My Floret Zinnias This Past Summer
Hello friends,
Last spring I sowed all the remaining Floret Zinnia seeds I had in storage, which I had bought from Emerden in 2024. The Floret Previous Metals, Dawn Creek Blush, and Unicorn zinnia varieties were sown into seed raising mix, grown on until they had two sets of true leaves, and then they were potted up into bigger containers with potting mix until I was sure the risk of frost was over.
I planted them in two vegetable garden beds close together, so that I could easily save seed for my own personal stash for the coming years.
And then it was time to wait for them to flower. Due to our horrible summer, which wasn't really a summer, my zinnia plants didn't begin to start flowering until late January, but they were well worth the wait. I had hundreds of flowers in such gorgeous colours ranging from cream, pinks, and orange, all the way to bright red. The range of zinnia flower types flowering varied from singles, to cactus shapes, all the way through to frilly doubles.
Dawns Creek Blush flowers varied from dusky pinks, to pinks, and to purples.
Precious Metals gave me lots of metallics in shades of orange, pinks and purples, and there was even ombré colouring in some of the flowers.
And finally, the Floret Unicorn variety gave me florescent bright pinks and orange and red flowers, with a lot of double flowers amongst them.
I was so happy with my zinnia patch, and I wasn't the only one. Bees and butterflies swarmed over my zinnias all summer and autumn long, and that made it just it that much better in my opinion.
I shared my Floret zinnias on social media, and soon found myself becoming a very small scale flower farmer, as I provided buckets of zinnias to a local flower farmer florist. I very much enjoyed going out into my garden on summer mornings to fill up buckets of zinnias to send away to their new homes.
Unfortunately though thanks to the terrible summer we had, all too soon I had to start seed saving by letting the blooming flowers set seed and turn brown. I managed to save seed from a lot of mature flowers, before the looming threat of a decent frost forced me to save as many older flowers (but not quite mature flowers) in mid-April.
On the 22nd of April we had our first proper frost, and all my lovely zinnias sparkled in the cold autumn sunrise as frost coated them all. By the afternoon the zinnia plants had all turned brown and died.
And so the zinnia season for 2025/2026 has come to an end. I have 5 trays of zinnia flower heads to process over the winter, so I can harvest the seed and store it away until next spring. I am very much looking forward to seeing which zinnia flowers bloom next summer. Zinnias are known to have complex and highly plastic genomes, and have transposons, aka jumping genes, which can lead to unstable genetics, so who knows what I'll end up with. But I'm excited to find out...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Flower Farming This Summer
Hello friends,
One day while I was doom scrolling on Instagram, I came across a reel from a local flower farmer, searching for local flower growers to sell their excess flowers to her for her floristry business. Since I was at the time in the middle of completing Floret Flower Farm's online Flower Farming Workshop, I thought this was a good opportunity to do some practical work for the workshop, by harvesting my flowers and foliage and selling them.
In summer my home garden is full of many flowers including varieties of dahlia, hydrangea, zinnia, scabiosa, cosmos, calendula, as well as many other precious goodies including my grown from seed dahlias. Most of these flowering plants are used in the floral industry for selling as cut flowers, and also many of these plant varieties that I grow do not travel very well over long distances, meaning that local florists need to find local growers to provide them for their floral work.
I contacted the flower farmer, and within a few days she came to my home to look at my garden, and also to pick her first bucket of flowers. She was impressed with my flower varieties, and especially my dahlias and Floret zinnia plants, and she quickly got to work photographing the flowers, and also harvesting them for use in her floristry business.
One of her favorite dahlias to harvest was a Floret Petite seedling dahlia of mine, which is currently named FP6, and it is an unusual anemone dahlia in shades of pink, red and yellow. I'm very happy with this dahlia, and intend to grow this as a second year seedling dahlia next year.
It wasn't long before she contacted me again, with the intention to buy more flowers from me, which I was very happy to do. This time she taught me how to harvest all the various flowers in the garden, so in the future I could harvest flowers for her myself.
This came in handy the next week which was Valentines Day week, the busiest time in a florist's year. For the first time I harvested all the flowers and foliage by myself, and I really enjoyed the process, harvesting the flowers that usually just flowered in my garden, and then processed them ready for her to pick them up.
I had so much fun harvesting zinnias, dahlias, hydrangea, and also filler flowers like calendula, cosmos and coreopsis. I also picked foliage plants like rosemary and dogwood for her. When she came to pick up all the flowers up after they'd been harvested, she asked to pick some more, as she planned to make over 100 bouquets for Valentines Day. By the time she left, my garden had provided her six buckets of flowers and foliage, and I was so pleased to have the experience under my belt.
From here on out, she is happy to buy flowers from me whenever she has the need for flowers, and I'm willing to sell them to her. I'm very pleased with this arrangement because it's a way for me to do some flower farming without committing myself to owning a full on flower farm, and all the commitments that come with it, but it also means that any income I receive from this means I can invest it into more plants for my garden, and most likely more dahlia varieties...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky, and now also Facebook.
Floret Flower Farming Online Workshop 2026
Hello friends,
By the time you've read this blog post, I will have already been studying for one week in the 6 week online Floret Flower Farming Workshop.
Every year in October, Floret Flower Farm opens registrations for their yearly online Floret Flower Farming Workshop. It's an in depth 6 week workshop covering all things flower farming: including whether flower farming is right for you (and what you might want it to look like), planning and mapping out your flower farming operation, making a start at flower farming, growing your flowers, sales and marketing, and finally harvesting cut flowers and selling them in whichever way works for you.
Their online workshop has a massive course book, and hundreds of video lessons to go through, along with question and answer video sessions, and an online community for those learning together in the workshop.
I've wanted to do this workshop for many years, and when registrations opened last October, hubby encouraged me to register and finally fulfill my dream to study with Floret. After registering, it wasn't long before a heavy package arrived in the mail from Floret, containing the course book and other workshop goodies.
I spent a long time flicking through the pages of the workshop course book, getting excited for the workshop starting in early January 2026, and then in early December it was time for workshop orientation. There were some online videos to watch about what was to happen in the workshop, along with some administration tasks to accomplish ahead of the starting date. One exciting part was a trip to a stationery store to buy workshop supplies including a poster board, graph paper and tracing paper, and a new A4 binder to hold all the worksheets I would be downloading and filling out...
And now it's January, and the Floret Flower Farming Workshop has begun. I'll be super busy with the workshop for the next 5 weeks, but I already have enough blog posts lined up to cover this period (hopefully, if everything goes to plan...).
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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November Dahlia Update
Hello friends,
Yes, I did buy more dahlias after I said my garden was completely full and I couldn't fit any more in, but I promise this time I had good reasons to do so...
First of all, I lost a number of dahlias this spring due to tubers rotting/eyes not forming, including:
- Arthur Hambley (DP)
- Cafe Au Lait (DP)
- Islander (DP)
- Muchacha (Dec)
- Salmon Runner (Dec)
- Tranquility (Col)
- Impression Fomoso (Col)
- The Phantom (Ane)
From my observations over the past couple of years, dinner plate dahlias seem more prone to rotting, and for this reason I am not planning on buying anymore dinner plate dahlias in the future, they're just not worth spending all that money on, just to end up rotting in spring.
Secondly, when my NZ Bulbs dahlia order arrived in early October, one of my collarette dahlias, Dark Tiger, was not in the package due to them being out of stock, and they replaced it with the waterlily dahlia, Twiggy. The dahlias in this order weren't in the best condition, and two of them (Tranquility and Impression Fomoso) are actually in the lost dahlias list. They didn't form any eyes at all, and then they rotted. I don't think I'll buy from NZ Bulbs ever again when it comes to dahlias.
Twiggy is a waterlily dahlia with warm pink suffused petals and a light yellow center.
And thirdly, I got rid of our small plastic pond in the back garden. When hubby installed it three years ago, he promised he would take care of it, and keep it clean, and that just didn't happen. So after I cleaned it out this spring (again), I talked with hubby, and he agreed with me that it was time for the pond to go. This freed up a large space in the right part of the back garden, and after some rearranging of dahlias in that area, it gave me more space for dahlias to go into the ground.
And fourthly, during the big North West storm in October my Avalanche camellia snapped off at ground level, and it left an open space in the garden which I could fill with another dahlia.
Luckily this all happened around the time that Bulbs Direct and Mount Mera Botanical restocked their dahlia varieties on their websites, so I bought some dahlias I missed out on earlier in the year, and with discounts too.
From Bulbs Direct I picked up Purple Haze, an anemone dahlia with deep plum-coloured blooms, darker in the centre, and rich dark green foliage.
From Mount Mera Botanical I picked up the following dahlia varieties:
Muchacha a small decorative dahlia with shades of rose pink, violet, and white, to replace the one I lost this spring.
Bacardi, a decorative dahlia with muddy-rose colouring and dark raspberry tips and centers. I lost this dahlia last spring due to it rotting, and I really wanted to replace it.
Platinum Blonde, an anemone dahlia with a fuzzy butter cream center and white petals.
Rockstar, an anemone dahlia with beautiful deep cranberry petals and fuzzy cushion centers.
Take Off, another anemone dahlia with soft, orchid-toned petals which encircle a lighter, fluffy center.
Princess Nadine, a collarette dahlia with double ruff of pink and plum petals and an apricot center.
And lastly, Skyfall, a collarette dahlia with luscious crimson petals and a gold heart.
As soon as these dahlias arrived by courier they all went straight into the ground, and they have already sprouted and begun to grow.
And finally just when I thought all my dahlia buying was done for the year, an opportunity came up that I just couldn't turn down. Emerden Flower Farm had Floret Petite dahlia seedlings for sale, and I couldn't miss out on buying some after I missed out on buying their Floret Petite Dahlia seeds last year. I bought 8 Floret Petite dahlia seedlings, and when they arrived by courier a couple of days later I planted them into a small section of our vegetable garden (bad of me I know, but I was desperate), and gave them a good watering. I'm excited to see what flower types and colours I'll get from them.
With summer fast approaching now, I can't wait to see all these new dahlia varieties flowering in my garden.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky, and now also Facebook.
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