There are several flowers that will always be in my garden! My top five annuals for the cut flower garden love full-sun and tolerate our hot summers remarkably well. I also love that these can be directly sown in the field, which makes them even more low-maintenance and easy to grow. And as a plus, all these flowers pair well together, making for some beautiful bouquets.

Seed starting indoors is a great way to get a jump on the season and enables us to put small plants in the ground once we are past the last frost date in our area, resulting in flowers earlier than if we had waited to directly sow the flowers instead. This is especially important for growing flowers that have a longer time between planting and harvesting. In addition to getting a jump on the growing season, there are also lots of seeds that either require light to germinate or are really small and could easily get washed away with a heavy spring rain. Planting these seeds indoors gives us much more control over the growing conditions and gives us a substantially better germination rate. Each year I generally start seeds indoors around the first week of February, but begin the majority of my seeds around March 1. Seeds that I sow indoors include: snapdragons, feverfew, rudbeckia, marigolds, hibiscus, statice, jewels of opar, scabiosa, and gomphrena.

While flower farming has a growing season and an off-season, running a farm is a year-round job. Depending on the farm’s location, the weather that given year, and what is being grown, the schedule of tasks my vary slightly from one farm to another, but overall are pretty similar. Here at Menkveld Farm we grow lavender, sunflowers, dahlias, and over 45 other varieties of flowering annuals and foliage