New Flowers Forum!

We've got a new Flowers forum!

https://permies.com/f/379/flowers

Flowers have lots of benefits in permaculture, like plant breeding, adding beauty and fragrance to the landscape, attracting pollinators and other beneficial insects, repelling pests, and also they're just so purty!

Wonderful!

Oh we love flowers here on Permies!

And you can eat (some of) them!

Yep, like Chive...goes good on a salad, in a grilled tuna, sprinkled on salmon, and has a nice pretty bloom to it as well!

I planted dahlias this year for the first time as the tubers are supposed to be edible, but became smitten with the flowers and have not eaten a single tuber, LOL. I still have a few going strong with the flowers so I will take some photos later today and start a new thread about them.

Sunchokes are another one with decent flowers and edible tubers. I think maybe starting a thread on edible flowers would be a good idea. Will do that in a while, if no one beats me to it :)

I get great joy out of growing veggies, and there is nothing like picking fruit off a tree and eating it right there, but for me there is something very special about flowers.  I could probably get kicked off the permies sight for saying this, but if I had to choose just one it would be flowers, no question.  They are beautiful, and many smell wonderful.  Pansy's always make me think of my grandma,  my mom loved carnations and gladiolus, and my mother-in-law loved and grew gardenia.  For some reason these flowers always make me feel closer to all these amazing lady's that are no longer with me.  
You will find all sorts of flowers all over our yard.  Roses mostly in the rose garden, eatable and beneficial flowers, like marigold, nasturtiums, and zinnia's just to name a few grow in the veggie garden.  Flower gardens, and containers with flowers in them seem to pop up everywhere.  I simply love flowers!  They give me joy and I enjoy sharing them with others.  I enjoy shopping a the thrift store, or yard sale, or where ever for inexpensive containers I can put flowers in and give them to friends and family.  Money is very tight for our family, so I can't give much, but when I give flowers, no matter if its a huge boque of roses, or 1 sunflower,  the person always seems so thrilled.  The smiles and joy I receive are worth every weed I pull, and then some.

Sorry it's my first time uploading pictures, and I'm excited I actually did it, but they seem very big.  I will have to have one of my kids help me next time

Jen Fulkerson wrote:

Sorry it's my first time uploading pictures, and I'm excited I actually did it, but they seem very big.  I will have to have one of my kids help me next time

I *love* the big pictures. They allow me to see the details which are beautiful.
(but alas, I'm sure the electron pushers would prefer them smaller.)

Plus they're money makers. A lot of people running high tunnels end up growing flowers along with or instead of veggies. We've been slowly collecting whatever flowers we can just to get some color other than green and white on the property. We have flowering native trees and brambles but they all flower white. My end goal is to have a few different colors most of the year. Either flowers blooming or different colored foliage. Right now, most things have leaves that go yellow in Fall. I want some orange, red & marroon.

Paradise should taste AND look good.

John Pollard wrote:Plus they're money makers. A lot of people running high tunnels end up growing flowers along with or instead of veggies. We've been slowly collecting whatever flowers we can just to get some color other than green and white on the property. We have flowering native trees and brambles but they all flower white. My end goal is to have a few different colors most of the year. Either flowers blooming or different colored foliage. Right now, most things have leaves that go yellow in Fall. I want some orange, red & marroon.

Paradise should taste AND look good.

"They're money makers" - exactly! We are planning to use cut flowers to supplement our income during the years that our nut trees, which will be the long-term commercial crop, get up to speed. I have planted a whole lot of tulips and daffodils in my vegetable beds on the existing property this fall, to get prepared to produce income next spring. We will have a farm stand at the new property where we will be able to sell these. Those, and eggs, will likely be the main farm products ready to go in the coming spring, other than value-added things like goats milk soap. In future years, we will have a number of perennial crops (fiddleheads, asparagus) that can be harvested in spring. I considered planting peonies as well but am running out of space as the present property, other than where I've built soil, is about 2-3 inches of soil over bedrock and/or covered in native forest and on a 25 degree slope.

So, our thoughts for flowering money makers that can grow in the alleys between chestnuts and other nut trees, or in the rows of trees, are:

Spring - Daffodils (and to a lesser extent tulips, as the tall ones do not naturalize well)
         - Peonies
         - Flowering shrubs (cut and force the branches) - eg. lilac, maybe honeysuckle?

Summer - Heritage varieties of roses
          - Daylilies? (mainly because I really like them, but not sure if these are big cut-flower winners)

Late summer/fall - Dahlias


We will almost certainly have others as well once we get going but these come to mind as being perennial, relatively low maintenance, and fairly flashy so they are likely to be popular with the flower-buying permies. I also have 60 basket willows growing in pots that will be planted out at the new place, and could add cuttings of those for a flash of colour to any flower arrangements, although perhaps they are more valuable for basketry. I got a couple of curly willow cuttings for free this year too, and they will eventually grow into mid-sized trees and cuttings from those can also be used to add to flower arrangements.

I must admit that I myself never buy flowers, so my opinions on this subject may not be well informed.

Any thoughts? What do others grow for farm-gate sales, or buy from farms?

Jen Fulkerson wrote:Sorry it's my first time uploading pictures, and I'm excited I actually did it, but they seem very big.  I will have to have one of my kids help me next time

Jen, those are beautiful!

Due to ongoing droughts, very hot summers, and water restrictions, I've removed the traditional European/Americas/Chinese flower gardens and put most of them into pots e.g. standard roses.

Exceptions are deep rooted ones like Camélia and Gardenia.

Besides using more indigenous plants. A bit of an experiment was replacing them with flowering succulents and those related to cactus and bromeliad.

So far the succulents are powering ahead with exceptionally long lived flowers that close each night and reopen as sunlight hits them. The others remain in pots as the experiment continues - need to be fully sun tolerant, with very low water allocations, and near zero attention = borderline neglect.

Moneymakers...oh yes!

My Grandparents were the most self-sufficient people I know. They cut their own firewood, raised chickens, had laying hens, had cows that made butter that they sold, logged wood in the winter, had a huge garden, and had a greenhouse.

Of all of them, they said they made more money on the greenhouse than anything else!

I have always liked sunflowers, and I have a road that is about 1/2 mile long, and has a nice view. One year I plowed up a strip and had sunflowers growing in a row along beside that road. I have no pictures of it, but it was beautiful.

Last year a guy that hays my fields never bothered to hay a 2 acre field, so I thought about planting that in sunflowers. It would be pretty and I could use the sunflower seeds to heat my home. I think that is a cool use of the: have a beautiful field all summer with sunflowers, and heat my home in a sustainable way every year. Talk about dual stacking functions!

Steve Thorn wrote:We've got a new Flowers forum!

https://permies.com/f/379/flowers

Flowers have lots of benefits in permaculture, like plant breeding, adding beauty and fragrance to the landscape, attracting pollinators and other beneficial insects, repelling pests, and also they're just so purty!

Am I the only wise guy who thinks with the last name Thorn, Steve should grow roses?

If I understand correctly, there are two flowers called "MoonFlower".
One is little bitty and one is big.  Like salad plate big.
The big one smells wonderful.
I wish my wife would find a perfume that smells like the big Moonflowers.

Phil Swindler wrote:Am I the only wise guy who thinks with the last name Thorn, Steve should grow roses?

Every rose does have its thorn.

And I do like how they look look and smell.

I hope to plant some soon.

Dominicans love flowers! Even the poorer households usually have at least some flowers, either out front or in pots on the veranda, and the better off households might have nearly the whole yard in flowers. I find lots of zinnias, coleus, allamanda, frangipani, and many whose identities I do not know.