Our reputations are ruined! All those years spent as liberal, “Yellow Dog” Democrats – right down the drain. As we mentioned last month, we went to the Inaugural Ball in Washington, over the protests of some of our friends! “We’ll just blend in and no one will notice that we’re Democrats,” we thought. Ha. They noticed us all right. Took our picture, they did, out on the dance floor. Trouble is, the Austin paper ran the picture the next day in a big color spread, right there with Bush and Cheney and bigwigs like Michael Dell. Now everybody is saying “I saw your picture in the paper! I didn’t know y’all are Republicans”. We’re ruined!

But we remain true to the faith. As you enter Blanco County near our farm, there is a big billboard with a gray cowboy hat in the center that says “Welcome to Blanco County -Heartland of a Great American. Lyndon B. Johnson.” We have to take our hats off every time we drive by. Actually we went to Washington with Mrs. Johnson’s blessings. Pamela spoke with her before we left, and she insisted that we borrow a piece of luggage for the trip. It turned out to be a huge piece of Louis Vuitton luggage with a brass name plate at the handle that read “L.B.J.” ! Frank was beside himself! “My first trip to Washington, and I’m totin’ a piece of LBJ’s luggage back to town!” We considered it a talisman to ward off any bad Republican juju.

In Washington, we stayed with Bob Wollam, of Wollam Gardens in Virginia. We stayed one night at Bob’s Farm, about 1 hour out of D.C. (the farm is beautiful, and is worthy of an article itself), but Bob leads a secret double life as a family man in downtown D.C., where he has an apartment with his wife and son. His apartment is within walking distance of the White House, and on Inaugural morning we walked all over town. We joined a protest for a while (we had to justify the trip to our liberal friends!), then wandered over to the Capitol, where we joined the throngs of people wearing mink coats, or holding election protest signs, or pro-life demonstrators. It was a real mix. As the 21-gun salute went off, a guy in a business suit cornered us and basically predicted the end of freedom as we know it. “Those guns there,” he said in a Bronx accent, “That’s to remind us who really runs this country.” “How lovely,” we thought as we we made our way out of the crowd.
We wandered over to the Building Museum, an incredible structure dedicated to the history of building and construction. The interior of this huge building is open to the ceiling, with elaborate architecture and giant faux-marble columns. It turned out that they were setting up inside there for the “Florida” Ball (they group states together – Florida got its own!) As we walked through the building we smelled that familiar, sickly sweet smell of floral preservative, and as we came around a wall, there was the crew putting together all the arrangements for the evening. The flowers were spectacular, and Bob knew one of the volunteers, so we got an inside look at the decorating.

That night we made our way over to the Texas-Wyoming Ball. (Pamela in a mink coat and Frank in a Stetson and Tux!) Contrary to the spectacular digs of the Florida Ball, ours was in a huge, open, flat room. We were amazed at just how “generic” it all was. The flowers were nothing like the Florida Ball (we have theories as to why the Florida folks got special treatment, but we won’t get into that!), and the food was simply turkey sandwiches on a white bread bun! Say what! We bet the food was better at the Florida Ball too. But by all accounts, the Texas-Wyoming Ball was THE place to be and be seen, and we had a blast!

It takes a lot of volunteers to put together the thousands of bouquets and arrangements that they use at these balls, but it probably still doesn’t come close to the thousands of bouquets that Pamela puts together in one season. Last year we sent out almost 30,000 bouquets from this little farm. From April 1st to November 1st, we have a commitment to our main customer to keep their floor space filled with “Texas Garden Bouquets”. And now they are opening a big new store in Houston, with the potential to do twice the sales of the best store in Austin. Yikes.

Pamela is in charge of putting the bouquets together, but it is Frank’s job to make sure she has a consistent supply of raw material every week. The key to keeping enough flowers blooming is succession planting – religiously, and without fail. There is never an empty bed around here during the season.

Although our bouquets look different every week, we basically have four types of bouquets. The early spring bouquets are made of the bulb crops like iris and daffodil, Gipsy dianthus and sweet william, and some late stocks and ranunculus from the greenhouse. The late spring bouquets are probably our best. It is peak season for delphiniums, lilies, snaps, ammi, larkspur and so on. Around late May we start picking sunflowers, zinnias and marigolds, and by mid June we are into the summer bouquets. These bouquets consist of all the flowers that can stand our brutal, 100 degree summer heat. Celosias, sunflowers, trachelium, salvias, marigolds and lots of zinnias keep us going through the dog days. Finally our fall bouquets come in with asters, goldenrod, liatris, mums and tithonia, in addition to our summer flowers.

Almost all our crops are put out as transplants. It is more labor intensive, but it gives us several advantages. First of all, it gives us a jump on the grasshoppers and the weeds. Secondly, it allows us to utilize our limited bed space more efficiently by not tying up a lot of ground waiting for seeds to sprout. By growing seedlings in a concentrated space, we have more bed space available in the field for blooming plants. But most of all, it gives us the control to start seeds on a schedule and know when we will transplant and harvest the crop, almost to the day.

We have one large 30 x 96 foot greenhouse that functions as a transplant factory. It was first built to grow poinsettias, so it has both a good heating system and evaporative cooling pads. That gives us the ability to produce plugs year round. Most of the plants for the spring bouquets are planted in the fall. Beginning in late July, we seed yarrow, sweet william, shasta daisies and other perennials that will need to be well developed before winter so they will respond to vernalization. These plants are set out in September, and continue to fill out in the field. In September we also start a round of seedlings for our spring annuals. Snaps, cornflower, agrostemma, ammi, scabiosa and other cold tolerant annuals are started then for transplanting in November. Campanula and lisianthus are started October 1. In November we also put out our delphiniums from plugs that we buy in, and our larkspur is direct seeded around the 1st of the month. Larkspur is about the only thing that we direct seed, and for us it is next to impossible to plant successively. Even if we make several seedings weeks apart, they all bloom at the same time, just on shorter stems.

It is very difficult to plan successive harvests for our spring crops here in Texas because once the season gets going there is such a short window of time before Mother Nature fires up her blast furnace and summer starts. By mid-May we are already in the 90s! Ugh. So we try to get around that by sheer volume. When we plant snaps and larkspur in the fall, we plant LOTS of snaps and larkspur. This year we have almost half an acre of larkspur alone!

We can stagger our spring crops out a little bit by making another planting in February. In late November we start another round of seedlings for snaps, ammi, and our other cold tolerant annuals. These plants will be set out in the field the last week of February. They will bloom only about 2 weeks later than the over-wintered crops, but that is enough to make a difference. When a crop like snaps comes on, it comes on like gangbusters, so it is nice to spread it out even just a little.

In early February we start the transplants for our summer annuals. This is where the real successive planting kicks in. From about March 1st until late August, we have a set amount of transplants that go out each and every week like clockwork. We try never to miss a week, because that week will show up about two months later as a gap in production. The goal is to have steady, even production – no peaks or valleys.

At this point our greenhouse becomes an assembly line for seedlings. Every Wednesday, Frank seeds 2,000 large sunflowers, 1,200 bouquet sunflowers, 2,000 zinnias, 1,600 marigolds, 100 cinnamon basils, and countless celosias – cockscomb, wheat, and Pampas Plume. We even grown gomphrena on this schedule now (Yuk.) So every week we are transplanting a corresponding amount of seedlings. Some crops like sunflowers, cockscomb, basil, and gomphrena are picked clean and plowed under each week. By planting a new set each week we assure a constant supply. Other crops such as zinnias, Pampas Plume celosia, and marigolds are cut over several weeks, but each week a new crop is coming into peak production with top-quality flowers, and once we hit a static level of production, we start plowing under the older beds. At any given time time we will be picking from four plantings of zinnias, for instance.

The hardest part of being in the bouquet business is making sure you have the right amount of bouquets each week. In years past we have tried to make about 1,200 bouquets a week. This year that will be a lot higher. But regardless of whether you make 1,200 bouquets for a grocery chain or 100 for a farmers’ market, you need consistent supply. You don’t want to have only 50 one week and 200 the next.

The foundation of our consistent production are the crops that we know we will cut once over, like sunflowers. We use one sunflower per bouquet all season long, so we know we need to plant at least 1,200 seedlings every week, allowing a few extra for any loss. The same goes for gomphrena and celosia. We plan for one gomphrena plant, cut whole, per bouquet, so again we put out 1,200 plants per week. We like three cockscomb celosia per bouquet, so we plant 3,600 seedlings, not counting the seedlings we need for straight bunch production.

Crops such as zinnias are a bit harder to plan. It took us some trial and error to figure out how many plants we needed each week. What you really need to figure out is not how many plants you need each week, but how many plants you will need over the four crops you will be picking from. In our peak season, for instance, we will be picking from four plantings of zinnias, or 8,000 plants (2,000 per week). Some beds will just be starting to bloom, and some beds will be on their way out, but once we hit that level of 8,000 plants, we want to stay there all season. We don’t want to go out the first week and plant 8,000 plants all at once though. Two months later we would have a huge bubble of zinnias that would smother us all! So we build up over four weeks. The zinnias start to bloom just as the spring crops are fading, so there is a smooth transition from snaps and delphiniums to zinnias and sunflowers. By June 1, the summer crops are up to full production and there’s no lookin’ back!

Most of our summer crops will come into production in about eight weeks from transplanting, so come the end of August, we stop seeding and just coast. We usually stop picking around the end of October, but sometimes the season will stretch into November. We don’t worry about that and just pick what’s left. The special fall flowers such as goldenrods and liatris are grown as perennials, and the mums are put in in June as we mentioned in this column several months ago.

By the end of August, we feel like we have been on a treadmill that has been running at high speed for six months straight, and its a great relief to get off of the seeding/planting schedule. The few fall transplants that go out for next season seem like nothing compared to the nearly 300,000 plants that we planted from March to August. It’s exhausting just to look at that number! Ugh.

When Frank thinks about those numbers, he wonders if now wouldn’t be a good time for a career change – politics maybe! But these are dark days to be a Democrat in Texas. Time was that elections in Texas were settled in the Democratic primaries. No Republican even stood a chance of being elected in the fall. Now all 29 state elected offices are held by Republicans! And a Texan in the White House to boot! Oh, well. Molly Ivins always says we do better as underdogs anyway. The goal now it to see to it that Texas-grown flowers are well represented in the White House decor. Maybe we’ll even get invited to another party. After all, the President is still the President, regardless of which party he’s from, and we wouldn’t turn down the adventure! We know, we’re shameless opportunists, but it’s fun!