How to Choose Flowers to Grow on Your Flower Farm

Updated January 5, 2024

I originally wrote this post in December 2017, before I even had a flower farm and before I knew, at all, what I was talking about. I wanted to record my thought process on choosing flowers to grow on my new, prospective flower farm, all while oozing with confidence and excitement over my new endeavor. I have updated the information in this post to reflect six seasons of flower farming experience, and found that, generally, my original inclinations in choosing flowers has stayed true! I do plan to write a new post about how I actually choose flowers for the farm now, but haven’t gotten to it yet, so subscribe to our email newsletter to keep in touch.

Despite not knowing what I was doing, I startee by developing a simple, useful Google Spreadsheet to map out bloom colors. You’ll be able to see a screenshot of the spreadsheet below. Without further ado, here is my original post from 2017, updated for extra helpfulness… if you’re a new flower farmer, I’m sure this post will resonate with you and I hope you might find useful information within it!

thoughts on how to choose flowers for my farm, before i started the actual farm

Choosing flower varieties to grow on a brand new flower farm is not easy. I sat for weeks (months?) scrolling through flower blogs and plant websites, not knowing at all how to determine what flowers to choose to plant next year on my new flower farm. It turns out, choosing flowers to grow is a lot more complicated than choosing vegetables (I had grown vegetable gardens professionally before starting a flower farm). With flowers, I’m providing a product to design with, not just for my clients to consume as food. Nuances of colors, shapes, textures, stem lengths, and wrapping my head around bloom times came into play… and that’s scraping the surface.

a color palette spreadsheet for flower farmers

I had an idea to turn a color palette into a Google spreadsheet. I thought by doing this, I could create a visual layout of all the colors in the color spectrum, and list the flowers underneath each color that I could grow. I simply opened up a new spreadsheet and filled the cells of the spreadsheet with each color that I thought was relevant for growing flowers. You can see below an actual screenshot of how I did this.

Spreadsheet for Flower Farming - Choosing Flower Colors for Flower Farm Spreadsheet

You can see how detailed I got with each color. When growing flowers and greenery for floral design and weddings, it is important to me to grow flowers in all hues on a color spectrum so my designs have depth and interest. As such, I broke the color “Green” down into four different hues — Dark green, Medium green, Light green, and Silvery green (simple descriptors that, with the help of the colors dropped into the cells, it was easy to list the different varieties of foliage underneath). By getting this detailed with the colors, I was able to see just how diversified the plant material was that I was planning to grow.

If you are struggling with deciding which flowers to grow on your flower farm, I recommend starting the process with a color palette spreadsheet like this one. Obviously, this information is limited to colors and does not account for bloom time (weeks-months during the season when the flower/foliage will be harvestable), quantities of plantings, or how the flowers should be categorized by bloom size (focal, filler, etc). You could figure out a way to build these factors into this spreadsheet. If you’re an even more visual person, you could drop photos of the flowers/foliage straight onto the spreadsheet instead of typing words.

7 Considerations for Choosing Flowers to Grow on Your Flower Farm*

*this information has been updated after six years of flower farming

Bloom Colors and wedding floral trends

For choosing an array of colors for your flower farm, create a color palette Google Spreadsheet like the one I made above. This will show you where you are growing too many flowers and not enough flowers for each color.

You should also consider what colors are trending for the upcoming year — this is really only important if you design for weddings, or sell flowers to florists who design weddings. To figure out color trends for weddings, you should consider becoming familiar with what is trending in all types of design, including architecture & interior design, fashion, Pantone colors of the year, graphic design, etc. Understand that every design niche is intertwined and informs the next. I, myself, am not obsessed with trends, but they do inform wedding requests and you should understand the affect they will have on the flower colors requested from your farm, to some degree.

Know that white, burgundy, peach and blush will always be colors in demand for wedding flowers. Burgundy and peach are especially in demand starting at the end of August thru the remainder of your growing season.

Bloom Sizes & Shapes

You should grow a variety of focal, filler, and spike blooms, and be aware that you will get more money for the bigger blooms. Flowers such as dahlias, peonies, lisianthus and ranunculus will figure the highest return on investment on your flower farm because they are premium focal blooms that come in an array of stunning colors.

Meanwhile among the sea of dahlias, remember to grow smaller blooms for fillers and “special moments.” Small flowers, when layered in different planes in an arrangement or bouquet, can make the entire design sparkle in a way it wouldn’t without those tinier bits. Some of my favorite smaller, ‘magical’ flowers are: Jewels of Opar, Gomphrena/Globe Amaranth, Silene ‘Blushing Lanterns,’ and Heuchera/Coralbells in bloom.

consider when the flower will be ready for harvest

It’s so important to make sure that you make a plan to have flowers for when you need them. If you have events/markets/customers lined up for August, you won’t want to have an overload of tulips in April/May (that is, unless you have a plan to sell them). The main goal is to make sure you have harvestable crops for the parts of the season you need them, and this requires a deep understanding of flower bloom times and crop planning.

Related: On Planting Perennials

Succession planting plays a huge role in making sure you’ll have flowers/foliage for the entire growing season. On our farm, we plant successions of zinnias, celosia and cosmos to keep the harvest going thru the fall. We plant only one succession, four weeks after the first planting.

growing unique flowers & foliage

When it comes to choosing which flowers and foliage to grow on my flower farm, thinking outside of the box has proved useful. I am a plant nerd at heart and admittedly grow way too many things on my farm, but I love pushing the boundaries of what a cut flower or cut foliage is. Growing flowering and medicinal herbs, vegetables, and tons of experimental perennials for cuts have brought immense joy and uniqueness to my offerings for other florists and my own wedding floral. Consider going beyond the typical lists of flowers to grow in the flower farming books and guides!

grow flowers for other uses

Another thing I ask myself when choosing flowers is: Is there another way I can use this plant beyond a fresh cut?

If I’m on the fence about growing a crop for fresh cuts again (maybe it didn’t sell well, maybe I didn’t use much of it myself), if I can come up with a secondary way to use it then I can justify growing it again. For example, gomphrena is a flower I absolutely adore and love growing, but for some reason unbeknownst to me, florists don’t buy much of it. I still grow gomphrena though, because I can harvest the leftovers at the end of the year and offer the dried stems for use in holiday wreath workshops. White gomphrena is particularly popular for this and people who attend my wreath classes love seeing our dried flowers from the field in the selections of decorations.

Another use for a cut flower is to grow it as a cover crop — or vice versa: cut the cover crop and sell it as a cut flower. There are lots of cover crops I’ve cut and sold: crimson clover, white buckwheat, red soba buckwheat, flowering mustard, hairy vetch, and field peas!

My favorite alternate use for growing cut flowers is eating them. So many plants I’ve grown over the years are edible and can be used to make teas, infused oils and honeys, or eaten straight off the vine. My favorite crops I grow for cut flowers/foliage that are also edible are: Raspberries (grown for foliage), Lemon Balm, Cinnamon Basil, Sage, Hibiscus ‘Mahogany Splendor,’ and Tomatoes (grown for the vines with unripened fruits)!

Ask yourself: Do I truly Love What I’m growing?

If I don’t love a flower, I don’t grow it, and this is because I won’t end up taking good care of it. I also won’t be excited to harvest it and use it in designs. It will be a waste. There are too many flowers to choose from, so don’t grow something if you hate it!

the final, most important consideration for choosing flowers to grow on your flower farm…

I left this for last, but really, this is the most important thing on the list. This is more important than colors, bloom sizes, all of that.

The most important thing for deciding which flowers to grow is KNOWING YOUR SALES OUTLET AND WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE.

Knowing your sales outlet(s) can be extremely challenging if you’re starting a new flower farm and have no previous experience selling your flowers… but you could aspire to have a certain sales outlet and go with it, for now.

Here is an example of how different flower farming sales outlets might change what you grow on your farm:

If you are a wedding florist or planning to design weddings using your own farm flowers, you will need to grow LOTS of variety of flowers, foliage, lots of colors and especially trending wedding colors or whatever colors have been requested by your wedding clients. If you are growing just for your own wedding designs (not selling flowers to other wedding florists), you might choose to grow a wide variety of cuts in small quantities for your own use. If you are selling flowers directly to florists who design weddings, you will want to always have popular wedding colors available for them to buy, but you’ll need them in larger quantities so you can fulfill their orders. Alternately, if you are planning to start a flower bouquet CSA or sell your flowers at a farmers market, you might choose to grow LESS variety so you can focus on growing lesser varieties of flowers each in larger quantity (you’ll be making lots of identical or near-identical bouquets over and over again, so focusing on 10-15 crops in large quantity would be a good start). Also, for a bouquet share or farmers market, you’d do well growing lots of bright colors to attract people’s attention and bring literal joy to their day, as opposed to growing whites and blushes for weddings. Can you see how, depending on your sales outlets, what one flower farmer chooses to grow is completely different from the next?

in conclusion

If you’re just starting out as a brand new flower farmer and you’re trying to decide what to grow, I suggest trying a little bit of a lot of things. See what you enjoy growing, see what grows well on your patch. Don’t forget to take care of the land, learn all about how to care for your soil to increase yields, and take lots and lots of good notes in a notebook and/or spreadsheet!

peace, love, and color palette spreadsheets for the win,

fran parrish