Flower Farming: Pushing the boundaries with shoulder seasons
The propagation houses are overflowing with seedlings eager to get in the ground. It must be March!
March is a huge month for us to plant many of our cold-hardy crops, such as ranunculus, anemones, ammi, and Iceland poppies. With the spring equinox quickly approaching, there are trays stacked upon trays.
It is quite the game of Jenga!
Thankfully, the game is short-lived, as we also begin planting many of our cold-hardy crops in March.
In Northern Nevada, saying we have “shoulder seasons” is putting it lightly. Being in the high desert of the Eastern Sierra Mountains, we are not strangers to extreme temperature fluctuations, where one day it is warm and sunny and the next dreary and freezing. These swings have created a running joke in our area about dressing for all four seasons since the weather can go from summer to winter in a single day.
Do you push through the icky weather and possible crop failure?
Or do you sit on the sideline and not push to have that product early or later in your season?
Last season, we had an extremely short ninety-day period of frost-free days. Yet, growing or harvesting only in summer would greatly decline our profitability. Between weddings and other sales, spring and fall are when we find the highest demand for our cut flowers, making pushing the boundaries of our shoulder seasons a must.
Right now, we are in the season of taking calculated risks when it comes to transplanting seedlings, winter sowing, and seed starting. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for “good weather.”
Today, we are going to cover the following:
What are shoulder seasons?
Pros and Cons of growing and selling in the shoulder seasons
How to balance taking pre-orders with frost uncertainty
Favorite Crops for Season Extension
What are “shoulder” seasons?
Shoulder seasons are those volatile spring and fall seasons where we flirt with the damaging freezes of winter-like conditions.
They are the shoulders of the “safe bet” growing summer season, where you are not battling vicious winter winds, snow, or freezing temperatures. Instead, summer is considered the optimal growing season, where warm temperatures make crops grow fast and there are more daylight hours, which many crops love.
Growing in summer doesn’t have its battles, but it is typically seen as a lot simpler. It doesn’t require much infrastructure, and you won’t be woken up at two in the morning to save greenhouse plastic from 80mph wind gusts (hopefully).
We can take advantage of the shoulder seasons by using season extension methods.
What are Season Extension Methods?
We use several season extension methods, such as physically protecting the crops or storing certain varieties in cold storage to extend their season.
Commonly used season extension methods we use are:
Micro tunnels are made with top rail wire (found in the chainlink section of home imporovement stores) and frost cloth, heavy-weight or lightweight.
Caterpillar low tunnels that are made with bent hoops and greenhouse plastic or purchased kit.
Double low tunnels (a combination of the two above)
Growing and storing varieties that can be held in the cooler
Programmable varieties such as tulips
Also, high tunnels- though we do not currently have one we use.
Pros and cons of Pushing the Boundaries with the Shoulder Seasons
The pros and cons will be unique to you and your growing climate. In our experience, peak summer is a tough time to sell many of our flowers. Customers go on vacations, and July can be too sweltering for wedding guests.
As mentioned, spring and fall are the biggest seasons for selling cut flowers. In our first season, without knowing how to utilize season extension methods such as low tunnels, we played it safe by following the average frost dates. With that strategy, we had flowers for a whole month and a half before the flowers bloomed, and then the kill frost came.
Pros:
Early to market allows you to demand a higher price per stem
On the flip side, having flowers after peak season can also command a higher price per stem
It gives you a longer selling season
More consumer demand
When selling anything, it boils down to supply versus demand. Season extension methods such as low tunnels, high tunnels, and shade cloth can allow you to have flowers earlier or later.
For example, they are having ranunculus earlier in the season before the other growers can give you the advantage where there is a low supply but a higher demand than when other growers also have ranunculus, which floods the market and, therefore, lessens demand.
It's similar to market growers with high tunnels to have tomatoes by June, while gardeners are just tucking in their plants. This is when those market growers make most of their profit on that crop when those tomatoes are in more demand before hobbyists have them growing on their patio. The same goes if they can have tomatoes to sell after the frost has wiped out the home gardener's plan plants. It’s common for market growers to push to have tomatoes for sale in December!
If you can have sunflowers to sell in early June, they will fly out of your field compared to having them in July. Those few weeks can make a big difference!
If you want flower farming to be your day job… and main source of income, growing crops during the shoulder seasons brings that dream one step closer to reality.
We often use shade cloth over our spring crops, such as ranunculus and sweet peas, to extend our season into late June-early July, especially in years when we get unseasonably warm temperatures in our area.
Cons:
Cost
Labor-intensive
Risk of crop loss still exists
Shoulder-season crops, especially spring varieties, are commonly more expensive, and for good reason. Investing time and money into infrastructure such as high or low tunnels can be substantial. Even with all the infrastructure, there is still a risk of potential crop failure or infrastructure damage. High tunnels are considered a “high retail” space since they are premium growing spaces that can cost a lot to heat or cool.
Pushing those boundaries of the shoulder season takes being uncomfortable in many ways, from physically being uncomfortable while fixing high tunnels or low tunnels during winter storms where you’d rather be sitting by the fire to getting emotionally uncomfortable because there’s a risk.
Risk-taking is nerve-racking. Pushing boundaries takes investment in both time and money in materials and infrastructure. Building low tunnels is not a one-and-done type season extension method. You are hunkering them down, rebuilding the collapsed ones, lifting them on sunny days, sweeping snow off them, and so on. By the time June comes rolling around, you’ll already be getting pretty tired. You may feel that the season is halfway over when, in reality, it’s just starting.
If you are not going to push planting earlier and take a risk, it may be best to skip even trying to grow crops harvested in those shoulder seasons, especially spring crops. Save the bed space for the crops that love the summer heat.
Ranunculus that are just starting to bloom in summer will most likely not be a great crop; instead, grow zinnias or cosmos that will provide a great July crop and, in turn, be profitable.
Let’s talk about the season to launch the growing season…spring.
The Spring Shoulder Season
First, let’s be honest: a good chunk of those flowers that have us drooling as flower farmers are… spring crops.
Ranunculus, anemones, sweet peas, tulips, fancy daffs just to name some of the stars, and that’s not even getting into the fun and quirky varieties that tie all the beauties together.
What they all have in common and don’t love: heat and the long days of summer. If you wait for that “nicer weather,” is where that bloom window will land you, especially if you are in a colder climate. This means sad-looking blooms, bug-infested petals, and not the best product to sell.
The Magic of Spring Blooms
After what feels like a never-ending winter, those fluffy, decadent, and colorful flowers ignite something in us humans: joy and hope that the season is going to be ok after those nail-biting winter months.
It’s like taking a nice deep breath and knowing everything will be alright in the world. It’s powerful.
Guess what?
Your customers feel that too, and having spring flowers to sell will capture their hearts.
This is why spring flowers oftentimes can be considered “loss leaders.”
“Loss” means not necessarily profitable; if anything, you may have lost money on the crop. “Leaders,” as in spring blooms, rope customers in that will turn into repeat business for you throughout the season.
As a side note, I think it’s debatable to name spring crops as loss leaders, depending on your chosen crops, your business model, and where you are in your flower farming journey.
Sure, spring can be a loss leader in those first couple of years. However, as you build a customer base and gain experience and infrastructure, spring flowers can be incredibly profitable.
A lot is happening in spring: Mother’s Day, weddings, graduations, and weddings, in general, just a demand for pretty locally grown blooms.
June is a huge wedding month you most likely won’t be able to have anything to offer unless you are planting crops out the previous fall, have perennials, or are taking a risk and planting crops no later than March, and you’re pushing it April. Most crops take about 90 days to mature on average, though you can push some 60-day varieties, such as bachelor buttons.
Now, days to maturity do not typically include germination time, transplant shock, cooler temperatures, and less daylight. If you are seed-sowing zinnias on March 1, don’t bank on having them ready to go on June 1, especially if you are in a cooler climate. Also, the day to maturity is a number given for when the plant will begin blooming. Still, it usually takes a couple more weeks for that crop to be in full swing with usable stems, especially those branching varieties. Days to maturity is a guideline, not a certainty. You see that date becoming more accurate during the active growing season, summer, under ideal conditions.
Timing Spring Plantings
The active growing soil temperature is typically 60-65F. Below that, cool-loving crops will slowly grow roots, which has its benefits but delays the harvest window. If soil temperatures are too cool for warm-loving crops and temperatures are below 40F, you will find a struggling plant. Timing is important. Crops should be grown in their respective seasons.
Season extension methods allow you to extend your season by about a month on average.
T0 Fall Plant or Not to Fall Plant?
I must admit, we often skip over fall planting crops. Our winters are unpredictable, and we are tired of the stress of tunnels collapsing from the wind.
If you have the time in the fall, have the infrastructure in place, or have a tolerable winter weather pattern, fall planting is a great way to spread out plantings in spring, give you healthy, robust plants, and jumpstart sales.
We do begin planting in spring and fall. We might choose to skip over planting bachelor buttons or bells of Ireland but will prioritize biennials
For most of our spring crops, we begin seed starting in the propagation house in January, which means planting them out in March under tunnels.
Some of the varieties we are planting out in March are:
Iceland poppies
Ranunculus
Anemones
Bells of Ireland
Larkspur
Nigella
Feverfew
Campanula
Honeywort
Orlaya
These are our cold-hardy crops. Some of the varieties’ subsequent successions will be switched to direct sowing in the field. This saves time and space in the greenhouse, as it also becomes unnecessary to start them as transplants, as soil temperatures are ideal for sowing them.
Direct Sowing in Spring Examples:
Stock
Bachelor Buttons
Nigella
Saponaria
Ammi
Garden Baby’s Breath
Spring Offerings
Our spring season kicks off typically with tulips and narcissi, mixed with blooming branches or curly willow and flowering fruit trees. As spring progresses, usually by mid-May, our bouquets become more fluffy with ranunculus, anemones, cress, ammi, and sweet peas that multiple successions and peonies finish off our spring season.
By mid-July, the spring rows will be turned over and planted with crops harvested in the fall.
Don’t Panic! Plants may look a little rough…
Transplants growing even under protection can look rough… rough. It will make your heart sink. It will make you question everything you did and what to do next. It’s messy and it’s ugly. It may be a goner if it’s a marigold or zinnia that was planted out too early and got hit with a hard frost. If it’s a sweet pea or ranunculus (or another cold, hardy crop), it will depend on the survival of the roots.
The foliage growth may get hit by frost or wind, but those hardy annuals will most likely bounce back with some TLC. Think of it as a super hard pinch; you should see some new growth soon. The new growth will also be able to handle those cold temperatures better and shouldn’t get hit as hard the next time. Now that the plant has experienced that stress, it has built up some good defenses in the form of carbs.
This scenario especially happens with newly transplanted seedlings cozy in the greenhouse or plants sending out tons of new growth during what we call “fake springs.” The point of using season extension methods, such as low tunnels, isn’t that it will 100 percent protect the plants and keep them from having zero damage, but it insulates them enough, the ground, for the plants to survive.
We want the plant, our cold, hardy varieties, to focus on that slow, steady root growth more than the actual foliage. It will send out new branches for branching varieties and ultimately result in a beefier, more productive plant. For example, we don’t pinch our snapdragons. Growing them slow and cold, they naturally branch out without us needing to take the time to pinch them, which rewards us with amazing stems.
The low tunnels help control the freezing and thawing of the soil, which can be detrimental to many crops. Once their feet and roots freeze and thaw too many times, you start seeing crop failure, especially corms such as ranunculus and anemones, which will turn mush. If we can keep this from happening, it may be a slow-growing crop, but when the right temperatures hit, they will grow fast with a healthy, robust root system at the base.
A note of foliar feeding during shoulder seasons:
We foliar feed our plants during the colder months with phosphorous (Big Bloom, or you could use diluted kelp). We feed them this weekly and a light dose after an exceptionally stressful event. We don’t typically want to feed them any nitrogen (Grow Big or fish emulsion) until we are done with the season's low temperatures. We aren’t pushing for them to grow active foliage that may get killed back anyway. In mid to late March, we start feeding the plants in the field nitrogen weekly. For fall, we take a backward approach in that they get their weekly feedings of nitrogen, but once the temps start cooling down, we stop feeding or diluting their feedings nitrogen and continue feeding them that phosphorous.
The Fall Shoulder Season
Our fall here in Northern Nevada is a little more of a mix of late summer through early fall. Just like we can go from winter to summer with minimal spring temps, our fall can go that way, too, from summer to winter.
Fall is a little more informal for us than spring. Mature and blooming crops are not as easy to protect from frosts as the tiny plants of spring.
In some ways, pushing for earlier crops in spring is easier than having crops past the first frost in fall, especially as a field grower.
Seedlings, in general, are typically more resilient than fully matured plants. This caused me a lot of confusion at the beginning of flower farming because I didn’t understand how my “hardy” crops got wiped out with the first fall frost. The main answer, and I’m sure there’s a much more scientifically accurate one, is that the more mature plants have more water cells, the easier it is for them to get damaged.
Sudden frosts from out of nowhere are exceptionally hard on the plants because they don’t have all those sugars built up to handle the cold better. Suppose summer slowly eases into those cooler fall temperatures. In that case, the plant usually can better acclimate, which gives it a chance to survive those lighter first frosts, even the very sensitive varieties. It’s also difficult to assess which frost will wipe out your crop. Temperatures alone don’t give all the details. The humidity, dew point, hours at that low, the plant's health, moisture of soil, and, as just mentioned, the temperatures that the plant has been exposed to all play roles in whether or not the plant will survive and whether you’ll see damage.
Usually, once I start feeling that nip of cold in the air… you know, the one that tells you you’re ready to switch from salads to hearty stews from tank tops to sweaters—I get more aggressive about staying up on harvesting. Even if the plant survives the frost nip, it will probably damage the blooms and take a few days to a week to get sellable flowers again.
Though we will run box fans in the rows of our dahlias to save them from a couple of low nights, we mainly depend on being able to hold flowers in the cooler after the killing frost for our late-season weddings.
Sunflowers, dahlias more closed, lisianthus, scented geraniums, heirloom mums, and marigolds are some of our preferred fall varieties that hold in the cooler. We have successfully extended the holding time of blooms, such as dahlias, to up to two weeks for event flowers.
The biggest thing in fall is weighing the potential benefit of protecting crops versus allowing the field to rest for the winter.
If you can protect the crops and have sales obligations to fulfill, then you should try to protect them. If it’s a rather light frost and the forecast looks good after a night or two, and you want to continue making sales, sure, protect.
We have experimented with some different methods of protecting mature fall crops and ultimately looked at what the orchard growers do: use fans. The fan keeps the air moving, not allowing the cold to settle on the plants. It is all about energy exchange. This one worked the best of all the methods, but only if the temperatures stayed above 30F.
Still, by doing that for a few nights, we protected our crops from that mid-September freeze (that has put our season to an end in past years) and had product until almost Halloween…without having a high tunnel. Sometimes the extra effort pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Last year, those extra sales paid for our components to build a high tunnel this season. In our experience, crop planning specifically for fall, at least in our colder climate, a high tunnel or larger low tunnels are a must to protect those mature crops if you truly want a product to sell through fall.
By the end of October, I knew I was done and decided to let the field go. At the end of the season, you reach a point where letting the season be finished allows you to better focus on the end-of-season tasks and to prepare for holiday orders that will set you up better for the winter months and the following spring.
How we balanced pre-orders and additional orders with frost uncertainty
Fall does have a lot of demand. This is when you see an uptick in weddings again. An uptick in demand as customers realize once those blooms are gone they are gone until the following spring. Also, customers are slowing down from their summer vacations as kids flood back into school… people make the time to stop and smell the flowers again!
Since our weather can be unpredictable and volatile once September hits, we usually try to wrap up all our flower subscriptions by mid- to late September and then offer bouquets to our members on a week-by-week basis after that. This approach worked out well. I didn’t commit myself to products I wasn’t sure I could deliver, and our customers got some extra fluffy dahlia bouquets until the end. Bonus: it kept our flowers fresh in their minds when we opened signups for our next season’s subscriptions.
I charge a little more for fall weddings and set higher minimums to ensure we are still profitable if I need to snag some blooms from a flower-farming friend over the hill. I will also stop offering bulk botanical buckets by mid-September. We keep our finger on the pulse: prepare for the worst and take advantage of the opportunities of longer seasons by protecting crops if able to. Once those low temps are consistently hitting our area, we let the field go to its winter rest.
Then… dahlia digging and fall planting commence!
Favorite Varieties for Season Extension
Though I have a hard time choosing favorites, there have been some varieties that we have come to rely on during the volatile shoulder seasons!
Spring
Ranunculus
Anemones
Sweet Peas
Snapdragons
Tulips
Peonies
Seeded Cress
Dusty Miller
Fall:
Lisianthus
Scented Geraniums
Dusty Miller
Everlasting Varieties (Strawflowers, statice, bunny tail grass)
Marigolds
Dahlias
Eucalyptus
Thornless Raspberries
Sunflowers
Ornamental Grasses
Battling winter’s grasp in spring and fall to offer the product during those shoulder seasons is a rollercoaster, but when you have those crops and those sales, you will be thankful that you pushed through.
Summer is a tough time of year to sell if you haven’t already been selling in spring. It’s the whole idea of supply and demand. When your customer’s landscape is flush with flowers, or their little vegetable patch has a few cosmos, even though not as amazing as yours, it still devalues your product. In summer, there are a lot of flowers all over: in the hobbyist garden, in the vegetable vendor’s stand, in the landscape, heck, even off the side of the road. Having blooms available to sell when the land becomes barren of flowers again can be your most profitable season, for good reason. It requires a lot of hard work, dedication, infrastructure and knowledge.
This is what separates the hobbyist from the commercial flower farmer.
I hope this post gives you a little insight into the value of pushing the boundaries of those shoulder seasons and how to tackle better dealing with the armpit of winter. The shoulder seasons are when you can capture your repeat customers, more easily snatch those sales, have a longer selling season, and set yourself apart from dreamers. The plants want to grow; we have this in our favor.
They need a little help from the flower farmer, who will reward you with amazing blooms to hand to your customers.
We are looking forward to helping you hand blooms soon!
- Jessica & Graham
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