Early spring: cool season flowers are a go.

This week in Melbourne has been a return to the cold of spring after quite a warm week last week! It is wonderful to see the over-wintered crops bursting to the brim with blooms, almost to the point of not being able to keep up, so it is great to kick off the Flowers from The Corner pop up at Westerly on the weekends in between the Yarraville Farmer’s Markets kicking off at the end of September. Once the flowers are blooming, you can’t stop cutting!

Here’s what’s been happening In the Corner lately…

curing daffodils in crates

Spring bulbs and corms need to be left to die back so they store enough energy to come back with a flourish next year. But when you are growing in consecutive seasons like I am, this delays your next crop planting (and then harvest) as you have to feed the soil in between crops. This is especially important as I don’t want to pump a load of synthetic fertilisers into my soil so I need time for some green manure to grow and then terminate. With daffodils (and I’ve heard anemones), you can move them from their garden bed after they’ve finished flowering to ‘cure’ in crates with soil. This will free up the beds to sow green manure to improve the soil before I can plant another 400 plants in the raised beds they were in and still stick to the summer timelines.

I’ve loved seeing the (new to me) varieties I planted this year - isn’t this White Lion Daffodil beautiful!

engineering my foundation

With the late winter / early spring crops, I introduced a harvest tracking system (for myself). In many flower farming podcasts, a common theme I heard is that there isn’t a robust harvest database for flowers. We have a lot of information about germination and plant growth, but limited data on harvest rates which can be variable across locations. My hope is that this information not only helps me build a better business, but a practice and tool that can be useful at an industry level, and ideally, contributes to a climate change adaptation approach for me in the futrue. So far, I have built a dashboard that models my historical harvest data, and is beginning to forecast my future harvests based on the number of plants I have, how many flowers have been harvested to date, and the harvest curve of each crop. This is the foundation of my future farm planning, as every year after this I can work from my own historical data that reflects the exact growing condition, not a city in the US!

FLOWERS FROM THE CORNER

The reception to my Flowers from The Corner at Westerly has been so lovely! It has been a cold and quiet couple of months, watching greenery grow in my garden but with few bursts of colour.

On Saturday I sold out of all the flowers, in total 17 arrangements in roughly two hours! This was a beautiful arrangement made as a birthday gift when the theme was ‘cottage-core’. Lucky for them, cottage garden is my style of garden!

Season switching

Even though it only feels like the start of spring, I have to get into gear for summer and autumn planting and planning. Things I have been doing for the next two seasons:

PRE-SPROUTING DAHLIAS

This year I am going to attempt propagation through cuttings for the early sprouters as I found dividing tubers challenging a few months ago, and am a bit dubious as to whether I will have much survival rate of the divisions. Let’s be honest though, I have bought so many tubers that I suspect I will be running out of space, so I really shouldn’t be concerned with further propagation. But, I always prefer to be at capacity than under not have enough flowers.

indoor seed starting

At the start of autumn I invested in two indoor growing units so I can start seeds indoors. I am focussed on maximising my seedling germination and survival rate, as it is very easy to sink a lot of time into seed starting, potting up and caring for them only to have them grow leggy, struggle or die due to unfavourable weather conditions, or be eaten by snails. I’ve started the late spring Pollinator Pack seedlings, as well as a selection of cosmos and zinnias so I can get them out into the garden as soon as the weather warms up. I do already have many self-sown cosmos plants in the garden, interestingly one variety has flowers that fare better in the cooler weather than the others. I will be collecting it’s seed for future early growing next year.

It’s a busy time in the corner (when is it not?!), and each time I walk outside, I see more new flowers blooming. What a dream.

Until next time, happy gardening!
- FM