August Abundance On This British Flower Farm 🌸

It's no secret that 2024 has been a challenging year for us growers, but after all of the challenges and hard work of spring and early summer, it feels amazing to be out in the fields picking flowers. You join me on the farm at the end of a busy mid-August week, where I'm harvesting the last of 2000 stems which are going out for weddings, birthdays and other celebrations. As I pick, I want to tell you about some of the trial varieties I've grown this year, which I will be adding to my yearly grow list, and show you around the new field which is in its first year of production. These are the floret zinnias and I'm so excited for them to properly start flowering. I've seen a couple of flowers from them. This is the precious metals mix and this is a really nice creamy flower. I've got one out in the field as well and it kind of ages really nicely and it has like a nice pink edge to it. I think that these zinnias here in the polytunnel are going to do really well, so I'm looking forward to harvesting them soon for quite a long time. I'm really pleased with how the polytunnel has gone this season because, as you know, I have struggled in the past with maintaining the polytunnel, keeping it weed free, but this year I've got lots growing in here. I've got melons like I grew last year, I've got tomatoes, I've got those beautiful marigolds behind me which I have picked a few from. I've got the zinnias and I've got lots of chrysanthemums and some snapdragons down here. The only thing I find with snapdragons is the stems are a lot weaker than they would be if they were grown out in the field, but for delicate kind of arrangements they work really nicely. So I'm just going to pick a few more things out this polytunnel and then we'll head over to the new flower field. Welcome to the new field. I'm sure it's looking a lot different from when you last saw it here on YouTube which was a few months ago and things have really flushed out in the last few weeks and they're doing really well and I'm just so happy with how this field's turned out and if you've been following me for a while you'll know that this field was prepared a year in advance of when I actually wanted to start planting in it so I made sure it was well prepared and I really thought it through before I went ahead and made flower beds and I'm really pleased that I did that because this field is pretty much weed free and the plants are growing really nicely so I'm so chuffed with the way that it is and it's a pleasure to be out here picking flowers on a Friday evening and I'm excited to show you the varieties that I've got here on this flower field and I've got a few new ones that I want to share with you this year that I'm definitely going to be adding to my permanent grow list because I'm really enjoying cutting them at the moment. One thing that I'm definitely considering growing again in 2025 is marigolds. Although they have a funny smell when you pick them they have been a really great brightly coloured flower that have been going down a tree in my flower shed. This is Sunflower Premier Orange Up. Last year I didn't grow sunflowers because I find them so hard to arrange with but this variety is a game changer. It's flowers face upwards making them so easy to make bouquets with. I'll definitely be growing this again in 2025. This bed here is chickpea foliage and I've been really loving it in bouquets. It has got a really dainty kind of leaf structure and I've actually got another crop of it up over there. I succession sowed it and that crop has actually got the chickpea pods on it and I have been using that as well because I think the chickpea pods look really cool. So I'm just going to pick some of this for my order tomorrow because it is great and it seems to last really well as well in the flowers. Well the flowers were all harvested in from the fields and it's time now to start thinking about next season and I know it seems really crazy to be thinking about next season when it's still August. It still feels like the height of summer here in the UK and I'm still harvesting lots of flowers and doing lots of field work but it's time now to start sowing hardy annuals and I already started doing a few last week and they're already starting to germinate so I'm looking forward to putting them out in the fields to overwinter and hopefully produce some nice strong plants for us late spring early summer next year. And also now I'm trying to take notes of things that I want to be mindful of next season. So for example I mentioned that the Premier Orange Up sunflowers were my new favourite sunflowers and I think that they would do a lot better with lots tighter spacing because some of the flower heads are quite large and I think if I packed them in a lot more tightly together then we would get some more dainty flower heads which would be more usable in bouquets and in wedding style arrangements. And also at this time of year I'm thinking about where my income streams are coming from and it's going to be time in the next few weeks or so to start thinking about how I want to market my flowers for 2025 and I think I'm going to have a little bit of a switch around because this year has been very difficult and I think it's time to go back to the drawing board and just rethink where I'm selling the flowers and my strategy for 2025. So that's kind of all a bit of a muddle in my head at the moment and I really need to spend some time ironing that out and having a solid plan for next season because if you like to grow flowers like I do but you don't really have a plan then it becomes all a little bit pointless when you've got thousands of plants or flowers out in the field and you've got nowhere to sell them so it's really important to think about where you're going to be selling your flowers if you want to be growing them. Everybody says the growing is the easy part and the marketing is really the hard part so lots to think about for next season. I would love to know what lessons you have learned this season and what notes you are making for yourself in 2025. Mine is to space the premier orange up a lot closer together and also this spring I had a really successful harvest of stalks in this polytunnel so I'm looking to put in lots and lots of stalks in here and I'm also going to be returning my ranunculus corms into the polytunnel this season because I think I've kind of, I don't want to kind of jinx it by saying this, but I think that I have overcome the problem, the weed problem that I had in the polytunnel because I've managed to grow in this polytunnel all season without any major weed issues and we are doing really well. Everything looks healthy so I'm going to return the ranunculus to the polytunnel next season along with some anemones, some colibri poppies and some stalks. I've got some delphiniums in here that did quite well so I'm going to start some more of those off from seed. I've got the chrysanthemums that are still to flower as well at the back of the polytunnel here so hopefully next year we're going to have a nice long season here in the polytunnel and the extra things that we're growing in here are going to be really helpful. This is my wine cap mushroom growing experiment and I have no idea whether it's going to work or not. The instructions said to either use a small straw bale and put handfuls of spawn into the straw bale or to make a flat six by six meter bed. It's quite a large area to be making a mushroom bed out of so I decided to put a load of straw, hemp straw and chipped willow into the ring there and then I put layers of spawn up the column so I'm hoping that the mycelium is going to colonize the straw, the hemp straw and the willow and produce mushrooms for us. I have no idea whether it's going to work. I am putting bets on that it's not going to work because there isn't really any information online about how to do it this way but if anybody has any information about growing wine cap mushrooms and whether they think this will work then please send me a message or put something down in the comments. It will be really exciting if it does work but if it doesn't I'm willing to try again because I know that I kind of winged it. The latter half of this video is being recorded on a really windy day and I'm hoping that all of the dailies behind me are going to survive because next week I have a big market to do and I've done this market a few times before and I know that the footfall is really good and the demand for the flowers is always there so I'm trying to take as much as possible with me next week. So stay tuned if you want to find out whether the market was successful and I will see you again on the next one. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.