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Cut-Flower Harvesting & Post-Harvest Care | Best Practices from Pros in the Slow Flower Community
What are the best practices and systems for harvesting and post-harvest handling of flowers, herbs, and foliages before they leave the field and workshop, to safeguard that quality? This survey of 5 specialty cut-flower growers distills the collective and cumulative wisdom of three-quarters of a century of farming and selling flowers, from the Slow Flowers community.
Instructions and tips for cutting and air-drying ornamental flowers: location for drying, selecting flowers to dry, prepping, and how to know when your dried materials are ready for arrangements and crafting.
For experienced vegetable farmers looking to expand into commercial cut-flower production, as well as the more casual — yet entrepreneurial — gardener exploring ways to create a tidy income stream on the side, these personal narratives from expert farmers around the nation introduce our top-15 choices for getting started in cut flowers. Remember to take notes as you create your seed lists!
Profitable margins at the market rely on building efficiencies into the bouquet-making and operation, plus branding that emphasizes "couture" over "commodity." Here's advice from 3 professional flower farmers on how to convey the inherent value of your bouquets through method and presentation.
Our panel of professional flower farmers discusses how to personalize your approach to ensure fair pricing and business sustainability in the face of change.
Key Growing Information
Scabiosa caucasica (Caucasian Pincushion Flower) | Key Growing Information
Written by our research team, this reference contains the essential information for growing Scabiosa caucasica. Read more for a successful harvest!
Key Growing Information
Scabiosa spp. (Pincushion Flower) | Key Growing Information
Written by our research team, here is the essential information for growing Scabiosa species from seed: sowing indoors (recommended), transplanting, trellising, cut-flower harvest and care.
A visual celebration of the beautiful, abundant, and unexpected floral design elements that seem to explode during that wonderful transitional time between summer and fall. Enjoy over two dozen examples of regional floral designs using flowers, foliages, herbs, seeds, pods, edibles and vines from across the creative, wide-ranging Slow Flowers Community.
Visit with flower farmers across diverse planting zones, ecoregions, and cultural conditions to learn their succession-planting formulas and gain new insight into this versatile method for producing even more flowers this coming season. Includes tips and recommended approaches for scheduling and planning, sowing frequency, record-keeping, and favorite crops and varieties for succession-planting success.
Join Flower Trial Tech Joy Longfellow for a tutorial on drying flowers, including tips and recommendations for a few of her favorites, from tried-and-true workhorse crops and varieties for drying to flower crops with novel colors, textures, and forms.
Visit our Zone 5 overwintered tunnel planting of perennial Scabiosa (Scabiosa caucasica) and learn about these varieties' performance in an overwintered tunnel.