“The retail grower must keep on adding to his assortment of flowers whenever possible. It isn’t enough to grow Snapdragons, Sweet Peas, Summer Larkspur, Stocks and Calendula. These and a few others may be considered the most desirable, but there are always some among your customers who are on the lookout for flowers they have never seen before or are not found in every assortment sent out. If for no other reason…sow some Godetia seed, the first batch in December, to be followed by another in February.”
Fritz Bahr, 1922

The more things change, the more they stay the same! Just as our guru was looking for new and different things way back then, we are always trying to push the limits here at our farm. After many years of growing (and writing about!) specialty cut flowers, one would think that we would be coming close to exhausting our choices. Now that we have mastered lisianthus, delphiniums and lilies–what next. Well, a lot, actually.

This year for instance, we are growing for the first time the following crops: eryngium, cynoglossum (Chinese forget-me-nots), freesia, Grecian foxglove, and several species of penstemon. So many flowers, so little time!

By our very nature, we specialty cut flower growers have to try new things. Otherwise we would all be slugging it out in the rose and mum world, or still growing bedding plants (yuk). We try everything we can get our hands on. Not everything works, but we give a plant two years before it gets the boot. The first year we figure out what went wrong, and the second year we work out the bugs. Sometimes it works, but if after two years we are still struggling, then out it goes.

We have tried most everything that had even a slight chance of succeeding here in Texas, and now we have moved into the category of “real longshots”. By all accounts, godetia fits into that category quite well. A California native that likes cool temperatures and long days. Ha! You Californians. Spoiled rotten with all that mild weather (Yes, of course, we’re jealous. The only place on this farm that will be cool after the equinox will be in the new cooler that we are finally putting in. It will double as Frank’s new office!) But this Californian flower looks like a pretty tough cookie. Last year’s trials were a success, and this year we have really stuck our necks out and planted a full crop.

We avoided godetia for many years because of its reputation of being a cool-growing crop, but we finally discovered the secret, and we’ll cut right to the chase: Grow it just like snapdragons! When you think about it, snaps are also a “cool-season, long-day crop” and we grow thousands of snaps. Once we realized that, and quit handling godetia with kid gloves, the stuff started growing like weeds! We’ve got it in the greenhouse, we’ve got it in the field, we’ve got it sitting in plug trays outside. It won’t die. Just our kind of plant.

Godetias are one of the most exquisite flowers we know of. The flowers come in colors that range from red and rose to salmon, pink and white. The common name is “Satin flower”, and that is a pretty accurate description. The flowers are about 3 inches wide, with 4 big petals that gleam like satin. The open flowers bruise easily, so they are usually shipped in bud. That makes godetia a great flower for local sales because we can pick and handle open blooms at their peak. A bucket full of godetias is a guaranteed draw to your market.

The ‘Grace’ series of godetia is the most popular series grown today. It is a hybrid and is available in a number of separate colors, and a mix. The salmon is exceptional and the other colors are great,but the white was a little weak for us. We were also disappointed with the germination rate, which was 60-65% at best. The seed is pricey, at about $60 per thousand, and we discovered that buying in plugs at around a dime a piece was less expensive than growing seed, considering the germination rate.

We also tried some of the older, open-pollinated varieties this year. Aurora is a salmon, and Furora is a crimson red. There is also a white(Memoria) and rose(Gloria). The older varieties are said to be less uniform than the hybrids, but they are considerably less expensive, and the germination rate was perfect – 95% or better. The older varieties are harder to find now, but you can get them from Modena Seed in California at (415) 585-2324.

There is another new hybrid variety that has just been released called the ‘Flamingo’ series. It has a wide color range like the Grace series. We haven’t tried that one yet but we will next season. Like we said, we treat godetia like our snaps, but the seed is much easier to handle. The seed is small, but still much larger than a snap, and we sow it into a 200 cell tray.

We cover it lightly, and give it a little bottom heat, and the seed is up within a week. The plants grow a bit slow at first, so we fertilized moderately at first to get them going, and they will soon start growing actively. Be careful not to over-fertilize at this point or you will get weak, leggy plugs. We like to grow the plugs cool (60 degrees) to keep them stocky.

We learned this year that godetias are extremely tolerant of cold (more than a snap) so we started growing them as overwintering annuals. One group was sown in the fall and set out in the field in December, and another group was sown in late November and set out in February. With snaps this gives us a staggered bloom time, so we hope the same will happen with godetia. You’ll need to adjust you planting dates accordingly, but you can use your snaps as a guideline. We planted the ‘Grace’ series in an unheated cold frame because the plugs are more valuable. The plugs arrived January 1st. They will bloom in late April. We are looking for the field crop to bloom in mid-May.

We planted our 200 cell plugs directly in the field. We used a spacing of 4 rows in a four-foot wide bed, and 9 inches apart down the row. The plants are really vigorous, and 1 foot apart down the row might have been better. The plants need to be pinched when they are about 6 inches tall, and they will make a lot of side-shoots. If they get too tall in the plug tray you can pinch the plants by shearing them off with scissors while still in the tray (This is standard procedure with our snaps). It is essential that they be supported with Tenax netting as soon as they are pinched. The new shoots grow rapidly and are very soft, and they tend to fall over from the beginning and snake around on the ground. We put the Tenax on at about 6 inches high, and raise it as necessary. Two layers of Tenax may be needed. Here in Texas our stems only grew about 30 inches tall, but we have seen godetia over 4 feet tall in California. (Ugh, California–never forget for a moment how good you’ve got it out there, earthquakes not withstanding!) The stems are very thin, and it doesn’t look like they will hold up the crop, but as the plants bloom, the stems become surprisingly tough and strong. Just keep them growing straight at the beginning.

As we mentioned before, the plants have a long-day response, meaning they will set buds in response to increasing day length after the spring equinox, so the key is to try to get your plants well established as early as possible. That is even more important here in the south, where the warm temperatures seem to intensify the response to day length and cause plants to bloom early. Even still, the plants were more tolerant of warm temperatures than the literature would have us believe. Our crop last year was grown in a cold frame, and by late April it was really heating up in there. We had celosias in the other beds! The plants bloomed out in near 90-degree temperatures, and did OK. They key, however, was that the plants were established during cool conditions.

Godetias will grow a long, thin stem with a cluster of buds at the top. The buds look like little okra pods, and they pop open like some incredible butterfly. We like to pick the stems when one or two buds have opened. The other buds will continue to open after cutting, so you can cut them tight if you need to. We cut them into our standard floral preservative, and there is no mention of the blooms being sensitive to ethylene. Vase life was well over 7 days for us.

Godetias are apparently susceptible to the standard soil diseases (“The usual suspects”, as they’d say in Casablanca) so be on the lookout. We haven’t had any problems so far. Last year we had a problem with spider mites in the greenhouse that eventually required treatment. Aphids and whiteflies can also be a problem. As a rule we find that insects are more of a problem in the greenhouse and cold frames than in the field. The greenhouse is a barrier to the beneficials that are present in the field. One year we were planting out broccoli that had some loopers on it while in the greenhouse. As we planted it in the row, we noticed that the red wasps (paper wasps) were working the plants as soon as we set them out, and finding the caterpillars within minutes! Biocontrol in action. It was very fulfilling!

Speaking of greenhouses and cold frames, we are putting up our eighth house this year. Even when we started in the bedding plant business we never envisioned 8 houses, not to mention almost 15 acres of field production. Frank realized it had become a problem because for the first time, he couldn’t remember how long the plastic had been on a greenhouse, and when it needed to be changed. Yikes! Usually he just kept those records in his head. Now we have to get organized. This is the year that we will probably cease to be a “small farm” according to the USDA. They set the bar at $250,000 in sales, and we were pushing that last year. It seemed like we really turned the corner last year, and that we were really on track as a business. Five more years till our land is paid off and we’ll be debt-free. We’re gonna be rich!