We haven’t had too many April showers this year, but the May flowers, as the saying goes, are coming anyway (thanks to irrigation). The farm is full of flowers just in time for one of the biggest flower holidays of the year, Mother’s Day, which is on Sunday, in case you forgot.
I have been cutting flowers for about a month, and I have already mowed some crops whose flower quality has begun to deteriorate. These include two weedy beds of unhealthy snapdragons, Bells of Ireland, bachelor buttons, Saponaria, and larkspur.
Every year I am more relentless about taking out crops as soon as they are finished producing good flowers for me.
It’s always a little sad to mow down crops that still have blossoms, but because I am a farmer, and not a gardener, I must make sure I have room to plant more flowers for the rest of the season. The heat can be unbearable sometimes, but one blessing of living in South Carolina is the long gardening season.
This long season allows us to plant warm-season flowers such as zinnias, celosia, and sunflowers multiple times. Brown spots of fungal disease always plague my zinnias during wet years, and during the drought of summer powdery mildew appears.
I combat this by planting zinnias three or four times in a season because I need to have large, perfect zinnias for florists. For the home garden, planting them once in May and once in July will most likely provide you with flowers all season. The diseases will come, and instead of fighting them or feeling like a gardening failure, just remove the plants and set out more.
For Mother’s Day, I’ll have strawflowers, snapdragons, cottage yarrow, ammobium, orlaya, bupleurum, sunflowers, salvia, Queen Anne’s Lace, sweet William, and larkspur.
I planted all those flowers, except the sunflowers, last fall. They die in our heat and so I can’t plant them again for bloom this season. My zinnias are now about six inches tall, and I expect them to bloom in June.
The farm stand will be open with bouquets and you-pick opportunities Friday and Saturday, May 8 and 9, from 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. We will then be open every weekend through June 27, then take a summer break to escape the heat. We will resume the you-pick and flower stand in the fall.
For more information visit https://onehubcapfarm.com.