Category: Flowers

Flower Planting Calendar

If you’d like to grow your own flowers from seed, this basic calendar can help. Below is a list of common flowers that grow well in Maine with dates for sowing seeds indoors and transplanting out seedlings, as well as direct seeding, informed by what is recommended for each flower type. The dates are approximate,

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Cut Flower Production in Maine

Lauren (left) and Carole Mapes of Flywheel Flowers. Photo by Ashley Jardim, She of the Woods, sheofthewoods.com Karen Volckhausen. Photo courtesy of Happy Town Flowers Dahlia flower protected from tarnished plant bug by an organza gift bag. English photo Zinnias grow tall in a hoophouse at Happy Town Flowers. English photo By Jean English This session at

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Certified Organic Flower Growing

By Karen Volckhausen I had the pleasure of attending the flower workshop at MOFGA’s Farmer to Farmer Conference in November, presented by flower farmers and florists Carolyn Snell from Snell Family Farm in Buxton, Maine, and Polly and Mike Hutchison from Robin Hollow Farm in Saunderstown, Rhode Island. I was so inspired by their talk

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Fresh from the Field Wedding Flowers

By Karen Volckhausen “Fresh from the Field Wedding Flowers” By Lynn Byczynski and Erin Benzakein Fairplain Publications, Inc., 2014 112 pages plus 75-minute DVD, $40 Lynn Byczynski, editor and publisher of Growing for Market and author of one of my favorite flower bibles, “The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower’s Guide to Raising and Selling Cut

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Grow Your Own Sunflowers

Pole beans growing up sunflower stalks. English photo. By Will Bonsall I’m amazed that so many gardeners plant a row of sunflowers along the edge of their garden to feed the birds. What amazes me is that they plant only for the birds (and perhaps for a windbreak on the north side) and that they

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The Slow Flower Movement Grows in Maine

A bouquet of peonies, grown and arranged by the author. Photo by Jude Lamb. By Karen Volckhausen Welcome to the first column in a series about the slow flower movement in the United States and Maine. It is time to start highlighting the great flower growing that is going on here and elsewhere. Like the

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Breadseed Poppy

Quite a few years ago, a Slovakian friend served me a dish of little soft pieces of bread sticks, coated with a sauce of ground breadseed poppy, some honey, and probably a few other ingredients. I never had anything like it. It was unforgettably delicious. While we ate, he explained that Slovaks used poppyseeds as

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Rosa Rugosa

By Roberta Bailey Who can resist the smell of a rose on the coast? The smell of beach roses, Rosa rugosa, pulls up a lifetime of memories for me, but the memories of sitting on sun-warmed rocks using my teeth to scrape the bright orange flesh from ripe rosehips are the strongest. To this day,

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Roses Fragrant and Delicious

Toki Oshima drawing By Ellie MacDougall Roses may not seem an obvious candidate for the dinner table, but their presence can turn the relatively mundane into something quite extraordinary. Buying and Planting Roses Hundreds of named rose varieties exist, and large categories of roses do well in various environments. Studying rose catalogs in print or

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Cut Flowers

2009 Farmer-to-Farmer Conference Linda Mercer described ageratum as a “workhorse plant” in bouquets. This bouquet displayed in the Exhibition Hall at the Common Ground Country Fair, combines zinnias and ageratum. English photo. Adding Value Through Bouquets, Arrangements and More By Dr. Lois Berg Stack and Jean English Linda and Jim Mercer of Sheepscot Flower Farm

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