Worst Flowers of 2022

in my four years of farming it's been the failures not the successes that have taught me the most and so in hopes of learning something let's talk about the 10 worst flowers of 2022. this list might be a little controversial I'm gonna have flowers on this list that might be the best flowers for someone else but I have to consider my specific growing region my specific growing conditions my specific Market all of those details when I make that list for myself and so hopefully in the details that I share you'll understand why they're the worst here on Red Roof Family Farm we have grown a huge variety of crops over the four years that we've been in business this year we narrowed in on only flowers previously we'd been growing vegetables and flowers more of a focus on veggies but this year it was all about the flowers and so I finally have the time to focus on which specific flowers do the best for us in a previous video I've already talked about which were the best of the year but I think it's just as important to take note of the worst so let's get to it number one is Shadow carnations and I really wanted to like these they look like the most incredible heirloom Carnation you've ever seen they have an amazing range of colors they have this incredible smell but they were so little that there just wasn't much I could do with them the flowers themselves were very very small they were clusters but they weren't enough of a cluster to make any sort of an impact on a bouquet the stems were really short you know we're used to seeing these big long beautiful big fat headed carnations at the grocery store these just weren't that the stems were also very very brittle anytime I went to work with them the few times I find a stem long enough to use fifty percent of the time I was snapping the stem and you know losing the flower completely I do think there is a chance that part of the issue is my growing of them I could have grown them a lot better I just don't think that I could grow them well enough to make up for all the problems that I had maybe if I was doing wedding work needing those smaller secondary blooms more I would consider it but as it is I don't see these in my future thanks to our sponsor Peak life I'm out here getting rid of garbage seeds like these scabiosa that I'm going to talk about next I'm so busy with the farm that I don't have time for a skincare routine but I always have time for tea my middle age skin needs more than dirt rubbed into it and the radiant skin Duo helps restore Skin's moisture and elasticity Sun Goddess matcha is my morning pick-me-up and it's deliciously creamy it has powerful Green Tea antioxidants to firm and brighten skin and chlorophyll to clarify and is quadruple toxin screened for Purity then BT Fountain helps keep me hydrated while I work with its natural electrolytes and minerals it's sugar-free and refreshing without the overpowering electrolyte taste it also has hyaluronic acid and clinically proven Ceramics to improve skin elasticity together the radiant skin Duo is like a facial in a drink best of all it has zero prep all you do is add water so it's easy for me to prepare while working or grabbing these cats one skin lesson I've learned on the farm is how much staying hydrated affects my skin too much sun and too little liquids is a bad combo so anything that helps me stay hydrated and supports my skin from the inside is interesting to me for a limited time get 15 off plus free shipping for life on Peaks radiant skin Duo you also get a complimentary starter kit with a beaker and frother when you start your new ritual number two is scabiosa and I need to clarify this is the annual scabiosa not the perennial scabiosa because this year for the first time I grew the Fama series scabiosa which is the perennial and it was incredible I had 100 plants of it and I want you know 300 more amazing amazing flowers but the annual scabiosa not so much the flowers were so small that kind of didn't feel worth it for me to go out and try to pick through these wiry unruly plants here on our farm we sell something similar to a grocery store bouquet our customers don't really care about what specifically is in the bouquet just that it looks really beautiful and so these little fussy bits and pieces like the scabiosa are just really hard for me to make any sort of money on yet again I can understand the value of it but we won't be growing it here again on the farm number three is Sweet William and this I had high hopes for we are always looking for more flowers to fill in our selection in June here on the farm tulips are in May you know they're followed by late May early June having ranunculus but after that we have this Gap we have this window before our warm weather loving annuals like zinnias and sunflowers start blooming in July and Sweet William is one of those flowers that bloom in that you know dry spell for me Sweet William is a dianthus the same as the carnations and the problems that I had with it are pretty much exactly the same I found the Sweet William stems very brittle they didn't get very tall the flowers I wanted something big and showy and they just were a lot more petite than I was expecting I've decided no more Sweet William because we actually planted a bunch of perennial flocks this year and it's gonna do pretty much the exact same thing for me as I was hoping to find in Sweet William it's going to bloom in that June window it has the exact same cluster flower head look the difference is my flocks heads will be nice and big and showy Where's My Sweet William where are these pathetic little discs number four is Dusty Miller and I've said I would never grow this again before and I still grew it again this year last year I planted it for the first time because I love it you can't find anything that does that same silver gray that you get in dusty miller the problem is it's just never grew into anything very useful for me I had some last year that overwintered and survived and in the spring they actually grew stems that were long enough that I could cut them and use them quite well but we get winter so cold here that dusty miller doesn't really survive it's it was a fluke that I just had those few I wish I could grow this better I love the look fresh it's even better dried and stays in that same look and it looks so different from anything else it's just it's clearly not meant to be growing in my conditions I know dusty miller can be useful I just don't think it can be useful for me number five is lime nosento marigolds and in the Sister video to this I said that one of my top 10 flowers of the year is the cocoa marigolds and the Coco marigolds does everything that the lime nosento Marigold doesn't do the cocoa Marigold has this color of flower that goes with everything and I want to use it in every bouquet the lime nosento is this like dirty yellow it was like a muddy yellow color which instead of making my bouquets look better kind of made them all just look worse the cocoa had a really nice side branching structure it was a I can make this cut it would be fairly straight it was easy to use in bouquets the nosento was kind of rambly and like bent and twisted it was very difficult for me to find good stems and so I didn't end up cutting very much off of these plants people love the nosento marigolds because they have no scent um but for me and for my customer no one was really complaining leaning about the marigold scent at all so that wasn't a value and most of the smell of marigolds comes from the foliage so if you really want it you could just strip that off and keep only flowers if you really hated the smell I was actually surprised how much I didn't like this because I've been loving Marigold so much for me it's proof that variety can really make or break the success of a crop on the farm number six is lemon basil and in the same way that the lime noscentos kind of muddied up and brought down the beauty in my opinion of my bouquets I find the same issue with the basil I love using basil as a foliage in my bouquets it's great it's the summer annual it grows really well here for me but the problem with basil as a foliage is you need to pick it when it it's more mature if you pick it when the leaves are at its prime like you would for eating a basil it's going to wilt it's not going to last very long in the vase you have to wait till the stem is Woody till it's set flowers it's kind of you know past past when you would be using it for culinary purposes my favorite basil which I still love and I'm gonna grow every year is cinnamon basil and it has this incredible purple color and as it ages it gets you know more sophisticated and rich in its tones the flower stems they have these amazing variety of different shades of purple but the lemon basil as it ages it goes kind of brown and the leaves end up getting these like spots on them and it just it looks like it's sad and dead and not intentional every time I use it even though I've grown it every single year of the farm so far I think I need to recognize that this isn't what I want I have better foliages I have better greeneries that I can use and it's time to retire this crop that really should have been retired a long time ago number seven is eucalyptus and stick with me on this one because I love eucalyptus my issues with eucalyptus have nothing to do with it you know in my bouquets you know has nothing to do with the incredible smell that I wish you know I could be having more often eucalyptus is gorgeous and I want to grow it the problem is I think I'm just not in a place where I should be trying to grow it I've tried to grow it multiple years now and I haven't really ever gotten any cuts off of it fair enough that's me not growing up properly but there's people in my area who do grow it properly and they only get it you know as tall as their shoulder they're getting you know maybe an armful off of each individual plant but considering this is something that you need to start in like December grow in a greenhouse because it needs the heat and it needs the shelter all of that for some stems which are very easy to find in wholesale you know maybe this is something I just don't need to grow I know when the conditions are right it's a total weed it's just not a weed in Canada it's a weed in Australia and maybe I need to bite the bullet and start looking into Willows that I can use as foliage as a Canadian and give up on eucalyptus number eight is super magic lizianthus and I'm not saying I don't love lizianthus because I do I am obsessed with Lizzie at this we grew a thousand of them this year and I'm growing 2 000 next year we are all about the lizianthus and the super magic lizianthus was actually our favorite lizianthus of the year because the super magic was our blue lizient this which had the most incredible color problem is it was the shape of flower that I liked the least the Petals on the super magic were a lot longer than some of the other varieties that it grew the shape of it you know was this skinny long petal and because of that the flower might have been a little bit bigger than some of the other flowers but it got kind of floppy and sad looking I really love that the Lizzie anthis has a rose look for me I don't grow roses here on the farm at all but I like the formal shape of a rose and so there was a lot of shorter pedaled lizianthuses that I was growing that had that rose look the super magic not the same lizianthus is also expensive it costs a lot for me to grow it so I need to be selling every single stem and my trick on the farm for how to make sure I sell every stem is to dry the things that I don't sell fresh and the lizianthus I love dried because they dried like roses roses have a beautiful shape as a dry flower but the super magic not so much they definitely look like dead flowers dried and so there's just no reason for me to choose that over other varieties we're definitely getting the blue back again the blue is a must this year we're just getting it as an ABC lizianthus not a super magic number nine is flax and I don't I don't get it I saw pictures that's why I bought it but having grown it I don't know how anyone is is having this to be a successful flower crop it was like insanely short it was like eight inches tall for me it had these beautiful little little blue flowers but it only kind of had a single tiny weedy looking flower open at a time and it didn't seem to have any sort of vase life the the flowers kind of in the field fell off after a day I think the idea with the flax is that you're supposed to use it as like a grain or a seed pod something to give visual interest but it it looked like a weed where there's so many other seed crop type things that you could grow that would do so much better this year we had auric or quinoa as a decorative for the first time and it was incredible that's coming back every year we also had some wheat that had you know self-seeded as a weed on the farm which also has me really excited I'm like why haven't I been growing wheat all these years it looks amazing in the bouquets in its green form has me really excited about other grains I can be looking at things like rice and stuff like that which makes me yet again say like why flax you know I love linen it's great you know it just maybe doesn't need to be a flower and finally 10 is Magic lime green fever few my favorite color is green and lime green especially is the number one color that I want to be working with in bouquets I have the lime beneries giant that I've been growing year after year and they always inspire me they always have me excited to work with so I wanted more lime I went out this year and I bought pretty much everything that had lime in it but like that lime Marigold the magic lime green fever few isn't lime it's a dirty gross yellow fever few is really important for me here on the farm because it's in that June window that I previously spoke about it's available for me in that time when there isn't very many things available so everything I can get for that window you know is is more valuable but it feels like every single thing I can get is in these yellow tones and people just don't want an all yellow bouquet as their only option and people especially don't want a dirty yellow bouquet as their only option Feverfew is incredible it has this classic little daisy look the white petals the yellow Center I love it and also in that same window actual daisies are blooming so it's fun to put together these bouquets that you know feed into these very classic looks of flowers let's say I have a beautiful bright yellow Lily and then I add in a muddy yellow fever few stem to it it's gonna take away from that beauty it's gonna kind of tone down the whole thing and not leave it as clean and fresh If instead I take a white fever few and I add it in and it's really gonna make those colors pop or adding a white fever few in with you know a whole range of colors it's not going to take away from those colors the white is so neutral it's going to make it so that the main brights in the bouquet will be the dominant colors and the white will just be a nice gentle background I really wanted lime colored fever few it's just it's not going to happen and you know I think this is also one of those learning moments for me I'm excited when I see lime in a Seed Catalog but I'm continuously being burned by what it actually looks like so rather than seeing lime getting excited being like this is gonna be the color I've been looking for I need to recognize the limitations of flowers to be green I know sometimes saying that something is the worst can feel really negative but for me and my experience farming I found that identifying what doesn't work has been the thing that's led to strengths here on the farm we wouldn't be growing only flowers if we hadn't been every season identifying what is selling the best what is you know growing the basket what are the things that we need to concentrate on as a farm business what I want want to achieve with a specific flower when I read about it in a Seed Catalog when I see other people using it on their farms in completely different areas of the world can't be what I force myself to do here on my farm I have to be guided by what actually works for us and so this list of 10 even though it's stuff that you know hopefully I remember to not grow next year getting rid of those is what's going to open up for me to be able to try 10 new items and those 10 new items that I try will lead to my new 10 best every year we refine what is working for us and what's working for the business just a little bit more and that refining is what actually makes it easier as you you know go further into your farming journey and because I know a lot of these flowers have nothing wrong with them they're just not good for me let us know down in the comments if you have any tips about growing these and you feel that they're great for your area why do they work for you I'd love to hear

Channel: You Can't Eat The Grass

Views: 74,721

Keywords: you cant eat the grass, family farm, farm life, gardening, flower farm, farmers market, growing food, team flowers, team veggies, pique life, pique life brand

Id: fAnX9JgEzLk

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023