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
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Planting Out All The Garden Seedlings
Hello friends,
The last couple of weeks have been very busy in the garden, with the weather now being warm enough to plant all the seedlings, plants, and dahlias in pots, out into the garden. This was super important, as the glasshouse was completely packed with plants, and my tomato, cucumber, and chilli and capsicum seedlings really needed to get planted in their final positions in the glasshouse.
The first plants to go out into the garden were the dahlias I had in pots, and also all the dahlia seedlings I'd grown from seed, which I put into two of the new side garden beds.
Next to plant out were all my natural dye plant seedlings into another new garden bed in the side garden, including tango cosmos, calendula, and Japanese indigo seedlings.
The vegetable garden beds also had to get weeded and dug over, so the corn, black turtle bean, lettuce, cabbage and bok choi seedlings could be planted into the garden.
After that, it was time for all the flower seedlings including cosmos, calendula, and pansies, to be dotted around the garden areas to fill out
empty spaces I leave for annual plants. This took about a week as I was very enthusiastic in sowing seeds this spring.
The last of my Floret zinnia seedlings (Unicorn, Precious Metals, and Dawn Creek Blush) went into two spare vegetable garden beds so they can self-pollinate with each other in blocks this growing season, to give me a stash of Floret seeds of my own for the coming years. There is no guarantee that Floret seeds will be imported into the country again any time soon, and I wanted to keep some seed stocks of these varieties for my garden.
And finally once the glasshouse was all but empty it was time to add compost to the glasshouse, dig over the soil, and plant out all my tomatoes (Pomodoro, Juanne Flamme, Hera, Island Bay, Lebanese, Grosse Lisse), capsicum (Marconi Red, Candy Cane), chilli (Serrano), and cucumber (Mini Me, Crunchy, Medici) varieties, and erect their climbing frames. I had some leftover plants which were given to family members.
Once the bigger plants were in place, I planted out my basil plants (Genovese, Gustosa, Lettuce Leaf) into the empty spaces. With that all done I scattered fertiliser, added Saturaid to help with water retention, replaced the yellow sticky traps to catch plant pests, and gave the glass house a good watering.
There are two more vegetable garden beds to be weeded, have compost added, and dug over for planting, but they are for special projects that will be dealt with by the time you read this blog post.
It's been a lot of work to get to get my garden to this point, and I've been neglecting weeding the garden to do this, so that will be my next big gardening job leading into summer in a couple of weeks.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Side Garden Project - Planning and Building Raised Garden Beds
Hello friends,
After we had taken down the old aviary/berry cage, it was time to get to work turning this space into garden beds.
The first task was to weed the area, tidy up the fence line, and move two concrete pavers. Once I pulled out all the weeds and then tidied the fence line by putting old pieces of wood up against it for protection, hubby and I maneuvered the pavers into the space next door, where I have my worm farm located.
With all that done I ordered macrocarpa sleepers from our local garden centre for creating the new garden beds. The sleepers are 1.8 m long, which was the exact size we needed for that space.
The next step was to first put up some old trellises for our raspberry bushes, so we could train them along the fence line. We then create 90 cm wide beds using the macrocarpa sleepers, with 50 cm pathways in between for easy access to the garden beds. It was a lot of hard work considering there was a lot of river pebbles in the area. We transferred those river pebbles into the pathways between the garden beds when we were finished.
Once all the beds were in place, hubby did the hard work of digging over the garden beds and adding compost. The first bed closest to the garden shed was set aside for the strawberry plants I had put into pots in the glasshouse before the aviary was removed.
The next garden bed was set aside for my natural dyeing plants including Madder, Woad, St John's Wort, Tomentil, and Lemon Sorrel, which I had squeezed in another garden bed down the side of the house. While transferring the plants I was able to harvest some of the madder roots for natural dyeing. I have enough space leftover now to put more natural dyeing plants in the other half of the garden bed this spring.
Garden beds 3 and 4 are currently empty, and they still need to have compost added, before being prepared to a fine tilth for spring.
My plan is to grow Linen and Japanese indigo plants in bed 3: I have my own homegrown flax linen seeds in storage from last year, and I bought Japanese indigo seeds from Growing Textiles last autumn with the intention to grow my own indigo plants for natural dyeing, and also for indigo seed production.
In bed 4 I want to start my own breeding experiments with dahlias. I've wanted to do my own plant breeding for ages, and I now have the space to start this. I have dahlia seeds set aside from last year's plants to do this. I'm very excited about this project and can't wait to get started in spring.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Floret Zinnias
Hello friends,
I just thought I'd share with you how my Floret zinnia plants have fared over the summer, and all the flowers that have been produced from the various varieties.
This is how the zinnias looked like when I planted them out in the garden in late October 2024. I sowed Floret Dawn Creek blush, Floret Precious Metals, and also Floret Unicorn Mix zinnias that I bought from Emerden Flower Farm back in August 2024. I had 100% sowing success from all the zinnia seeds.
First up we have the Dawn Creek Blush Zinnias:
There's a mix of creams, buttery yellows, and pinky blush tones, they are really beautiful and understated.
Next we have Floret Precious Metals:
The Floret Precious metals, are more pink and purple toned, and when the flowers get older, there is a cool metal sheen on them.
And lastly we have the Floret Unicorn Mix:
The colours for the Unicorn mix are much more bright pinks and yellows and lime greens, and they really stand out in the garden.
All in all, I'm really loving all the varieties that Floret and Dawn Creek have developed. The seeds were super expensive, but the uniqueness of the flowers are worth it in my opinion. I still have some seeds left over for next year, and I plan to seed save from the zinnia varieties when autumn starts in March (on Saturday). If more Floret zinnia seeds become available from Emerden in spring, I plan to pick up a couple more seed packets to increase my seed stash of these beautiful flowers.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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