Back in high school biology class we were told that if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog will never notice that it is boiling to death. The frog is apparently oblivious to the change in temperature until it is too late. While we aren’t sure that this is exactly true for the frog, this is just what we have done to ourselves around here this season! We’ve been adding acreage and crops and turning up the heat until we finally realized that we were way deep in hot water!

As we mentioned before,we bought 100 acres last fall. We started breaking ground last November, and little by little, we kept adding production beds and greenhouses. One day last May we found that from scratch, we had made a new, 20-acre flower farm, in full production, complete with six 150-foot long greenhouses. We did all this in less than 6 months! This is in addition to the other 15 or so acres that we farm. About this time we realized that the pot we were living in was at full boil!

In reality, we are victims of our own success. The weather has been perfect (for once!) and production has been overwhelming. We packed almost 25,000 dollars worth of flowers just for Mother’s Day! The following Monday, half of our crew told us that they were homesick and wanted to leave for Mexico! Yikes! That’s when panic set in, and when last month’s GFM deadline came and went, we were still in shock. But as of mid-June, we are back on an even keel (we hope). Even though we had to pass on our column for a month, we didn’t miss a picking or planting day in the whole month of crisis!

For years we have farmed on small acreage, but this year the new farm gives us some room to spread out. For the first time we have established a lot of new beds for long-term perennial production. Texas is a hard place at best to keep perennials alive, but here are a few new items that we are exited about.

Platycodon
Platycodon, or balloon flower, is a beautiful perennial that we have always wanted to grow, but we weren’t sure if it would survive the brutal Texas climate. However, a while back, we were in a nearby small town , and tucked away deep on back street was a fabulous little garden, full of platycodon! So we knew we had to try it.
Platycodon is a relative of campanulas. The flowers come in pastel shades of blue, pink and white. The name balloon flower comes from the buds, which swell up to be about an inch across, and filled with air. Then they burst open to become beautiful 2-inch wide, star-shaped flowers. The flowers are clustered at the ends of the stems.

There are lots of varieties of platycodon, and many of them are too short to be cut flowers. We are growing the Fuji series, a tall type that gets about 24 inches tall. It comes in all three colors. There are also double types that have a second row of petals, and there is one variety, Royal Puffs, that makes a cluster of deep blue balloon buds that never open. Interesting, but that seems like a disappointment to us because the flowers are so beautiful.

Platycodon can be grown from seed, or you can buy dormant roots from a perennial specialist. We’ve tried both. Seed is fairly easy to germinate. The seed is small, but not too bad–much easier than campanula. We germinated the seed in a 200-cell tray, with a dusting of vermiculite as a covering. We put the trays in our cooler for about 10 days after seeding, just to get a little chilling on the seed, but we are not sure that this is necessary. The seed came up well at normal greenhouse temperatures, and the small plants grow relatively fast. They will reach a point where they will stop growing, however, and even though the plants look healthy, they can be stunted. Platycodon plants form a clubby taproot that looks a bit like ginseng, and they will actually form this little root in the plug tray. You want to get them transplanted outdoors or preferably into a larger container before this happens. If you wait too long, that taproot will grow through the bottom of the cell, and get gnarly and hard to remove.

When we grew our platycodon from seed, the trouble that we ran into was that the young plants, when put into the field from a 200-cell tray, just didn’t have the vigor to compete with the weeds. They grew fine, but after a point, they started to go dormant, and the weeds took over. Other projects took precedence, and by the next spring, the dormant roots just couldn’t make it in the weedy beds. So we gave up.

This year we tried a different strategy, and we purchased 1-year-old roots from Walter’s Gardens (888-925-8377, waltersgardens.com). This was the right move. The roots arrived in February, and they were strong and ready to go. As we said, they look like ginseng, and at the top of the root there will be a cluster of new buds around the remnants of last season’s growth. Plant the root pointing down, with the buds up, about 1 inch under the soil. The buds will grow rapidly once spring hits, and each bud forms a single stem. The older the root, the more buds you get.

With the luxury of more room at our new farm, we established our perennial beds as single rows, with about 6 feet between the rows–enough room to get our small tractor between the rows to keep the aisles clean. After farming intensively on small acreage, this “waste of space” took some getting used to. But it has paid off in our ability to cultivate right up to the plants and keep the rows weed free.

We planted the platycodon roots about one foot apart in the row. The stems grew amazingly fast, and by May they were in full bloom. Each root produced an average of 4 strong stems, and if we wanted to cut them all, we would have doubled our money easily in the first season. But we didn’t cut anything this first year because we want to get a good root system established, and removing too much growth would have weakened the plant.

We did cut a few stems to test the post harvest handling. They are a bit fragile, and need to be handled carefully. We cut ours into Chrysal OVB hydrator, but the open flowers tried to wilt until we got them into the shade. The next day they had recovered, and then they lasted over a week. One seed catalog suggests scalding the cut stems in boiling water, but we didn’t do that. We cut them when the first bud was open, and the other buds continued to open, but the color was faded on buds that opened indoors. When we cut next year we will probably let the first flower open and mature in the field and wait for the cluster of buds beneath to open fully. Then we can remove that first old flower like we do with lisianthus, and the cluster of younger flowers will give a better show.

One question we still have unanswered is how hard we can cut the plants next year. To get a nice long stem, it would be good to cut it to the ground. But this could deplete the plant, so we will have to experiment with these to learn how many stems we can take off without hurting the plant. This looks like a flower that can easily command a dollar a stem at the florist or farm market, so we should be able to afford to leave a few on the plant.

Guardian delphinium
While we are talking about perennials, there are a few new varieties that deserve mention, even though here in Texas we grow them as annuals. One new plant that we think is a winner is the new Guardian delphinium series. This is a “Pacific Giant” (elatum) type delphinium that is shorter than the old strain, about 2 1/2 or 3 feet tall. We first saw this plant in a greenhouse in Vancouver during the last cut flower conference. There are two striking advantages to this new series. First, it is very uniform in flowering. The old Pacific Giants will bloom over a wide window of time, but these new Guardians will all bloom together, which makes it very valuable for greenhouse production. It also has a much shorter crop time–9 or 10 weeks from transplant. The other nice thing is that the flowers are huge, and closely placed on the stem, so the display is really stunning. It comes in white, lavender, and blue. We only grew the white and the blue this past spring. The white is spectacular! Some of the individual flowers were almost 3 inches wide.

We ordered plugs and planted them in the greenhouse in late winter. The seed is expensive, and so are the plugs, so we wanted them indoors. We planted closely, 6 inches apart on centers. The plants have a thinner stem than the older types, but the flower is far superior. We plan to incorporate this variety into our winter greenhouse production.

Annual foxglove
Another new plant that we will be looking at is the new Camelot foxglove series. Foxglove(Digitalis) is technically a biennial, but this new series is supposed to bloom the first year without vernalization. This is important to those of us in the South because we don’t always get enough chilling, but this could also be important in all areas because it could free up production space required for biennials.

There already is a strain of foxglove that blooms without chilling, but that is the Foxy series, and it is a dwarf strain, usually too short for cuts. This new Camelot series grows 4 feet tall! It comes in four colors.
Foxglove seed is tiny, and we leave the plug growing to specialists. We’ll probably order our plugs to arrive in late fall or winter. Foxglove plants will get pretty big, so give each plant at least a square foot of growing room.

New sweet william
Last but not least, we just noticed a new sweet william in the Ball Seed catalog (800-879-BALL) Its called the Sweet series, and comes in 4 separate colors–coral, purple, red and white. Like the Amazon series, this one apparently needs no winter chilling, and even better, the seed is about 1/3 less expensive! The catalog description says it grows from 18 to 36 inches in the field (although we think they mean to say that the 36 inch tall plants are greenhouse grown). We plan to give this one a try next fall.

It has been a real treat to have enough room to put in perennial crops at our new farm, and we have been going crazy! We’ve planted phlox, yarrow, daisies, agastache, kniphofia and echinops, as well as woody plants like chinese lilacs and flowering almonds. It was amazing how fast we filled up the first 20 acres. With a spring where the weather has been with us, it’s easy to believe that the sky’s the limit. As they say in the song from the Austin band Timbuk 3, “The future’s so bright we gotta wear shades!”

Frank and Pamela Arnosky are the owners of Texas Specialty Cut Flowers in Blanco, Texas.