This fall we have had a rash of folks dropping in on us, wanting to see the farm. They are they latest wave of newbies that think they want to be farmers. We have always encouraged folks when they want to do this, but lately, we have decided to be brutally honest with them. “You’re retired, so now you want to grow cut flowers? In Texas?” We tell them that we are looking forward to retiring from this business, not into it! We try to tell them that Texas is a “tougher than average” place to be farming, and the learning curve can be really steep here. While we don’t want to discourage anyone from their dream, we want to be sure they know what they are getting into. We tell them about Growing for Market, the ASCFG and Lynn’s book, The Flower Farmer. We force them to buy a copy of our book, We’re Gonna Be Rich!, and then we send them on their way with a Bueno Suerte (good luck).

As we scramble to make as much money as we can going into the last weeks of fall, we wonder if these folks have any idea that last year we got our first freeze just one week after Anchorage, Alaska got theirs?! Somehow that doesn’t seem quite fair. We usually get a whopper of a cold front in late October or early November, and then we can get five or six weeks of exquisitely beautiful growing weather before it will freeze again. Of course everything died in the first freeze. Sometimes we are glad to see the end of the season, but this year we are running scared with a lunker of a new land payment to keep us motivated, so we have been pushing the crops for all they are worth. On top of that, the Farmer’s Market in Austin runs until late November, so we are trying to keep flowers in production right up to the end of the market.
Trying to grow summer flowers late into the fall has its own set of challenges on top of the fact that the growers are just plain worn out! The shorter daylength and cooler nights can slow down growth, but at the same time cause the plants to bloom earlier, creating a short, colorful little plant. Nice, but not good for cuts. What’s going on?

First a quick primer about daylength and flowering. Between the spring equinox and the fall equinox, the number of hours of daylight is longer than 12 hours. The farther north you go, the longer the day gets in the summer, but at the equinox, everyone gets 12 hours. These are “long days” of summer. Between September and the following March the opposite is true. Daylight is less than 12 hours long. These are “short days” Pretty obvious. But these changes have effects on the growing habits of plants, ranging from the subtle to the dramatic.

Plants can be classified as “short-day plants”, “long-day plants”, and “daylength neutral plants”. Short day plants will only flower when the daylength is less than 12 hours long. A classic example of this plant is the poinsettia. It simply will not flower if the days are not short, and even the light from a street lamp can inhibit flowering. A plant that does not get short days will just keep growing into a big green bush. Salvia leucantha (Mexican sage) is another short day plant. In Austin there is a huge plant growing in front of a lighted shop window. It is over 6 feet tall, and shows no sign of blooming. This is a fairly dramatic effect of daylength.

Ranunculus and anemones are short days plants. That’s what makes them so good for winter greenhouse production.

So a long day plant is just what it sounds like – a plant that needs longer than 12 hours of daylight to bloom. Sweet peas are a good example of this. If you grow most sweet pea varieties in a winter greenhouse, you will get lush vines with no bloom. They will only bloom after the days are longer than 12 hours. To get sweet peas in the winter you have to grow “winter-flowering” varieties that have been selected to flower in short days, such as the Winter Elegance series.
Daylength neutral plants will flower whenever all the other conditions (water, fertilizer, temperatures)are correct, regardless of daylength.

In reality, there are not too many truly day-neutral plants. The subtle part of all this is that a lot of the plants we grow for cut flowers are called “quantitative” short-day or long-day plants. This means that a plant that is short-day, for instance, flowers best or most rapidly under short days, but will also flower under long days if grown for enough time. The opposite is true for quantitative long day plants. A lot of the flowers that we grow in the spring are quantitative long day plants. Centaurea, agrostemma, larkspur, and Ammi can be planted in the fall here, and will grow all winter as a rosette of green leaves. As the days lengthen in the spring they send up flower buds. If you grow them in a warm winter greenhouse they will eventually flower in the winter; they just take a long time. Putting lights in the greenhouse will trick them into blooming, and this is a common practice for winter production of “summer” flowers.

All this comes into play when we try to maximize production late into the fall. As it turns out, many of the plants that we grow in summer are quantitative short-day plants. Zinnias, marigolds, celosias and sunflowers all fall into this group. We plant these plants every week, all season, but as we get into the last plantings of the season we have to change our strategy a bit.

During the summer we usually figure a 10 or 12 week crop time for these plants, from seeding to bloom (8 weeks for sunflowers). This would mean an August 1 sowing would bloom in mid to late October. Figuring an average frost date of around Nov. 1, this should be our last seeding. In reality, as we get into the short days, the crop times shorten, and the August 1 sowing will bloom around October 1. This means that we will need to continue planting seeds. We are now down to an 8 week crop time, so an August 15 sowing should bloom around October 15. But it actually blooms in 7 weeks, on October 7. The next week’s seeding blooms even a bit more quickly, and so on.

So we keep seeding into the first week of September. At this point we are gambling with a frost, but what we are trying to do is keep production up at full level right up to that frost. We used to wind down a bit before frost and just pick off of plants that were getting old, but now we don’t mind if the frost comes and takes out beds in their prime. The gamble is this: seeding and planting is relatively inexpensive, and every week we can get at full production is $10,000 more in the bank! If the frost is a week late, we’re ahead that much more.

Conditions are working against us though, and in the fall we have to treat the plants differently. These quantitative short day plants are hard-wired to bloom in the fall, and they are looking for any excuse to bolt into bloom and flower on short plants. If the plants are left in the plug trays a moment too long, they will bolt. Likewise they will bolt if they dry out in the trays, or after transplanting. Anything that can stress the plants will trigger blooming on short, unsalable plants. We have to keep the plants actively growing.
In that respect, we make sure the beds we plant into are well-fertilized in the fall. We want to encourage as much vegetative growth as possible. Irrigation is also important, and we never want the plants to be water-stressed.

Cool nights in the fall also change our picking schedule. While the short days can shorten the time till blooming, the cool nights will slow down the continued production of flowers on blooming plants. For example, during the summer and early fall, we can cut our zinnia beds hard twice a week. The buds continue to open fast enough. But in mid to late October the cool nights can “lock up” the buds, as we say around here, and we can only pick the beds every 5 to 7 days. Production is essentially halved, so for our last few seedings back in late August, we seed and plant double our usual amount.

Sunflowers present their own set of difficulties in the fall. Sunflowers are quantitative short-day plants, some varieties more so than others. Also, as seedlings, certain varieties are much more sensitive to stress than others , and with the short days of fall, the bad ones will set buds at the slightest stress, even in the plug trays . We have found that our favorite variety Superior Sunset is the least sensitive to stress, short-days and cool nights, and we can usually count on full size, high quality flowers right till frost. On the other hand, we used to grow a lot of Sunbright , planted closely and flowered small, for our bouquets. Sunbright is very sensitive to stress under short days and will bolt at any chance. The resulting flowers are cup shaped and dwarfed. We have found that the variety Sunny is much less sensitive, and produces nice, fully formed flowers into the fall. ( On the other hand, Sunbright does better for us in the high light, long days of July and August!)

The colored sunflower varieties are a real challenge to us here. They sell best in the fall, but that is when they are hardest for us to produce. They want to bolt in the plug trays, and it is hard to find varieties that will grow straight up with one large bloom.(we don’t like the branching types – just personal preference.) In addition, a lot of varieties don’t like our heavy soil. In the past we haven’t grown many colored varieties.

This year we decided to do a fall variety trial of colored varieties. There has been a lot of good sunflower breeding in the past few years, and there were some nice varieties that did well for us. One that everybody liked, and that had consistent production was a variety called ‘Infrared.’ It was almost black, like the variety ‘Prado Red’, and we thought that it might be the same variety renamed. But the stems were very strong, and the plants didn’t branch too much.

Another nice one was the variety ‘Cappuccino.’ As you might expect, it was a coffee- colored reddish brown. Production was very uniform, and it didn’t branch much for us. We also like the new variety ‘Sunsplash.’ It is a two-tone, yellow with a dark orange center on the petals. It was a strong, vigorous plant that resisted bolting in the fall, and looks like a good replacement for ‘Sundown.’ ‘Sundown’ also has that great two-tone color, but it will bolt on us if you look at it the wrong way.

We have to transplant all of our sunflowers because the grasshoppers eat the seedlings as they come up if we direct seed, but if you can direct seed, you’ll eliminate a large part of the stress of fall production.
This fall we tried an experiment to try to stretch our production out until the end of November by using our unheated cold frames. We plant all our tulips starting in late November, so the cold frames are open until then. We wanted to use them to try to have at least enough production for the farmers’ market till the end. We planted four cold frames with transplants that were started in late August and early September. We grew the same varieties that we grew outdoors – celosias, zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers,and even gomphrena. (Gomphrena in a greenhouse – Frank never thought he’d see the day!) The idea was to produce just enough flowers to keep us in the market with bouquets till the market closes. So far it has been working great. The one thing that we learned is that the cover really accelerated blooming, so we could have started the seed in late September, especially for the zinnias. They were in bloom in six weeks from seed. The same is true for the other crops, to a lesser degree. The bright side is that the cold frames provide enough protection, even in the mild weather of early fall, that the plant height was dramatically increased. We were picking zinnia stems that were 2 feet tall from the first cutting of the flower in the center – just down to the first branch. A lot of the side shoots are 3 feet tall. And the flower size is great. They look like fancy florist’s gerberas. We sold 100 bunches of zinnias from one house just from the first cutting of center flowers!

The plants grew so tall we had to add some support. We didn’t use Tenax netting, but we ran yellow builders twine along the edges of the beds at about 18 inches up to keep the plants from falling into the aisles. That was enough to keep them growing straight. Powdery mildew was a problem in the greenhouse, even though the field plants were unaffected.

We planted some late sunflowers in the houses too, both from transplants and direct seeded. They all did well, and the direct seeded plants were so vigorous that they caught up with the transplanted beds. We grew ‘Superior Sunset,’ ‘Sunsplash,’ ‘Sunny,’ and a variety new to us called ‘Eversun’. At writing they hadn’t bloomed yet, but all the plants looked great.

Growing these plants in the cold frames allowed us to somewhat overcome the effects of short days. But most importantly, they filled a production period in a space that was otherwise open. Growing annuals in a greenhouse might not be as profitable as the bulb crops that follow them in November, but as specialty growers we need to take advantage of every opportunity to increase our cash flow. We have talked to a lot of growers lately who are realizing that they are no longer just seasonal growers, but growers that want and need to have some sort of year-round production. At our farm. we produce something every month of the year, from field flowers to fall lettuces, poinsettias and then bedding plants, and back to the field flowers. Our cold frames allow us to stay in cut flower production all winter now, and we are building six more on our new land. Whew! Ten years ago we planted our first crops in front of our little blue house in the Texas Hill Country. We try not to be hard on the newbies who come to visit because back then the “experts” told us we couldn’t do this here. We’ve come a long way from when we were the newbies with our first crop of zinnias in our front yard! Now we are looking like the J.R. Ewings of the flower world! Maybe we’ll find oil on our new land and we can quit farming!

Pamela and Frank Arnosky are the owners of Texas Specialty Cut Flowers in Blanco, Texas. They have 15 acres and eight greenhouses in production. They write about cut flowers in this space every month.
A collection of their previous columns, We’re Gonna Be Rich!, is available for $19.95 plus $4 shipping from GFM Books, PO Box 3747, Lawrence, KS 66046′ 800-307-8949; www.growingformarket.com