Mar 26, 2021

Flower Plan

There's lots of good reasons to plant flowers. We want to encourage pollinators and parasitoids, we want to have plenty of cut flowers, and we want the farm to look nice from the road.

So, we have dedicated 30 garden beds to flowers of various kinds. We're growing the standards, of course: sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, calendula, johnny jump-up. We're also growing several native perennials that will grow will in the wetter area by the road: familiar ones like bee balm, baptisia, and echinacea; and less familiar ones (at least to me!) like heliopsis (a perennial sunflower), rose mallow (temperate hibiscus, kind of), and golden alexanders (which blooms very early in the year, starting May 2022).

To keep things as organized as possible, we're growing just one type of plant per bed. The only exceptions are the slower-growing native perennials, which will have cannas mixed amongst them for the year, so we can have showy cut-flowers as well as long-term wildflowers.

Speaking of wildflowers, we're also planting a meadow in a triangle that won't quite fit a nice row of trees. We've hauled out the trusty billboard tarps to knock back the grass, and we'll till and tarp again before planting in mid-may. It's a mix with flowers that will span the whole season, which will make a nice place to move our beehives once we re-start them.

For now, these flowers are mostly still in their seed packets, though we've gotten a bunch of heliopsis to sprout, and johnny jump-up, and a few calendula. Next week we should have echinacea, rose mallow, shasta daisy, rudbeckia, and milkweed popping up in their flats. Once it warms up, we'll start sunflowers, zinnias, and cosmos.