Okay, we’ve created a monster. Remember, a few months ago, we wrote about our idea to hand out a bouquet card at the Farmer’s Market? A stamp for every bouquet purchase, and with 15 stamps the customer gets 2 tickets to dinner at the farm late in October? Holy Cow! As of late September we have handed out over 800 cards! We are on our third printing. Now, the chances are that we won’t be serving dinner to 800 couples (we hope!). But this does mean that we have had at least 800 individual first-time purchases of bouquets at the market, not to mention all the folks that are buying a lot more bouquets to fill their cards. We think this is an incredible number of new customers at a market that is just 5 months old.
Here in the home stretch folks are getting really competitive to fill their cards. People are coming up with an armload of flowers, holding their card out and grinnin’ like a possum. “Only 4 more bouquets to go”, they say. “I can hardly wait!” It looks like at least 50 people will fill their cards, if not more. Frank is starting to get scared!

We are going to put the tables for the dinner right out in the field, and we have been planting a special batch of fall flowers to make it look spectacular. This season we have really fine-tuned our planting schedule, and we have done a great job keeping a succession of flowers coming off every week. We have learned some new tricks about successive plantings this year, and we want to share a few of these, along with some other things we have learned.

Purple Majesty millet
First, we want to go back to a plant we mentioned earlier this year–Pennisetum Purple Majesty. It was a new plant to us this spring. Many of you have tried it by now, and we suspect that you have formed your own opinions, but here is what we think.

We grew it 4 rows in a bed, spaced 1 foot apart, just like sunflowers. It made a very handsome plant. When we started cutting it, no one one was quite sure about it. It was so black. Frank started calling it pasto feo- ugly grass in Spanish. Who would buy this? Well, lots of folks. We took it to market and it sold out. People loved it. Then we started calling it money grass! We’re gonna be rich!

Then we kept some around the packing shed for a few days. The stuff turned solid yellow with pollen! Not just a little. Great smoking clouds of pollen every time you bumped the bucket. So we started calling it allergy grass. There was enough pollen to send a roomful of people into anaphylactic shock! We also noticed it had a very strange odor. Frank finally pinned it down as being identical to the smell of burnt antifreeze, the smell you get when your truck is overheating on the way home after delivering flowers all day in mid-August. You could even smell it from the field. This was too much for Frank. As the guy responsible for the equipment, he instinctively couldn’t handle the smell of burning machinery. So he plowed it in. The pasto feo struck back by re-seeding itself in a thick carpet of seedlings that choked out the celosia we planted there. Round one goes to the ugly grass.

So we may have given you a bum steer on this one. But we are trying it again, on a limited basis. That black color has got to be great for Halloween. We are growing a fall crop, and we are going to cut the spikes just as they emerge from the last leaf, before they are mature. Hopefully this will be early enough that they won’t shed all that pollen. As for the smell, Frank will have to put up with it. Smells like money.

Dianthus Amazon
Another crop that we mentioned earlier in the year that merits more attention is the new dianthus Amazon. We have raved about this plant in the past, but now we are even more impressed with it. As you may know, this is a new series of hybrid sweet william that blooms the first year from seed without vernalization (chilling). It can get up to 30 inches tall, and the colors are so bright they vibrate. We have grown it as a spring crop like other sweet williams.

Our new discovery about this plant is that it can be successively planted every week, all summer for continuous harvest. We think this is a big deal, especially here in Texas. Even in milder climates it is important to have a crop of flowers for as long as possible. For example, when you grow sweet williams, you have a lot of them at one time, and then they are gone just as fast, regardless of where you farm. For us, sweet william is over by May, and every other dianthus we’ve grown just goes up in smoke about the first of June, when the temperature hits the 90s. But this Amazon was producing 24 inch long stems with 4 inch blooms in late August, after weeks of temperatures as high as 108 degrees! It never even noticed. We have some plants still in 72 cell plug trays that we never planted out. They have been in full bloom for about 4 weeks in August and September, and they look prettier that any bedding plant that we have grown, spring, summer or fall. We are definitely impressed.

So next season we will be planting a crop of this every week during the spring and summer, in addition to the plants that we put out in late fall for the first blooms in the spring. We start the seed in 200 cell trays, and the plants go out in the field spaced 4 rows in a four foot wide bed, 6 inches apart in the row. We’ll start a crop every week. We want to have this plant almost year round.

There is some question about seed availability this coming season. Dianthus Amazon now comes in three separate colors, along with the Neon Duo mix. When we ordered 10,000 seed of the Duo last September, Brigid at Modena Seed (415-585-6820) told us that the Duo would be available until fall of 2004!! We pushed the Panic Button! Calls to other companies confirmed this. Cripes–just when we found a winner! But apparently two of the colors, cherry and magenta are available separately, and Modena was able to get us 5,000 seed of each. The rose is still delayed. So, at any rate, get your order in early, you don’t want to miss this one.

Late-blooming lisianthus
Mastering successive planting is really the key to being successful in this business. We are always trying to push the envelope and extend crop times. Another new variety that we were able to push past the limits this year was the Lisianthus series Mirage. This is a very late flowering variety that has performed very well for us.

Lisianthus breeding has become very sophisticated, and there are now cultural groups that are classified by growing season, much like greenhouse snaps. The reason this is important is because long days and high temperatures will cause lisianthus to bloom. In bad cases the plants will “rosette” or become stunted and refuse to grow.

The familiar Heidi series, and, to some extent, the double-flowered Echos are classified as “early flowering”. The Flamenco series is a mid- season variety. If these varieties are grown too late in the season, at least here in Texas, they bolt into bloom when they are very short. So we can only grow them early, and the lisianthus season is soon over.

This season we tried the late season variety Mirage. It comes in 3 colors – white, white with blue rim, and light pink. We set out plugs around the first of May, just before our other varieties normally bloom. The plants were very heat tolerant, with little rosetting, even in 100 degree temps. Best of all they started blooming in late August, and by Labor Day they were in full bloom. The stems were at least 20 inches long, and sometimes 2 feet. Flowers were a bit small, though, and the light pink was the strongest variety. They plants were grown in the full Texas sun.

Once again we see the potential for sequential planting. We plan to order plugs for delivery every 2 weeks in April and May to try to extend our season through the summer and fall.

We have given up on trying to grow our own lisianthus plugs, and we now order them from Headstart Nursery in California. Headstart sells only through brokers, but most seed companies will order them for you so call your favorite company. We order 392 cell plugs, and although we set the tiny plugs right out in the field, if you have space, it would probably be a good idea to bump them up to a larger plug for a while before you put them out.

Lilies all summer
We really decided to stick our neck our this fall and try a fall crop of lilies. We generally end our lily season around the first of June, when the temperatures get too hot. But this year we got a wild idea to plant some in bulb crates in the greenhouse with cooling pads. It was a smashing success, and now we are picking incredible lilies in September and October.

Lilies are a great crop to plant sequentially. The bulbs are held by the suppliers in a frozen state, and shipped out as needed. If you place your order early in the year, you can have bulbs shipped any week that you need them. For northern growers, this means that you can be producing outdoor crops of lilies all summer into fall. Here in Texas it’s just too hot for field crops, so we tried ours in a cooled greenhouse.
We didn’t plan ahead, so when we called our bulb suppliers, we had a limited amount of varieties that we could choose from. We looked for varieties that had a tall stem(100 cm or more), short crop time(around 85 days) and high bud count (5 or more for a 12/14 cm bulb. We grew mostly asiatic lilies, but we also tried some LA Hybrids. LA hybrids are a cross between asiatic lilies and longiflorum types – like Easter lilies. The result is a big-flowered, colored lily with huge fat buds. There is a lot of variation between varieties, and some are not that great, but when they are great, they are spectacular. We grew some nice ones this fall. Fangio is an incredible variety with huge rose blooms clustered at the top. Aladdin’s Dazzle has huge yellow trumpet type flowers. Manhattan has giant dark pink flowers that open big and flat. Awesome!

Gloeckner Co. has a very detailed lily catalog that lists hundreds of varieties and gives a comparative chart listing crop time, finished height, and bud count for all the varieties and bulb sizes. We use it all the time. The chart is relative, and you’ll need to adjust it for your conditions. You can reach Gloeckner at 1-800-345-3787

We ordered our bulbs to be shipped in mid-July, and started planting every week until mid-August. We could have continued planting, but we wanted to finish with the close of the Farmer’s Market in late November. We had the bulbs shipped all at once and held them in the cooler, but in the future we will schedule shipment for every two weeks. Even at a cooler in the mid-thirties, the bulbs will begin to grow, and after about 3 weeks the shoots can get too long to work with. So timely planting is essential.
We planted 25 bulbs in a standard black bulb crate. ( We described the process in an earlier article about growing lilies in crates.) The crates were placed as close to the cooling pads as possible, and the greenhouse has 30% shade cloth. We put the crates up on our benches with the crates touching on all sides. Production was very tight. The crates were very heavy when watered, and our benches needed to be propped up. In the future we will grow them on the floor! The crates were watered and fertilized normally, with care taken not to let them dry out in the heat.

The plants grew very fast in the intense summer light, and some of the varieties started blooming in less than 60 days! Most varieties ran about two weeks earlier that the catalogs specified. The stems were a bit weaker than we expected, probably due to the high temperatures and rapid growth. We didn’t use support netting, but we should have. The buds become very heavy just before they open, and then they want to lean over. The buds open very rapidly in the late summer heat, so we had to cut stems daily and put them in the cooler. Cut the stems just before the buds open. Wholesalers want to buy tight buds, and Farmer’s Market customers like to see some buds opening when they buy them. The buds will continue to open in the cooler, although very slowly.

Next year we are going to try to have lilies all season long. Frank is now dreaming of a 144-foot long, 3 bay, gutter-connected greenhouse with fans and cooling pads – no benches, just ground beds full of lilies, and maybe delphiniums. And now we have the room for it. The big news around here is that we just bought 100 acres of new land! It is about 2 miles from our farm, on the corner of two state highways, and the soil is great! We want to move the business down there, and we can see opening a retail market there sometime in the future. We’ll still live at our home farm, but this gives us lots more room to expand. We have six cold frames ordered, to be built there this winter, and next summer we will be putting up shade houses. Frank’s gutter-connected lily house won’t be far behind.