is their productivity - one of the most productive flowers we grow, they start blooming in April and can keep blooming until July even out in the open without any protection from the cold. Dozens of blooms can come from a single plant, and given that they can be grown in close proximity (6-9” apart) a single bed can produce a massive amount of blooms over a long period of time.

When harvested properly, Icelandic poppies can last up to seven days in a vase and can be a great offering to customers. Whether you grow the brightly colored ‘Champagne Bubbles’ series or the pastel colored ‘Meadow Pastels’ or the gigantic ‘Colibri’ varieties that are less prolific but are absolutely stunning when they do bloom in gigantic flowers the size of your face, they are an easy sell and surefire hit with customers.

RELATED BLOG POST: How to Grow Icelandic Poppies - Stress free!

Ranunculus and Anemones

Although we don’t grow them anymore, ranunculus and anemones can be quite productive and useful for the small scale flower farmer. They do require a bit of prep - soaking and starting corms, providing shelter and planting them at the right time, but if you can get them well established before they bloom, they will provide you with a lot of blooms in a small amount of space.

I know some flower farmers who basically only grow ranunculus and anemones during the spring - and you can do quite well with them. They are quite palatable to the consumer, and are easy to sell during spring (when most people are hungry for flowers after a long and cold and dark winter) so it’s no surprise that many people focus on them.

You can also sell ranunculus and anemones to florists as well and fetch a decent price for them. Given also their long vase life and decent production, they have a lot of good qualities going for them.

We made the decision not to grow anemones and ranunculus given our inability to provide them with optimal conditions for growing, and our springs are usually short and get too hot too quickly for them to bloom for long, so it doesn’t make them worth it for us. If you live in area with either a milder winter or if you live in an area with a cooler, longer spring you’ll likely have better success with them than we do.

RELATED BLOG POST: 12 Spring Blooming Bulbs to Plant for Cut Flowers (Anemones and Ranunculus)

Tulips

I’ll caution you against tulips first as a disclaimer - it seems that everybody these days are growing tulips. And they can be an incredible asset and wonderful crop for some people, but it’s not an automatic success (and in some cases can be a liability!).

Okay, so tulips can be grown quite intensively on a small scale. And can be a good crop because you can cram in thousands of bulbs in a very small space, or even grown in crates or even forced inside basements or unheated garages under lights. And they can be stored in a cooler to be able to preserve them until you can utilize them or sell them.

That being said, it also requires you to buy tulips in bulk (usually with a high minimum) have the right environment to grow tulips well (cold and moist weather preferably) the infrastructure and ability to harvest and store them at the right time (including a dedicated cooler) and of course the customer base to sell them to.

Can it work? Yes, it definitely can. Are people successful with growing them? Absolutely, and they sell every single stem. But it requires you to do your research and ensure that you have a plan in place to be able to move your product.

You’ll also be subject to the weather and conditions as well. I’ve given up long ago trying to estimate the bloom time of tulips - they’ll bloom when they please and not before, and given that our springs are becoming more and more unpredictable, I’ve decided to take a much more laissez faire approach.

You can of course also grow some tulips less intensively - we will plant tulips in and around some of the beds that will bloom at some point, and can add them to arrangements and bouquets but we never plan on them as a staple.

Orlaya

Orlaya is one of my favorite umbellifer flowers (from the Latin term for parasol umbella) for multiple reasons. They are the most cold-hardy of all the umbellifers (more than ammi majus, more than daucus, more than ammi visnaga) and are the first to bloom in spring. Flowering over a very long period of time, they grow on wonderful long and strong stems.

But their petal form is absolutely special, with silky white petals that remind me of lace or doilies in their form and display that adds a glorious sparkle and ephemeral effect to any arrangement they are a part of.

Orlaya can be planted closely together, similar to other umbellifers - we’ll usually plant two seedlings at 6” intervals - and in a small space they can provide quite a lot of airy filler that will elevate any arrangement they are a part of. I love arranging orlaya together with bachelor buttons and Icelandic poppies - one of my favorite combinations with a distinctly meadow or wildflower look.

Picture from Johnny’s Seed because I always forget to take a picture of it during harvest

Cress

Cress is an interesting floral material. When grown initially, it looks like a weed - because it kind of is. A member of the mustard family, it’s a very unimpressive plant - that is until it starts to flower. And although it has light and airy little white flowers held aloft on long stems, the real magic comes when the seed pods have formed on the stem.

Like tiny little beads strung along long and elegant and slender stems, they add a remarkable textural contrast in arrangements, breaking up what seems to be a larger proportion of ruffled, fluffy petals that are so omnipresent in spring.

Their form is great as well - you can either cut each delicate and gorgeous stem to carefully place into your arrangements and bouquets, or you can harvest an entire stem to use as a spray - perfect for bulking out arrangements and creating wonderfully diaphanous clouds of texture and color.

Just a few plants can produce a prodigious amount of their elegant stems, and although the plant does not really rebloom it produces enough to make it earn its keep and justify its space. You can grow them in a large patch for easy management or even tuck them around into different beds (aka let them reseed around and never get around to weeding them out until they’re large enough to start blooming and by that point you just don’t have the heart to pull them out).

You can also pick them green or you can let them age and dry on the plant as well - they will hold quite well and turn a lovely golden coloration that pairs well with neutral colors and can be utilized in installations and everlasting bouquets.

Sweet peas

Sweet peas are generally thought of as time and labor intensive crops that are fussy and picky about their growing conditions and cultivation requirements, but the reality is that they are quite easy to grow.

Cold hardy so long as they are protected from harsh winds, we start sweet peas in December or January and plant them out in March. No trellis, no cordons, no tripods, we allow them to grow as they would naturally - as sprawling vines that weave themselves in and around.

Sweet peas are a wonderful choice of a plant because they can be harvested as a foliage - I’ll sometimes clip some vines if I’m needing extra foliage or greenery for an arrangement. And when they start to bloom, we’ll sometimes harvest single stems but I more commonly harvest the blooming stems on a length of stem - it helps to extend the vase life of the sweet pea flowers and if you have multiple blooms on a stem they’ll continue to open and provide an even greater vase life.

And given how vigorous they are, it’s quite easy to from just a few plants to continue to harvest a large amount of blooms from a small patch of sweet peas. Their growth rate is crazy when the weather starts to warm up, and so long as you keep up with them they will continue to provide for you.

Calendula

I used to not really like calendula - although a nice enough flower, their bold and saturated orange and yellow blooms were not my favorite to design with. In fact in the past I utilized them more for incorporating into salves and healing oils than making floral arrangements.

That’s until I met ‘Ivory Princess’. Soft buttercream and ivory petals piled high in ruffled layers that remind me of the feathers of large and fluffy poultry, with some of them so full that they almost remind me of a picotee buttercream ranunculus.

But unlike ranunculus that requires purchasing in corms, more delicate care and gives up the ghost when the weather starts getting too war, calendula are quite the opposite. Quick to grow and easily grown from seed, calendula start blooming in a mere sixty days and will continue to bloom straight on through the summer and up until last frost for us so long as they are kept fed, watered and deadheaded.

While their blooms at first may be relatively short and on thick stalks that may make them appear a bit comical, as they grow further their stems get longer and taller and become far more usable. And how versatile - their buttercream color combines well with whites, ivories, peaches, apricots and yellows while also contrasting well with purples, mauves, lilacs and blues, and their smaller size allows for easy maneuvering around other materials.

And how prolific they are - they continue to produce stem after stem even after being harvested ruthlessly, and even a small planter or pot can produce quite a few blooms for you to use. What’s not to love?

RELATED BLOG POST: Growing Calendulas for Flower Farmers

Statice

Statice is a bit of an odd duck. Technically a cool-season plant at first, statice needs some exposure to cooler temperatures (<50 F) to initiate flowering and establishes best in cooler weather. However, statice will start to produce a flurry of long stems that are crowned with dozens of tiny tissue-paper-puff inflorescences and will continue to do so well into the summer.

And those stems - the tiny flowers atop the long alien-like stems are the perfect filler flower, bulking out bouquets and acting as a lovely base for other flowers in a compote arrangement. They’re great for installations as well, since they don’t require a water source, and will also dry extremely well for use in everlasting arrangements and bouquets, floral crowns and floral jewelry - the whole lot.

Statice comes in a whole variety of colors as well - deep purple and blue, light lavender and palest blue, bright pink and apricot, a pure white, bright yellow and all sorts of mixes and shades in between, perfect for whatever it is you need it to do. We grow the white for use in wedding designs for summer, and then apricot for use in centerpieces and personals in the autumn.

It’s one of the most prolific flowers that we grow, and is so generous with its blooms. It likes the heat and drought and full sun here, and although it does slow down a little bit in the worst of the heat, it picks up the pace as the weather cools down in September, allowing for us to harvest from it during the spring, summer and fall - quite an impressive bloom window.

RELATED BLOG POST: Dried Flower Varieties for Floral Design

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I hope that you found this useful and have found some inspiration for your small scale flower farm! If you’re interested in learning or reading more about small scale flower farming, you may find some of these blog posts useful: