Some time ago, we thought that we might grow out a large sunflower trial. The idea was to try to grow a row of every available sunflower and see how they performed here in sunny Texas. Texas is in the genetic center of origin for sunflowers, after all. Well, one look at the catalog dashed that idea. Even with our new 100 acres, we wouldn’t have the space, time, or energy. When we first started this business in 1993, there were fewer than 10 varieties available, and only three that we really tried to grow. These days there are so many varieties that it is next to impossible to figure out what to grow, let alone try them all. At last count, one of our seed catalogs had 64 different varieties.

There was a time when the fashion moguls of New York and Paris proclaimed the sunflower dead and gone. But just like when Mark Twain said “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, the sunflower still rides high in popularity. Even with Martha in the hoosegow, the garden flower look survives, and until our customers crash the gates demanding roses and carnations, we’re going to keep growing sunflowers.

Although we can’t grow all the sunflowers available, we do try to trial the newest varieties, and there are a few standouts that we’d like to mention, along with some other new flower varieties that we’ve tried or are about to try.
Probably our favorite new flower last season, sunflowers or otherwise, was the sunflower Sunrich Gold. This is a new addition to an old series. Back in ‘93 the Sunrich series (Orange and Lemon), along with Sunbright, was about all we had for commercial pollen-less cut flower sunflowers. We grew mostly Sunbright, because we had some stunting problems with the Sunrich, although many growers still grow the Sunrich colors and swear by them. So it was with only a halfhearted effort that we trialed the new Gold color. We weren’t expecting great results, but boy were we surprised. We still had a bit of a problem with short plants, but the color was outstanding! The petals are a clear bright yellow, and the center starts out bright, light green, and turns golden as the florets bloom out in the center. It is a customer magnet!

The most interesting thing about this variety is that the flower petals are rounded at the tips. The petals are oval-shaped, and there are several layers of overlapping petals. This gives the flowers a different look than your standard sunflower. We grew some at a close spacing (6” by 6”) to keep the flower size down, and in our bouquets the blooms looked just like gerberas. The effect was really nice. We also grew some plants at a larger spacing (1 foot square), and the plants grew about 4 feet tall, with a full-sized flower head of great substance.

One note about harvesting this variety. We found that we needed to pick this one early, before the flowers opened more than halfway. The center florets begin to bloom before the flower completely opens, and if we waited for the flower to open fully, we found that the center florets were more that 50% open. We don’t like to cut flowers with more than 25% of the center florets mature. But even cut tight, the flowers opened up nicely and the vase life was very good.

Another nice sunflower that we tried this year was Pro-cut Orange. Pro-cut is a new single-stemmed commercial cut variety with four colors in the series. We tried the Pro-cut orange in the field last fall, and were impressed enough to continue trialing the other colors in our greenhouses late into the season. The most interesting quality of the Pro-cut orange was the incredible substance of the flower petals. They were very thick and full and resistant to damage from handling. The overall appearance of the flower was very neat and crisp. The only complaint that we had for this, and the other new varieties that we tried as well, was that the plant height was short–only about 3 feet. This is still tall enough for a nice stem; the problem is that you have to bend down to cut it! That’s just not fair! After 11 years of bending over hour after hour cutting gems like statice and gomphrena, we like to be able to cut our sunflowers from an upright position! Our main sunflower variety, Superior Sunset, grows 6 feet tall, so we can cut it at waist height. Bending over to cut sunflowers is more than we can bear at the end of a long, hot day! (Plant breeders take note: soon you might not be allowed to bend over to do anything horticultural in California!! This opens up possibilities for all sorts of tall plants. Imagine cutting lettuce from a standing position! Let’s do it!)

There are three other colors in the Pro-cut series, and they bear some further trialing, too. The colors are Lemon, Bicolor, and Peach. The lemon is a standard light yellow like Sunrich Lemon. The plants were very short for us, even in a greenhouse. The Bicolor is a clear two-tone red and yellow. The flowers were not large, but the color and production were very consistent. The Peach was nice, but the name implies a color that the flower doesn’t deliver. It is an interesting color– a somewhat transparent looking light orange, but it didn’t jump out at you. In a bouquet of other orange sunflowers, you might have a hard time picking it out. Other than that, it was a strong grower (the tallest Pro-cut for us) and the flower quality is good. One other good point: We had an outbreak of powdery mildew on our last greenhouse crop and the Pro-cut Peach was much less affected. Judging from that one planting, we could say that this one was at least tolerant of powdery mildew, although not totally resistant.

All these sunflowers are available from any seed supplier.

We also have some other new plants that we have tried or are in the process of trialing. One of them is the new Ammi visnaga Angel. Ammi visnaga is a heavier version of Queen Anne’s lace, with a greenish flower head – a color that’s all the rage right now. We have grown the older variety Green Mist for many years. We like it for several reasons. One is the color. Secondly it doesn’t get powdery mildew like Ammi majus. It is also more heat tolerant. This allows us to successively plant crops into the summer long after it’s too hot for Ammi majus. And most importantly, it is a monster when it comes to production. We get billions of stems from each bed, and it really goes a long way in our bouquet production. The only drawback we know of is the strange smell of the foliage when you cut it. Frank can’t stand it. But it is not a problem after cutting, and no one has ever complained to us. Also, Ammi visnaga doesn’t irritate your skin like Ammi majus can.

The new variety Angel is supposed to be much more uniform in crop time, with all the flowers ready within a shorter period. This is not too important for our early, overwintering crops, but later in the summer we plant sequentially, and it would be nice to schedule pickings like we do with sunflowers and marigolds. This year we intend to see just how far we can push this crop into the summer, so we will be planting this variety every week. Normally we plant a fall planting and a spring planting, and they bloom one after another in May. The plants are tough and can take a lot of cold with some row cover protection.

Although we haven’t bloomed out this new variety of Ammi yet, we can already see one big advantage. Germination and growth in the plug tray is very uniform. Ammi visnaga usually has spotty germination, and we normally plant double what we need. Angel had perfect germination, and the seeds were up and going a week earlier than the old variety. This is great for standardizing production. We start our Ammi seeds in 200 cell trays, and then transplant into the field on a 1 foot by 1 foot spacing. The plants get really big, and can spread out to 4 feet if you give them room. We don’t. Otherwise the plants will take over, and grow thick stalks and huge flower heads that are unusable. One trick we have learned is to grow them tight, and when the plants are 1 foot tall, we ruthlessly remove about 6 inches from the top of the plant. This causes branching, and we get a lot of nice, manageable, 4-inch wide flowers on 24 inch stems. Don’t pinch too early, or the plant will just grow more big stems, but if you can see the first bloom emerging, that is probably a bit late. After pinching, we stake the beds with Tenax netting to keep the plants straight.

Post-harvest is very straightforward. We cut into a hydrating solution, and pack into a holding solution. Ammi visnaga is often the last flower to fade in the bouquet. Angel is available from Gloeckner (800-345-3787).
There is a new color in the Champion campanula series – Champion white. This is a wedding designer’s dream come true. Campanula is also know as bellflower, and as expected, the flowers are perfect little bells about 1 inch across. This is an old-fashioned English garden flower that has been grown for years as a biennial. The Champion series is an important cut flower plant because it has no winter chilling requirement, meaning it will bloom as an annual. We have grown the other colors (pink, blue and lavender) for several years, but the white will be a knockout plant for the wedding circuit.

We’d recommend buying plugs for campanula instead of seeds because the seed is expensive and can be a bit tricky, but if you want to try a few trays, here’s what we do: Sow the seeds into a 392 cell tray. We start ours in early October. Cover the seeds very lightly (they need light), and keep them evenly moist and warm. Be very careful about watering when the seeds are just sprouting. They don’t like to be moved around by the water, and a heavy-handed watering will roll the seed around in the cell and change the position of the emerging root. Campanulas have a hard time recovering from this, and growth will be erratic. In about two months, we bump up the plants into a 72 cell tray, and get some size on them before we set them into the field in early February. They can take a lot of cold when acclimated, but we cover ours in really cold weather.

We plant our campanula close, 6 inches by 6 inches. The plants will give one main stem and a number of side shoots. The side shoots can be good for bouquet work. Harvest them with a quick tug; they pop right off. Cut the main shoot, of course. Use a hydrator and get them out of the sun right away. Cut tight, before the buds open. They will all open in the vase.

In the interest of space, we’ll quickly run down a list of other plants that we are trying this season:

• Larkspur Chorus Violet. A branching larkspur. Our jury is still out on this. Supposed to have a full-sized, double flower at the end of branching stems. Must be pinched at 6” tall. Seed is expensive, and our germination wasn’t great. We’ll let you know more as we grow it.
• Larkspur Rustic bicolor. This is your standard ‘Blue Cloud’ branching larkspur in a blue and white form. We love this plant. The ferny foliage and tiny blue, white, and now bicolor flower are great for bouquets, and our customers love it as a straight bunch. Plant single lines of seed with the onion plate of your seeder. They’ll grow as a bushy hedge that you can cut away on. Available from Germania (800-380-4721).
• Celosia Bombay Fiora. We grow millions of celosia–literally. In the past we stayed away from the Bombay, mostly because we don’t like the flat flower heads. But we saw this one at Bob Wollam’s farm last summer, and it’s a winner. The flowers are large and ruffled, and they are that elusive “peachy-orangish” color. (A florist once called us in a panic. “I need something…something…peachy-orangish,” she gasped! Just what does that mean?!) Anyway, this one’s just the ticket–peachy undertones with orange highlights. Perfect for panicked florists. Grow it tight, it grows straight without branching, and, being a celosia, it likes heat.
• And of course we have to mention our old friend the zinnia. Not much happens in the zinnia world these days, but the German breeder Benary hasn’t forgotten us out here in the zinnia patch, and they have released 3 new colors in the Oklahoma series: Yellow, Ivory and Carmine. Bravo! Carmine is our favorite. A great color, more of a bright, deep magenta. This color looked great with cinnamon basil! The Yellow is also nice. It’s a bit lighter and softer than the old Gold variety, which is nice because we always thought the Gold was a bit harsh, especially when you are picking it on a 100 degree August day and you are seeing mirages in the heat! (In Mexico zinnias are known as Mal de Ojos, or Bad Eyes, and some people believe that you can get brain fever from staring at the flowers, especially the red ones. One of our crew explained to us a complicated cure involving a Curandera, or Healer, and something about rubbing a raw egg over the entire body, cracking the egg into a glass of water, and sucking down the whole glass, among other things. We’ll have to try this next August. Wonder if it works with beer?) The Ivory is also a nice color, (probably less likely to cause brain fever!) but we had a little problem with the centers browning earlier than the other colors. All in all, though, these are nice additions to an already good series.

Benary also has their ‘Benary’s Giant’ Lime variety in full production now so seed is available. Although not as big and strong as the other colors in the series, it is a vast (yes, vast) improvement over the old Envy variety. And this is a HOT color, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t be the last on your block without green flowers. Give this variety extra TLC to increase vigor.

So give these new plants a try. We are always on the lookout for plants to set us apart, and as a rule we give new items two years to prove themselves – one year for us to make mistake, and another to see the real potential. Have fun with these new varieties, and keep a cool head next season!