Picking the flowers before they are picked...

Just like the anxiously awaited toy catalogs as a child, seed catalogs also start arriving in November. The process of selecting the 2026 flowers for the farm begins many months before they get planted. Our goal is to have a beautiful reminder of our farm in your home as long as possible, so we strive to choose varieties that will last at least a week in a vase of water. The stems are a minimum of 8 inches with either large or multi-blooms per stem that grow well in the full sun conditions we have available for them. Some will be targeted for direct seeding while others will be started in our greenhouse.

We are figuring out a lot of this as we go along, but there are some lessons that we can carry forward from the last few years. Some of our returning favorites from 2025 are:

• Zinnias – They come in a multitude (20+) of varieties, and they grow well without a lot of maintenance. Most varieties are cut and come again, so a single plant can produce as many as 20 pickable stems over the season.

• Celosia – We grew the plumed varieties in 2025 with great success. The bright gold, pink, purple, and orange blooms make both great accent as well as a center piece.

• Gomphrena – They make little round blooms like something appearing in a Dr Suess book. They make for fantastic filler, but they also make great dried flowers too. The pinks and purples hold their colors best when dried.

• Status – We grew these for use as filler. The colors available were bright and diverse. They grew really well early in the season. They will put on a second bloom, but we learned late in the process that they needed to be deadheaded. One more thing figured out the hard way there.

We always explore new varieties to provide as much diversity and color as possible. A few varieties we tried in 2025 were not a great fit. The Agastache/Hyssop provided some wonderful blooms and leaves that we kept for use in herbal tea, but they were too small for cut flowers. The Dahlias were beautiful but also temperamental. The varieties we tried had shorter and fragile stems. We may try some different species in the future, but some more research is needed. We learned the hard way that Bells of Ireland like some shade in their life, so we will not be attempting those again for filler. Our profound apologies are extended to those plants that died baking in the sun last year.

The key for us is to keep moving forward. Our trial crops for

2026 include:

• Mexican Sunflowers – Though the blooms are smaller than the other sunflower varieties we grow, the multiple bloom and bright orange petals more than hold their own in your bouquet.

• Salvia – The blooms are not especially large but the color and number of blooms on such a long stem are something we really wanted to try.

• Stock – These have shorter stems, but the blooms are so large and tightly packed that you can barely see the stem. We picked several color variations and look forward to seeing them grow.

• Perennials! – The flower field nearest to the farm stand is restricted to annual flowers. We’ve worked hard to tame the back field for them and are building a footbridge for customers to gain access. Though we will be planting throughout 2026, the perennials will not be available in mass until 2027. We envision a fierce battle with weeds, but we’re going to give it a shot.

Our planning begins for the next year as soon as the first frost hits in the fall, so we’ve already been thinking a lot about the flowers and vegetables we’re going to make available for the best experience we can provide. The greenhouse has already been cleaned. We’ll finish separating the chaff from the seeds we saved shortly, and the first plantings will occur in the last week of December. We look forward to a great 2026 season.