Flower Farming Myth number 1
Your place must look so beautiful all the time!
I hear this a lot. Unfortunately, It’s not as true as you might think. If I’m doing my job correctly, and selling all the flowers I’m producing… I just have a lot of green plants around my house. If you want solid proof, click the link in the button to view the updated Google street view from this summer. You can see some flowers, but the place isn’t bursting with blooms.
Where does this misconception come from? A few places I believe. The first would be images that come out of places like the Netherlands. I’m sure you’ve seen them. Massive fields of Tulips blooming all at once. Absolutely gorgeous, right?! But those flowers are not intended for use as cuts. They are either tourist attractions, or those bulbs are being grown for bulb production or they are trial beds to test varieties that will be put into bulb production. I’ll do a deeper dive into tulip production in a few weeks.
The second place that the misconception comes from is garden centers or display gardens. Those plants and flowers are put on display when they are blooming and pulled down when they are done. Both places will irrigate(water) on a daily basis with fertilizer in the water that is formulated to boost blooming.
For a cut flower farmer, my job is to harvest the flowers as soon as possible to give the end user (you) the longest possible vase life. The tricky part of this, is that almost every flower is tiny bit different. But most of them are harvested very early to where most people would think, “That’s not ready yet!”.
One example is tulips. If they are being used for a cut flower, they should be harvested in what is called the cracked bud stage. This is when the outer petals are just barely opening enough for you to be able to tell what color the flower will be. At this point, I am pulling the entire bulb, plus the flower up out of the ground. (I’ll explain all about tulip production and harvest and why I can’t treat them as perennials in another email.) This means if I harvest a tulip in the morning, and you buy a bouquet of them in the afternoon, they might not look that showy. You may almost feel underwhelmed. I’m asking you to trust me that the best is yet to come. Tulips only get better with age. The colors will deepen, they blow wide open, they move towards light so the can seem to dance in a room. They are awesome flowers.
Ranunculus and peonies are harvested at a stage called: marshmallow. Yes, that is a technical term. Their buds should be slightly open and feel like you were squeezing an uncooked marshmallow. If you squeeze the bud and it’s rock hard, it’s not ready yet, and if all the petals are unfurled, you’ve missed your ideal window.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, zinnias need to be fully open for 1-2 days and their necks need to have stiffened up before harvest or they will immediately wilt. To see if they are ready, flower farmers perform the “Wiggle Test”. Which is essentially what it sounds like. We gently grab the stem about a foot below the flower and move it back and forth. If the flower wiggles around like a bobble head doll, it’s not ready. If the entire stem stays stiff and the flower head doesn’t wobble, it’s ready!
I hope this has shed some light into the realities of a flower farm. If you have more questions on this topic or any other questions, please send them my way and I’d be happy to answer them!
