The Beginning of the Flower Journey - Wins and Learning Opportunities

Flower farming is not for the faint of the heart! My husband (John) and I planted cold hardy annuals back in October last year. If you’ve never heard of cold hardy annuals, these are spring flowers that can withstand our winter temps in the Midwest. The goal is for them to get their roots established then essentially hibernate until Spring. Most of the local flower farmers I use to source flowers from do this and they have blooms by Valentine’s sometimes! That was the hope for us as well but we didn’t water them enough to get their roots established in time before the cold and we didn’t frost cover them so that first round of seeds never bloomed. We tried again in February. Only the strong survived this round because I had a genius idea to fertilize. Well, there is such a thing called over fertilizing. Lesson learned: compost doesn’t need fertilizer. Look at this lone survivor of the snapdragons we planted. So gorgeous, definitely growing them for late summer!

Finally the Spring flowers started blooming. WOW, we didn’t plant much. Only 8 varieties but they sure gave me such joy. We had blue chinese forget me nots, bupleureum, love in a mist, bachelor’s buttons, calendula, sweet peas, orlaya, and false queen anne’s lace. If you ask me which of them were my favorite, I’d say all of them! lol

For the summer, we have zinnias, cosmos, statice, strawflower, and of course, DAHLIAS! If you’ve ever seen a dahlia, you know why I had to grow these divas. They are a lot of work. I actually have been babying some of them since October of last year until I could get them in our raised beds after the Spring and torrential downpour of rain every day. And now we wait 120 days for them to flower!

This is my first year growing all of these wonderful flowers so I’m learning quite a lot as we go. Shout out to my husband for being a good sport!