Blooming Beauties: Discover Our Top Favorite Perennial Cut Flowers

Hey y'all, Jen and Adam here from Pepper Hero Farm. We've been getting lots of questions about our favorite perennials we grow here on the farm, so we're going to tell you our favorites that we grow here on the farm, as well as some of the different varieties we grow. Jen and I are still busy putting the farm to bed. It is December 1st or 2nd, I don't know what day it is. I think today is December 2nd and it's 60 degrees out today. Very unusual here for Iowa. Yeah, so I'm going to get Adam to start doing some of our perennial bed cleanup. Right now it looks like a disaster, but we'll be coming into our perennials today and cleaning some of them up, cutting out all the dead growth, and getting them ready for spring. It's crazy that we're thinking about it at this point, but when you have these nice warm days in the middle of winter, it's cleanup time, bed cleanup time. So that's what we're going to be focusing on today, and that's why we wanted to take a minute pause and talk to y'all about our favorites. The first one we're going to talk about today is Ladies Mantle. I think we've mentioned this in another video, but perennial-wise it is one of our top perennials. Yeah, we really count on it in early spring so that we can do early spring bouquets. And the flower makes a lovely, beautiful chartreuse-y green color. The foliage also works in arrangements as well. And when we have extra, we actually bring it in and take it in for drying, which as you know, we love flowers that are multi-use, that can be used as cut, dried, edible, any of those. It's not edible, but you get the point. Yeah, don't eat it. No, we love flowers that can be used for a myriad of different uses, not just as a cut flower. That one fits the bill for dried bouquets, all the things. So I really love it. My next very favorite, and we use it a lot with Ladies Mantle, is Salvia. And in particular, I love Caridana because it doesn't have a lot of that stinky smell that a lot of Salvias have. We grow a ton of Salvia. And the other thing I really like about Salvia, and I'm kind of like looking out at it as we look across our little perennial beds here, is it's an awesome landscape flower. Like, if we don't get to cut it all, it looks amazing just as a landscaping, just a huge swath of purple. It's absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, as a mass planting, Salvia coupled with pink roses is an amazing landscape impact. Yep, absolutely. The other thing I really like about the Salvia we grow is it blooms twice. It blooms really, really hard in the spring, and then it usually does a smaller, less impactful bloom in the fall. But it's always nice to have that little bit of a fall bloom to be able to take and use in bouquets, which at that time of the year, things are starting to slow down right as it blooms that second round. So we really highly value that and love that about our Salvia. We also bring it in and use it occasionally in some or for some dried flowers. It does fade quite a bit, but it's still really nice to use in fall wreaths. It's kind of that muted purple color that kind of dulls out, but it's absolutely gorgeous. So Salvia. The next one we'll talk about is Coneflower. Coneflower is great in and of itself because the pollinators just absolutely love it. And if we don't use it for any other thing, it's just really great to have for our pollinators here on the farm. And I have a lot of issues with it getting a little bit damaged. The petals get damaged really easily from pests and other things that are running around here on the farm, bugs. So I actually like to pull the petals off, and the cone is just so cool to use in a bouquet. We pull the petals off, we just put the cone in. A very interesting textural element to a bouquet, and people have constantly remarked on how cool it looks. I'll also use those in flower crowns too, and people absolutely love them. And they're starting to come out with more unique colors for Coneflower. Some oranges, and I like the orange in particular that I've seen. It's really, really cool. And Adam actually likes, we grow one called Cantaloupe, and it is a really cool peachy color. He really loves that. And then I'm a fan of all the double ones that they're starting to make, and I think we have a pink one. It's small, but we grow a pink one that we really love because it has a double bloom on it. Lupine is my next favorite. Lupine's a favorite in early spring bouquets. We add it with Ranunculus and all sorts of really pretty early spring flowers. It's also just cool as cool can be. It's a little bit hard to grow here in central Iowa, Zone 5b, where we are. We plant the lupine up near the house, and we've had a lot of success with it. But we highly recommend you to check out lupine. It is awesome, and it comes in so many pretty colors. And it's definitely one that can be sensitive to cut. It's one that needs to be cut and put immediately into water. Absolutely. Yarrow is another favorite of ours. You may have heard in other videos, Summer Berries is my absolute favorite color. I just love the berry variety of colors. They're kind of, they're soft. They're not really too incredibly strong. For us, they tend to bloom closer to fall, so they really complement our fall colors in Dahlia as well. Yeah, I just was going to say, Adam wasn't expecting it, but I planted a patch of it back by our new greenhouse, and he was like, where did these come from? You are so excited. Yeah, and actually, they bloom kind of mid-summer, don't they? They straight up bloom mid-summer. Yeah. Those bloom later because we planted them. It's usually mid to late summer when our yarrow usually blooms. Well, it depends on which type of yarrow. Summer Berries is the one, and it did, it bloomed, I don't know, August. But we also grow Coronation Gold, and that's my favorite yarrow because that beautiful yellow, it is an amazing pop of color in a bouquet, and Adam knows this, I actually brought those in, the yellow, the Coronation Gold, to use those in my rainbow wreath. The gold yarrow dried, the color held up really well. It was amazing. It was so gorgeous. Anyway, yarrow, and oh gosh, and it spreads like crazy, and that's the other thing we really like about it. Does it self-seed, or does it spread under the ground? I have no idea. I'm sure one of you knows, so leave it in the comments. Does it self-seed, or is it spread? I don't know, but it spreads everywhere. I'm like, take over the world, go! Yeah, whatever, I don't care, we love it. We absolutely love it. Baptisia is another one of my favorites, and Adam's like kind of hem-hawing about it. He doesn't really care for it as much as I do, but I love Baptisia because, again, it's an early spring bloomer. I feel like after Salvia and Lady's Mantle gets done, boom, Baptisia starts blooming. So it's like, we kind of transition from one flower to the next, and I like that kind of successive bloom pattern. It works for, it works for us here on the farm, and we're always needing flowers for bouquets, so it's absolutely perfect. I like it when things don't bloom all at once. Staggering the blooms is really great, and like, we don't plan it that way, that's nature doing it that way, so that's why I like Baptisia. Even though I'm not a big fan of the blooms, I love the color, but it can be a little bit finicky when you cut it, and I just find like the, what are the little purple florets are just spaced a little bit too far apart for my liking, but the greenery has definitely proved its worth with Baptisia. Yes. After the blooms come, the greenery really seems to flourish really well, and it is a huge staple of greenery for our bouquets here on the farm. Yeah, definitely, and when we let Baptisia go to seed, we'll even take and use the seed pods after the seed pods form in bouquets and for interest in some other things that we do here on the farm, so Baptisia, check out. And if you hear a plane in the background, we have a skydiving center at our local airport. Yeah, the skydivers are circling. They're over there in the sky. Another one that we really like and is relatively new to us for the past few years, we've probably grown it about three or four years now, is Geum. I really like the peachy and orangey colors that it provides. It can tend to be maybe on a little bit of a shorter side of a bloom, but it's definitely long enough to use in our bouquet and design work. It's a later spring bloomer, but it's a nice pop of color for spring. It really looks great in spring bouquets. It's gorgeous, and I kind of like how delicate and frilly it looks, and it looks like it has like a double bloom on it. So pretty. I also like Geum because you don't really have to go out there with clippers to cut it. You can really just kind of pick it, pop it, pip it. Yeah, whatever. That's it. Poop it, pop it, pip it. Pip, pop, poop. Anyway, you don't really have to go out with clippers. You can just kind of pick. Pop it, poop it, pick it off. Don't say poop it. Poop. No. Okay. Okay. Geum. The final perennial that we want to talk about that we grow here on the farm today is rudbeckia, and holy cow. I think we discovered this last year. I started five trays of rudbeckia, various types, and I just threw it into our annual field, and whoa, it was absolutely incredible. We had blooms for a solid month, all of rudbeckia, which helped us fill that midsummer bloom time, and they were these gorgeous yellow colors that looked absolutely incredible in summer bouquets. And we were kind of expecting it to be more like a tender perennial and to die off. We were planning on treating it as an annual, but before we started to prep our gardens for the next year, they were already popping up. So we left a row. Yeah, we were like, let's experiment. Let's pull the fabric up and see what these plants do, and let's see what they do out of fabric and see if they succeed. It did get a little weedy, just to let you all know. There does need to be maintenance that needs to be done on those. You still need to go in and weed, but it was really cool to see them come back up and do their perennial action. Yeah, and actually without the fabric, they grew a lot denser, which helped with the weed pressure, which helped with the weed pressure that we get. We have heavy, heavy weed pressure. We would love to get away from using the fabric maybe in the future. Yeah, we'll see. The other thing I really like about rudbeckia is it is super duper easy to start from seeds. So you don't need to buy plant starts for it. It starts so readily. It's an easy one to get going and one you should really look at starting yourself. If you've seen the native little rudbeckia, the black-eyed susans, we spread those around in our natural areas and it seeds very prolifically and reseeds really well. The native rudbeckia that Adam is talking about is triloba, and triloba looks so adorable. It is black and gold and we usually use it for hawkeyes bouquets. Yeah. If you're from Iowa, if you know, you know. Those are our favorite perennials we grow on the farm for cutting and for other uses. We hope you enjoyed. If you like today's video, please hit that... wait... please smash that subscribe button and hit the like while you're at it and we'll see you next time. As always, thanks for joining and happy growing!