Market farms are run in many different ways, but succession planting shows up on nearly all of them. Vegetable growers everywhere sow at set intervals through the season so the harvest never stops, and flower farms have long relied on the same idea to get the most from their ground.
Planning & Planting for an Abundant & Frequent Floral Harvest
If you are just starting out, every season of growing cut flowers will show you how valuable succession planting is. If you've been at it a while, you likely have your own favorite ways to plan, carry out and record your plantings. The Hensley's team gathered experiences from flower farms in Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio and Oregon, spanning a useful range of zones, ecoregions and growing conditions.
Every farm shared two main lessons: first, choose a system that suits you; and second, make it a habit . Here are the specifics.
Find out which flowers suit 7-day and 14-day planting intervals in our Planting Interval Charts for cut flowers.
Our Flower Farmer Contributors
We're grateful to the flower farmers who shared their hard-won advice. Their methods have been proven in fields and greenhouses across the country.
- A grower at a flower farmin northwestern Illinois
- A farming couple at a flower farmin central Maryland
- A grower at a flower farmin southern New Jersey
- A farming family at a flower and branch farmin central Ohio
- A grower at a flower farm and design studioin southern Oregon
Planning & Scheduling
Planning a flower year begins with two questions: what and when. Decide what you'll grow and note when each flower, herb, foliage plant or grass will be ready to cut. From there you can split the year into the seasonal stages that suit your farm.
Whether growers use paper or software, scheduling tops every succession checklist. Below are a few ways farms organize the flower year into seasonal stages.
Flora Farm • Oregon
Growing Zone: 8b • Ecoregion: Oak Savanna Foothills
The grower at the Oregon farm, a small flower farm , splits her year into two main seasons: cool-season annuals that overwinter and then heat-loving warm-season annuals.
With a main field under an acre, she raises her yields and profit by getting two crops out of each bed through succession planting.
Below is a sample from her succession planning chart for the small farm.
| | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crop or variety | Sown | Final harvest | ||||||
| 1 • COOL-SEASON ANNUALS (OVERWINTERED) | ||||||||
| Nigella | 09/14 | 06/06 | ||||||
| Cerinthe | 09/14 | 05/28 | ||||||
| 09/14 | 05/28 | |||||||
| Orlaya | 09/14 | 06/06 | ||||||
| Calendula | 09/14 | 05/28 | ||||||
| Larkspur | 09/14 | 06/28 | 2 • HEAT-LOVING ANNUALS (SPRING-SOWN) | |||||
| 03/07 |
|
|||||||
| 05/09 | 09/22 | |||||||
| 05/28 | 10/06 | |||||||
| Zinnias | 05/28 | 10/06 | ||||||
| Shiso | 05/28 | 10/06 | ||||||
| Tulsi Basil | 05/28 | 10/06 | ||||||
The chart shows how a small operation depends on double-cropping its beds.
Right Field Farm • Maryland
Growing Zones: 7a/7b • Ecoregion: Chesapeake Rolling Coastal Plain
The owners of the Maryland farm use several reminders to know what to plant and when, but the wall calendar is the one they look at every day.
Their simplest, most-used tool is a large wall calendar, a method adapted from an experienced flower-farming teacher . The calendar tracks each crop from seeding to harvest and works better for them than any database or spreadsheet, though they use those as well.
At sowing they record the tray number, variety, potting-up date if needed, and the dates each batch is hardened off and transplanted. Ideally they also note the first cutting date.
They plan to start counting every stem they cut, which should help them decide what to plant the following year.
After testing many kinds of labels, they now swear by small brass tags stamped with numbers. Each outdoor row is numbered too, which makes finding things quick. Having a shared system for marking where to plant, prep, harvest or weed makes the work much smoother.
6 Planting Seasons at Right Field
The Maryland farm spreads its plantings across 6 seasons each year:
- The first stage starts with seeding long-season annuals in mid-January, usually just a few trays under lights in the basement.
- The second stage, which the owners call spring annuals, includes many of the same flowers that were overwintered from the fall sowing: Agrostemma, bachelor's buttons, snapdragons, stock, Rudbeckia, Scabiosa, bells of Ireland, and Cerinthe. Since most of these are frost-tolerant, the spring annuals usually go out first.
- That frees space in the seeding area for the first round of summer annuals, including dependable producers such as zinnias, Cosmos, Celosia, and sunflowers. Each is planted in 4 successions, and only the sunflowers are sown directly outside. The farm adapted the first of our Sunflower Succession-Planting Programs, sowing 3 varieties with different bloom times in the same plot on the same day. Planting them close and feeding lightly gives the smaller sunflowers they like for arrangements.
- The fourth stage is a midsummer sowing of perennials and biennials, such as Echinops, Eryngium, lupine, columbine, and Echinacea, to bloom the next spring and summer. Sowing then gives plants time to establish before winter.
- The owners pause planting in August, then plant cool-season flowers and spring bulbs in September. They add more perennials each year, each filling its own seasonal niche, from early hellebores, branches and spring bulbs through peonies to summer bulbs and corms such as tuberose, gladiolus and dahlias.
- The sixth and last stage, easy to overlook, is cover crops. The farm sows rye over winter to prevent erosion and build organic matter, a mix that includes cowpeas in spring, and buckwheat in summer.
Brightflower Farm • Illinois
Growing Zone: 5a • Ecoregion: Rock River Hills
At the Illinois farm, cloud-based files let the grower and crew check plans from a computer or phone, even out in the field.
Located in the Driftless Area of northwestern Illinoisnear the Wisconsin line, the farm has grown a diverse mix of cut flowers and plants for many seasons, selling to grocery stores and to wedding and event florists in nearby cities.
She credits a retired flower farmer who co-founded a Wisconsin flower farm with many of her methods. Everything begins with a seeding log of every flower she plans to grow. For each variety it lists the sowing date, the number and size of flats, and seeds per cell, followed by the germination date, the planting date and, when she keeps up, the amount harvested.
She builds a spreadsheet from the master plan and takes it to the seeding bench to record each day's work, then updates the log on her computer. Changing sown dates from black to red text shows at a glance what is done.
Alongside the documents is a master map of every field and row, marked with what was planted where and when.
Most of the farm's flowers start in flats and are transplanted rather than direct-sown. She finds transplants do better because a bigger, sturdier plant goes into the ground with a head start on the weeds.
Planting Frequency
Red Twig Farms • Ohio
Growing Zone: 6a • Ecoregion: Loamy High Lime Till Plains
The grower aims for roughly two weeks between sowings , timing his schedule with the germination information on each seed packet. Third-party photo.
A farming couple runs the Ohio farmin the Columbus area. Their farm began as part of a family landscape and nursery businessand has since become an independent cut-flower farm focused on woody branches (twig dogwood and willow) and peonies. After adding a small high tunnel and several caterpillar tunnels, they began growing spring bulbs such as ranunculus and anemones, plus seed-grown annuals.
Their goal is to follow the market and grow beyond a two-season business. Much of their branch crop ships to customers in other states, while cut peonies and annuals go wholesale to local florists and DIY couples, and a seasonal farm store sells flowers to the community.
He starts most seedlings himself from early February. Recent crops have included snapdragons, Celosia, Eucalyptus (such as 'Baby Blue' and 'Silver Drop'), Delphinium, and Dianthus. He checks the germination details on each packet, schedules sowings on the calendar, and aims for about two weeks between them.
Because the farm is still fairly new to growing flowers from seed, they began with a few popular choices, such as 'Madame Butterfly' snapdragons, 'Queeny Lime Orange' zinnias and several sunflower varieties.
Brightflower Farm • Illinois
Growing Zone: 5a • Ecoregion: Rock River Hills
For many growers, succession planting happens every week or two (sunflowers and zinnias are classic examples), but the Illinois grower stretches her stock (Matthiola) season with separate spring and fall plantings. Fragrant, with a clove-like scent and lovely colors, stock is cold-tolerant and quick to mature, so it suits shoulder-season production well.
She sows the spring crop in early February and the fall crop in early July. The fall planting has kept earning money into the holidays; she has cut stock in late November and used it with mums, greenery and winterberry in jar arrangements for grocery customers in early December.
Flora Farm • Oregon
Growing Zone: 8b • Ecoregion: Oak Savanna Foothills
By contrast, in Zone 5a the Illinois grower usually expects to start cutting sweet peas around late May.
Depending on how much land you have, you may face questions about how often to sow, like these from the grower at the Oregon farm:
-
Am I maintaining soil fertility by rotating plant families and adding compost or amendments between crops?
Quick turnarounds, she points out, put heavy demands on the farm. -
How will I turn a bed over from one crop to the next, for example by mowing and tilling or pulling by hand, then forking and replanting?
She has to make sure equipment, helpers and time for residue to break down are available during the busiest stretch of late spring. -
How long will my cool-season annuals keep producing, and can the heat-lovers that follow tolerate a light frost?
In her climate, heat-loving crops transplanted after early July often can't produce enough flowers to justify planting and caring for them. Crops that tolerate light frost, though, such as Cosmos and Tulsi basil, are good choices to follow cool-season annuals that finish late. -
Could low tunnels in the field make my successions even more productive?
She finds that successions under low tunnels come in a few weeks earlier.
Record Keeping
Good records, the Illinois grower says, are most valuable for predicting which varieties you'll have to harvest, and when.
Recording first-cut dates gives her solid information to share with designers and their wedding clients. When florists ask whether she will have sweet peas in late May, she can check when she started cutting them the year before, or when a favorite peony first opened, and give a realistic answer for a specific wedding date.
Recording how much you harvest each year lets you compare it with how much you planted. Germination varies by variety, so these comparisons show her when to sow extra seed to make up the difference.
At the Ohio farm, the owners label each crop and variety at sowing and note the ideal start date. They take record keeping seriously, tracking soil and air temperatures and even how they amend the soil.
The Flower Peddler • New Jersey
Growing Zone: 7a • Ecoregion: Inner Coastal Plain
She keeps her phone with her all the time, takes notes through the season, and sets reminders so it tells her when to repeat each task.
Third-party photo.
The grower and her husband at the New Jersey farm grow cut flowers on several acres for wedding and event florists, DIY wedding couples and shoppers at several farmers' markets.
For her, the phone beats any other planning and record-keeping tool. She jokes that she doesn't run on coffee and spreadsheets; her calendar lives on her phone, which is always with her, and as the season goes on she takes notes and sets reminders for when to repeat each job.
With little greenhouse space for seedlings, she uses three planting methods: sowing directly, buying pre-ordered plugs, and seeding trays for transplants.
They direct-sow sunflowers, Cosmos, zinnias, annual grasses, and grains, and start some transplants in the basement, such assweet peas and asters. She uses notes and photos from past seasons, all kept on her phone, to plan plug deliveries for the whole season and asks her broker to deliver the same plugs at the same time the following year.
A Note about Experimentation
One season the Maryland growers tried sowing biennials a little earlier than usual. By mid-October a batch of Dianthus started blooming, which they hadn't planned. Checking the calendar showed they had sown it in seed blocks in mid-June: too early for the plants to overwinter, but too late for a strong fall crop. The calendar made the cause clear.
Whether a planting succeeded or failed, today's notes help you get a better result next time.
Favorite Flowers for Succession Planting
Brightflower Farm • Growing Zone 5a
Day-neutral flowers are good candidates for repeat plantings, the Illinois grower says. She can fit five to seven snapdragon sowings into a season, tracked by date, starting in January and finishing in late spring.
Right Field Farm • Growing Zones 7a/7b
The Maryland growers like to raise long-season annuals from seed. Dependable favorites include Eucalyptus, lisianthus, Campanula, and a personal favorite, Icelandic poppies.
Flora Farm • Growing Zone: 8b
Remember that mowing or cutting perennials back hard is another way to manage bloom timing. Some of the Oregon grower's favorite perennials include:
- Scabiosa atropurpurea and Rudbeckia hirta. These flower in their first year (FYF), starting in midsummer. Mowing once seed pods start forming brings another harvest in early fall. In later years flowering starts a few weeks sooner, and the fall harvest after mowing or pruning is similar.
- Achillea millefolium and Veronica. First-year flowering. Cut back hard after the first spring bloom for a second flush in late summer.
- Heliopsis. A first-year-flowering perennial that blooms in early summer and reblooms in late summer if cut back hard after the first flush.
- Monarda 'Bergamo'. Grown as an annual, Monarda 'Bergamo' starts flowering in early summer from a late-winter sowing and gives a second flush in early fall if cut back hard after the first.
Get Started & Keep Learning by Doing
Logging what you do on the farm can feel like paperwork when you'd rather be outside. But a system for planning and record keeping is a skill that helps any flower farm succeed, no matter its size.
The clearest lesson from these growers is to simply begin. Phone, computer, spreadsheet, app, index cards or a paper calendar all work; consistency matters more than the method.
You'll figure out what works for you, and you'll thank yourself next season and the ones after that.
