HOT TIPS

from these growers — recommendations for the Home Flower Grower: gorgeous flowers and remarkable, interesting vegetables there ever since. She has a weekly subscription service, available for pickup or delivery, which features blooms coming from the farm each week. Currently it’s tulips—mass quantities of incredible varieties, which are ripening under lights in her basement and out in the spring sunshine. Her farm has one high tunnel filled with early bloomers—anemones, sweet peas, ranunculus, campanula, and more—and another tunnel that will be filled with dahlias in summer and fall. Like Rebekah, she has a beautiful woodlot to forage from, and all these elements combine in her wedding design work. You can find her flowers for sale at a few local shops, and can place an order for a bouquet or arrangement, throughout the growing season, right on her website: goodefarm.com

Corinne Hansch:

Plant something blue in your cut flower garden— people love a shock of blue in their bouquet.

Rebekah member!) for many years. Her farm, Nine Mile Farm, is in a rural corner of Delmar, and she’s been growing vegetables and flowers there since the ‘80s, helped along by a community of friends and her very helpful granddaughter. Rebekah is highly influenced by Permaculture, sows according to the Biodynamic calendar, and has a high tunnel currently filled with salad greens, self-sown herbs, seedlings she’s been nurturing since last fall, and trays of fresh starts getting ready to go out in the garden. With a mix of perennials (peonies are a big focus), woody shrubs, annual flowers, and materials foraged from her 90-acre property, she emphasizes that while it’s very labor intensive, she’s found flower farming to be easier on her body than vegetable growing was. “And you never hear, ‘oh I don’t eat such-and-such,’ with flowers,” she says. She is experimenting with interplanting—ways of combining different crops to maximize harvest and efficiently use space—and offers a flower CSA, bulk buckets, and wedding/event florals, in addition selling directly to other local florists.

Other regional flower farms we weren’t able to visit or interview, but which you should certainly check out:

Robin Holland:

Utilize beautiful vegetables in your arrangements! Special kale, pea foliage, herbs, and strands of cherry tomatoes are all novel and gorgeous in a centerpiece.

Embrace the volunteers and self-sowers in the garden, and you’ll have easy flowers year after year.

Rice: And from me,

Colie Collen:

Queenz Cut Flower Farm, a Troy-based CSA queenzcutflowers.univer.se

Native Farm Flowers in Greenfield Center www.nativefarmflowers.com

Pleasant Valley Flowers in Fort Edward www.pleasantvalleyflowerfarm.com

It’s all an experiment! Play with new flowers every year, move perennials around, and see what your particular plot of land can grow best. Also, research when to harvest and how to condition your flowers; it’s a shame to grow something beautiful and have it wilt before you can design with it.

Saipua/the Farm at World’s End www.saipua.com

& my own project, on urban lots in Troy Flower Scout www.flower-scout.com