It's Grow Time

Now that JUNE is here, it's time for the season to officially START!

This is the time our little seedlings are all snuggled into the soil! The ideal plan is to have everything planted out sometime in May but Mother Nature plays a huge role in this. Last year we had flooding for all of May and the delay in planting also caused a delay in blooms. Thankfully, the weather has been pretty decent to us this season and all the plants have found their home in the ground!

I wanted to share with you the behind the scenes of our little seedlings! Each flower variety that we grow here at Piggly Petals has its own growing guidelines and specific conditions that we follow. One thing that we do for almost every annual is the use of black plastic. This is a HUGE help as it suppresses weeds but allows water to seep through, which reduces our work load and limits competitor weeds so the flowers can flourish and grow!

A new technique we tried out this year was soil blocking! Instead of using plastic cell trays, we have moved to a more sustainable and efficient approach. Soil blocks are an alternative way to start seeds and we are able to maximize our growing space! It allows us to start twice as much seeds in the same growing space from last year! This was an experiment and so far we have saw good results!

As all our seedlings have been planted out, that doesn't mean that we stop seeding! We aim for succession planting of certain flowers, that way we can have a flush of blooms all season! Succession planting is when you seed a variety, like Stock, and then a few weeks later you seed Stock again. This means that when the first round of Stock is blooming, we will have another flush coming a few weeks after! Here is a list of a few plants that we succession plant on the farm; Stock, Snapdragons, Celosia, Amaranth, Ammi, Basil, etc.. and the list seems to grow every year:)

Keep on growing!