Once you know your last fall frost date, simply count backwards the number of days that each variety takes to ripen and that’s the last date that seed can be sown with enough time to flower.īecause the days get shorter and colder as autumn approaches, plant growth will slow down as the season progresses. While other varieties like Black Eyed Susan’s require a much longer growing window of up to 120 days, so fewer successions can be achieved. You’ll notice that some varieties like Calendula come into flower very quickly, in just 55-60 days, so you can squeeze more flowering waves into a season. This information can be found in the variety description of the catalog or on the seed packets. You also need to know how many days each variety takes from seed to flower. If you don’t already know them, your local county extension office or Master Gardeners group can help. When creating a succession-planting plan you need to know when your last spring and first fall frosts are. During the early fall months Amaranth, Grasses, Asters, Rudbeckia and Sunflowers shine. High summer brings heat lovers like Globe Amaranth, Zinnias, Celosia, Basil, Cosmos and Chocolate Lace Flower. In late spring and early summer cool weather lovers like Iceland Poppies, Sweet Peas, Larkspur, Bells of Ireland and Honeywort steal the show. This spreads out the flowering window and the workload, into much more manageable waves. Rather than sowing all of your seeds in one shot, you instead sow small batches, successively, every few weeks. In addition to choosing a wide range of varieties that will flower at different times in the season, it’s also important to stagger each planting. It was pretty humiliating to have to go back to them and say my flower season was over so quickly.ĭetermined to find a way to do better next year, I threw myself head first into learning everything I could about extending the flower season. Fancy city ladies who joined my weekly bouquet subscription, grocery buyers who were thrilled to get organic blooms and a few local wholesalers who seemed intrigued with my unusual heirloom offerings. It was heartbreaking to have so much beauty go to waste, especially when I had people wanting to buy it, and I really, really needed the money.īy early August, the floral tidal wave subsided and I was left with a few rows of dahlias and zinnias that were still blooming, but that was it.ĭuring the brief floral extravaganza, I had quickly built up a nice little customer base. No matter how hard I worked, or how fast I went, I still couldn’t get everything out of the field. For the next month and a half I harvested, arranged and delivered flowers from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week. I didn’t pick a single flower until late June and then in a flash I was swimming in more bounty that I knew what to do with. In early spring I sowed one huge batch of seeds, planted them all out after the danger of frost had passed and spent the next few months impatiently tending to them as they grew. The first season I grew flowers on any kind of scale ( ¼ acre), I knew very little about staggering the harvest through succession planting. I now take lots of time planning and plotting the season to come and have much better outcomes as a result. While it was a tough lesson to learn at the time, my experience (or lack thereof) with succession planting taught me that too much of anything, especially blooming at the same time, can be a curse. The first year I grew flowers to sell, I was served a big ol’ slice of humble pie. To say that I learned about succession planting the hard way would be putting it mildly! One of my main goals in writing this blog is to save you time and money by learning from my mistakes.
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