Thousands of Zinnias! September Farm Tour

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. It is September on the farm and the moment I've been waiting for all year has finally happened. The zinnias are blooming. Very few things on the farm got done on schedule this year and one of the casualties was our zinnias. Instead of doing seedlings, the plan this year was I was gonna direct seed, make everything easier. Zinnias grow so easy there's no reason they wouldn't grow from direct seed except for a bug came and ate them all so I direct seeded again and then a bug came and ate them all again and then I was like okay I guess we have to start seedlings. So by the time the zinnia seedling transplants got in they were already pretty delayed. Normally we would have zinnias in you know mid-July kind of be available for us all summer. You know here we are it is currently the beginning of September and this is kind of the first week that we've really had a lot to use but it's not necessarily a bad thing. We've had you know a great flow of flowers throughout the summertime and one of the things that I always struggle with with the zinnias is when they first bloom like this they look so gorgeous they look beautiful the flowers are big the plants are healthy they're happy but as the season goes on they start to get affected by downy mildew they the flowers they get slowly smaller they kind of start to fizzle out and most farms they deal with this by doing a succession plant but usually I'm just so busy by the time summer comes I never do get a full planting of zinnias done. So this year because we only have a fall planting it means we're going to be doing great for zinnias until the end of our season. We have two full beds of zinnias here but we also have this gorgeous bed over here so let's go look at it. The weather on the farm right now is gorgeous it's full on summer it's almost almost 100 degrees out I'm very hot I'm very sweaty right now um but school's back in even though it is really nice right now and it's probably going to be nice next week too you know it is it is fall the season is coming to an end with the zinnias you know with them just starting you know we're going to get six weeks of really happy healthy flowers which is going to be perfect because we usually shut down the farm for Canadian Thanksgiving which falls in the middle of October so I'm really excited to have this gorgeous collection of zinnias that's going to last me until the end of the season. Down here behind that zinnia bed we have some exciting stuff that hasn't really been shown much uh this year uh there's a couple beds of perennial plantings here so this here this I was super excited to discover this I think it was called peter cottontail and even though it looks like a double uh double fever few what this actually is is a yarrow um so that means it's super drought tolerant um nice and cold hardy it's it like the it got planted really light so it's quite short but it get enough height to be a good pick good cutting stem um but yeah so it's really exciting to see this establishing in because this kind of got planted in I don't like end of June got in really late um so I'm sure that this is going to have a lot of good potential in the years to come um and it'll be interesting to see what the timing is like for the fever few you know if this can bloom a little bit later a little bit earlier than the fever few like that would be a super exciting succession to have on the farm then back here needs to get weeded so it's a little bit tricky to tell um but this is a bed of delphinium and they got planted super late too normally you'd want to get these in early spring and then they'd bloom early summer um these got in very very late but they are surviving there is plants in here and I was taking a peek the other day and there a few that looks like they might be starting to get a flowering stem on it so maybe we'll even have a couple couple fall delphiniums to to get to play with this year this bed used to be the end of the farm the very bottom um this is an entire bed of miscanthus grasses and its only purpose is to grow all year so for you know fall season we can get these grass plumes and I can stick them into bouquets to do you know like a harvest a harvest style bouquet I love them they've just started to bloom um so these like they'll fluff out still more um but these they do really well and like you know they're so easy to grow really low water needs um they just come back bigger and bigger every year uh they're you know they're a beautiful landscaping plant just these big clumps of brass um you know so it's not necessarily something I'd recommend as a cut flower but I really like having them and then behind me is two big huge beds of sedum there's probably I don't know I think maybe 1,500-2,000 plants that are planted in here this is just the first year for them so you know it's not necessarily going to be a harvest they kind of just send up like a single stem in that first year um but year after year these are going to come back and this is on the very very edge of the farm and the plan for planting this here is sedum has very very low water needs sedum has such low water needs that it has been a little bit tricky for us to grow it because even the drought tolerant stuff like Miro where we limit how much water it gets is still more water than what the sedum likes so being on the very edge of the farm here it's just you know I we watered this a few times after it got planted you know so like it got some water in July type thing but honestly I feel like it probably hasn't been watered in over a month and it's happy and thriving it's it's you know it's doing what it wants so you know this this will be an awesome low maintenance filler you know for years to come another crop which we normally would have had all summer long and it would be kind of starting to fade out but because of our delayed schedule is this Queen Anne's lace the variety here is called green mist and it's one of my favorite it has a really really nice scent to it I love working with it and it's kind of it's a little bit more frilly like fern like in the foliage you know I love this because it got planted so late you know I'm kind of kneeling down you can see these plants aren't very tall normally this plant would be as tall as I am but even though it's stunted because of that you know it's still plenty tall enough to get you know each one of these plants in here because I think we have 150 plants of this and each one of these is going to you know give me four stems each by the time you know it finishes all all of its different blooms so you know this is this is going to be great for me over the next few weeks to have as a filler you know it looks so formal it really elevates the bouquets you know this isn't this isn't what I'm going to put with the sunflowers this is what I'm going to put with some of the more delicate flowers like the next one I'll show you I have almost two beds of straw flowers and I said I was I was like oh I'm never going to grow these again last year we grew straw flowers just for the flower heads when I came to harvest them I just picked all the flower heads off and at this point I have a lifetime supply of straw flower heads um you know I can make all the crafts in the world and they last forever because they dry so well um so this year I was like you know let's let's put in a bed of straw flowers and let's do them actually for in the bouquets um so so they're finally at the point now that that I've been harvesting them um you know we got some enough of a stem length here to get them into bouquets and I've been really loving them it's it's been a few years since I've had them to work with in bouquets um I had gone away from them because they don't add a lot of value you put this into the bouquet the flowers are quite small um it doesn't necessarily look punchy the way a sunflower or a zinnia looks and so because of that um you know I can't necessarily put this in and even though it has four flowers say it's worth five dollars or anything um you know so the labor was just maybe not the best equation on them um but they really they really add a lot to the bouquets and I've been building some of these smaller um more feminine bunches you know like with the queen anne's lace and things like that um and and yeah no they're I really like them and I have lots but the real money in the bouquets are things like this sunflower hedge um and it's at the stage right now that's perfect to show you what happens when we do our planting it every two weeks with having a mix of different sunflower system um so you can kind of see there's some darker flowers over here um clumped together and then we have all the doubles over here and then it's it's less obvious because we did a pick and we we picked most of them but this hedge over here has some of the whites um and and some of the some of the reds that are coming on and then this which is our last succession of all is just starting with the plum colored sunflowers so this this is four plantings in total and because when we plant out a mix of seeds um in in each of these patches the different colors are timed just a little bit different um so even though everything doesn't bloom out at once the the system works really well together so we grow pro-cut sunflowers and the quickest one comes on in 60 days and then the slowest one is the double quick and honestly this year it feels like it's it's more like 80 90 days even is how long it's taking from seed to flower so you know as as that first plum comes up in 60 days you know 62 days we're getting the classic orange with the dark center at 65 days we're getting the other one um but because they're all kind of working together in a system at this point we have all the colors at the same time and it's just it's a really nice way to manage the patch um unfortunately ideally i would like one more planting we still have six weeks um and because this has just started and i said that the double quick the double is coming on about a month later this means that i'm probably gonna be getting those doubles in a month you know and then i'm gonna have a couple weeks at the end with no sunflowers which will make me sad because if i could have sunflowers every day for bouquet building that would make me happy the one thing that isn't going to run out before the season ends though is the marigolds this marigold patch i've been picking off of for two weeks now um and i'm in heaven i love marigolds um at this point we had anise hyssop right over there but it isn't able to be picked anymore the the flowers just kind of spent on it but it was such a valuable filler and i and i like didn't have another it's kind of the last filler in the succession um so at this point the marigolds are my filler which is intentional that was my plan um but each of these marigold stems you know like when i cut a stem you know it's like here we'll just break this off to show you this is like what a marigold stem looks like so i leave the greenery on and i use it as like a filler and a flower right so it adds a lot of bulk to the bouquets because i'll put like one or two of these in each of the bouquets it it makes it very impactful um it has this green that fills in and then the flowers are so fun and punchy um that you know i just i really like working with them uh nothing nothing says fall like uh like an orange and red zinnia and a sunflower and a couple marigolds and a little bit of status ultimate fall bouquet but i mean they're gorgeous how could you not want this all over your house as i said the yellow marigolds i've been picking for a few weeks now but behind me is the succession of orange marigolds and they just started this week these got planted a little bit later um we got the first yellow marigolds in and then things things were just busy so it was hard to get all the marigolds planted um but it's it's worked out quite well honestly if i could only grow one marigold at this point i would do this uh this golden one this is uh cocoa gold um but we also grow the cocoa orange and this is cocoa yellow and mixed in here too is zoshi um which is but i mean this color this like warm this like soft warm orange i just love it and like i said i want a marigold to be the base for almost every single one of my bouquets so over the years i've developed a few uh like sister plants that i always want together and so with the cocoa gold i gotta have my favorite cosmo which is this beautiful violet uh double click cosmo the color on this is you know when i first grew it i really struggled to work with it i was blending it with things and it just i was like it's kind of it's kind of a cool tone almost like blue undertones to this um which made it hard for me to pair with like more of the warm pinks that i had but my favorite thing to do with bouquets is to do strong contrasting colors and so on the opposite side of the color wheel from orange is blue um and so these blue tones in this when i pair it with the orange marigolds is just so punchy and so fun um and the customers love it as soon as i can have the cocoa gold and the violet double click uh those bouquets just fly off the shelf so you know very happy to have both of these back on in the farm right now you know and we're we're drowning in we put in three beds in total you know the marigolds so our normal planting um like what the zinnias are planted on i mean i think we even did the marigolds on this spacing normally we have 400 plants per bed we kind of space them by six inches the the cosmos just gets so big and so unruly that we space them by a foot so these cosmo beds only have 150 plants per bed as opposed to the 400 that you'd normally see um but they're they're beasts they produce so much they they're almost like hard to keep on top of so i just did a huge pick i just like picked for market i i picked like four massive bucket armfuls and it's like just never ending so six weeks worth cosmos definitely we will have cosmos till the bitter end the final fall mpv here on the farm what all these bouquets are going to be made out of from now until the end is status uh status i love it's probably one of my favorite plants to grow um but it can be frustrating because the first flowers are quite they're quite short too short to use in the bouquets but at this point you know the first couple blooms have been finished and so now everything is getting to be a really good height um they start to produce less stems but they're taller so at this time of year it's a lot more reasonable to come out and pick uh status when it's in like its first flush is just so overwhelming for me i'll be picking on it for like 10 hours and it's like there's still a million flowers left to pick at this point i can come in here and if i wanted to pick this entire bed clean it would probably only take me four hours but because the flowers last for so long what i tend to do is i'll come and i'll pick half of it every week for two hours and so it keeps keeps it so i always have fresh status to use in the bouquets um but also there's always stuff available for the following week so i love it makes me happy i i really love the fall bouquets honestly i mean the flowers out here are great the farm looks incredible you know it's just i mean it's weeds everywhere but it's also flowers everywhere and the days soon are gonna get cooler we're gonna start to get some cooler nights there's no planting left to do at this point on the farm it's kind of september is the sweet spot where we get a little bit of a breather which is convenient because it's back to school so we're usually a bit busy with that um but yeah it's it's a really nice time of year to be able to try to get a little bit caught up on the end of season jobs without being overwhelmed by everything so it's weedy it's messy but there's lots of flowers the flowers are healthy and i'm going to have some time coming up to be able to deal with it okay but i've spent all day today getting ready for the farmer's market tomorrow and so i have like 75 of the most beautiful bouquets ever laying around so i think we need to tour that as well looks good welcome to my mess but there's some good stuff here check out this check out these bouquets rainbow zinnias we got cosmos zinnias marigold status i love those and then i got some rainbow rainbow bouquets so this is the exact same recipe as this the only difference is that i use the pink cosmos instead of the white um but you know it's it's kind of a good example of how changing out one flower can create totally different looking bouquets right these don't look like the same bouquet even though they are and i got these ones so this is the plum procats that was blooming this week on our on our last planting and they like they just they turned out really well so i was like oh i gotta do bouquets featuring them they're such like a perfect fall but i love the pink and the orange yeah this is the the dream team combo right there and then here's an example of what i'm saying about the straw flowers and the queen anne's lace um creating like a little bit more of a different look something a little bit more sophisticated a little bit more feminine um you know but yet again this is a filler a handful of zinnias a couple cosmos and then just the straw flowers in there you know you don't need a lot of options to be able to make it look like there's a lot of different bouquet options here's another example so this is the exact same bouquet as the one that i just showed you except for i did white zinnias and white cosmos instead of the apricot cosmos um but yeah they look totally different oh okay this is my so because it's fall i have to start making my fall bouquets i make this every year and it's always a best seller it's uh sunflower this uh rubenza cosmo and then orange and red zinnias with a marigold it's pretty hot it's like summer beach weather this weekend um so it doesn't feel like fall but because it's september it's time to start making these so i'm really interested to see if they're gonna if the customers are gonna be telling me it's fall this week by buying these and then this is my newest creation i came up with this last weekend i'm in love look how good that looks so this is uh apricot an apricot uh cosmo an orange marigold uh salmon zinnia and then the salmon salmon straw flowers and a little bit of the apricot status isn't that isn't that such a fun pairing it's bright but it's also like feminine i just i love staring at these because it's new i love it the most but yeah yeah things are things are looking pretty good and uh you know and it feels good right like at this point with it only being six weeks until the season's over um i can confidently look at the farm and know that i'm gonna have flowers to be able to have the sales until the end of the season um which you know is huge that's the goal the goal is to sell for all the weeks um so you know i'm feeling i'm feeling really good and it makes me really happy to be out there and see all the flowers i couldn't grow all these flowers if i didn't have anywhere to sell them so it's so important to me that you know these flowers are available for going down to the market but one of the best ways to sell things for a business is with a 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