For today’s Flower Friday, we’re going to talk about flowers that we grow for production purposes. Let’s talk about what that means to us and talk about the how’s and why’s!
When we talk about growing flowers in production, basically that means that we’re treating it like it were a vegetable. We’ll offer that flower a more ideal (and typically, more expensive) growing environment and we also keep it extremely well fed to promote lots and lots of flowers. Our general goal is to heavily promote flower production, typically for reasons beyond just aesthetic purposes.
With these “special” flowers, we’re basically aiming for an end-product, just like we are with veggies we grow. You can see here that we’re growing chamomile, calendula and viola and our goal is a usable, functional harvest. Some we’re growing for tea, some for soaps and salves and others are for a special infusion project we’re working on. Some are seasonal regulars, some we grow for special projects. Like veggies, these flowers provide us value. But, this same kind of methodology could be used for a cut flower business or even if you just want a whole lot of flowers!
One of the qualities we generally look for in flowers that we might grow this way is that they provide for continual production. All of these flowers will continually produce new flowers throughout the season, meaning our total harvest volume becomes quite significant. We’ll often harvest multiple times through the season. We’d find a lot less value in dedicating “premium” growing space for “one and done” types of flowers.
We also generally prefer flowers that do well with intensive planting techniques. We want to maximize our production, so often we’re growing nearly a half dozen plants in a relatively small space. This is also beneficial for harvesting as we don’t have to move around to capture all our harvest. Flower harvesting is a bit more intensive than your average vegetable harvest.
Our most common preservation technique for our flowers is dehydration. We often just use ambient air, laying them out on a pan with a sheet of parchment to air dry. We probably could leverage our dehydrator, but the truth is, we aren’t in a hurry for these and keeping production costs lower is more redeemable. Once they’re fully dried, we can store them up in a glass jar and they’ll stay good for quite some time.
This flower production is highly beneficial to our vegetable gardens as well. Pollinators love coming into a smorgasbord of flowers and these large flower clusters definitely attract them. We keep veggies that need pollination nearby, so they have vast selection of what to go after. We do everything we can to try and “be on the map” for bees and other pollinating species. For this reason, we rarely struggle with not getting enough pollinators in.
Happy Friday, everyone! We hope you all have a wonderful weekend! It’s hard to believe our growing season is half way over at this point. We’re starting to think about those end of season tasks, but with 45+ days remaining, there’s still a lot more to come!
