Selling cut flowers at farmers markets can be tough. Learn the best farmers market flowers and a homemade flower food recipe to keep your flowers fresh longer.
Fresh-cut flowers are a great way to draw customers to your farmers market booth, whatever else you might be selling. Eye-catching and attractive, they can offer rewarding sales too. Maybe you’ve considered selling your homegrown blooms but don’t know where to start. Here’s some advice I’ve gleaned from 25 years of experience at the farmers market.
Planning Flower Planting and Harvest Timing
First, start planning, and then start planting! Flower selection is all-important – not just what you’ll plant, but when. Think about how long a production season you wish to have. Many farmers markets (even year-round ones) are more heavily attended at certain times of the year. Do you want to aim for the busy periods (summer) or the entire season (spring and autumn as well)? Perhaps your efforts would be better spent supplying a local florist with a special crop during the slow periods.
Consider how many flowers you’ll grow. Do you have enough space for a full array, or should you focus on single showstoppers? Your answer will determine whether you’ll be able to sell mixed bouquets, single-species bouquets, or by the stem. If you opt for single-species bouquets or less dramatic arrangements, this will naturally affect what you grow. Decide whether you can supply flowers in any quantity.
Best Cut Flowers to Grow for Market
Flower arrangers and container gardeners often refer to “filler, spiller, and thriller” elements. Thrillers set the tone and focal point of bouquets, while the spillers add texture and dimension, and the fillers add volume and supply some framing and contrast to the focal flowers. Flowers don’t always fit clearly into one category or the other. Here are some of the familiar faces in farmers market flower arrangements:
- Spiky flowers, such as delphinium (Delphinium elatum), foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), salvia (Salvia farinacea), and snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus).
- Low-maintenance calendula (Calendula officinalis), cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus), marigold (Tagetes erecta), rudbeckia (Rudbeckia hirta), sunflower (Helianthus annuus), and zinnia (Zinnia elegans). Keep them coming with succession plantings and by continuous harvesting or deadheading the spent blooms.
- High-maintenance blossoms – but customer favorites – dahlia (Dahlia spp.), peony (Paeonia lactiflora), lisianthus (Eustoma grandiflorum), and ranunculus (Ranunculus asiaticus).
- Small but mighty blooms from ageratum (Ageratum houstonianum), gomphrena (Gomphrena globosa and G. haageana), and scabiosa (Scabiosa atropurpurea and S. caucasica).
Some flowers used extensively in dried arrangements also do double duty in fresh-cut bouquets. These include baby’s breath (Gypsophila paniculata); cockscomb, plume, and spike-type celosias (Celosia argentea); statice (Limonium sinuatum); and strawflower (Xerochrysum bracteatum).
Many flower growers are adding perennials to the mix because of their resilience in the face of challenging weather patterns, thereby taking some of the pressure off annual-flower production. In addition to the perennials already mentioned, try dianthus (Dianthus barbatus), echinacea (Echinacea purpurea), larkspur (Consolida ajacis), and yarrow (Achillea millefolium).
Farmers Market Flower Selling Tips
Bouquets with an excellent vase life go a long way toward encouraging repeat customers, often the cornerstone of successful marketing. The following tips will help your booth “blossom.”
Avoid picking flowers in the heat of the day, and keep them cool and fresh once you do. Learn the optimal time to pick each type of flower to promote the cut bloom’s longevity. For example, spike flowers should have 2/3 of the flower stalk open, and compound heads should be newly open with a flat center. Consider testing the best picking time on your homegrown flowers.
At least initially, avoid flower types known to have a poor vase life. Shirley poppies (Papaver rhoeas) and clematis (Clematis spp.) are lovely, but they just don’t last. The same holds true for phlox (Phlox paniculata) and lupine (Lupinus spp.). After you’ve built a reputation for quality bouquets, you can include short-lasting blooms, with the caveat to the customer to remove these select flowers after they’re spent while keeping the remainder of the bouquet for a longer period. Communication will be critical.
Finally, I like to have a spray bottle on hand to mist bouquets during the heat of the market. Mist can help maintain their condition, because the evaporative cooling keeps them from wilting severely.
If your bouquets aren’t selling well, play around with stem counts and price points. A fellow vendor once told me her “tussie-mussies” sold phenomenally well. (A tussie-mussie is a small round bouquet, popular during the Victorian era, made up of fragrant and colorful blooms that conveyed special meanings.) Small bouquets may be attractive to buyers because of their lower price, portability, and size. Some people don’t have much room in their dwellings for flowers.
Offering blossoms by the stem is also a great idea if you have the space, an efficient market display, and time to deal with this type of sale. You’ll be giving buyers another purchasing option, and you’ll learn what they favor, which will help direct your future planting decisions.
Homemade Flower Food
Offer pointers to customers on home flower care – keep the vase clean and trim the ends of the stems regularly. I provide a recipe for homemade flower preservative: 1 teaspoon vinegar, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1 crushed aspirin tablet added to 24 ounces water. (Aspirin contains salicylic acid, known to extend the vase life of cut flowers.)
Consider Flower Color and Shape
Though growers are always excited to try what’s new and different, don’t make too many changes all at once. In my experience, customers like some surprises, but most want 70 percent to 90 percent of the flowers in their bouquets to be fairly familiar.
Color choices are important. Market-goers prefer brightly colored bouquets, not muted, delicate, dark, or smoky. Mark down pink blossoms as a sure seller. Also, blue – as in bachelor’s buttons (Centaurea cyanus) and salvia – is always a rare and welcome addition. Bouquets also benefit from having a bit of green to set off their colors. Play around with your garden’s greens to see what they can add. Think bells of Ireland (Moluccella laevis), bupleurum (Bupleurum rotundifolium), sweet Annie (Artemisia annua), the stems and leaves of any garden mint or geranium leaves, and leafed-out branches of curly willow. Speaking of green, don’t forget fresh pods from nigellas (Nigella damascena) and poppies (Papaver spp.). Although commonly used dried, they look great fresh too.
Shake up the shapes of your flowers. Try round poppy heads, craspedia (Craspedia globosa), and scabiosa (S. stellata ‘Starflower’). I also like firework-shaped bee balm (Monarda didyma) and butterfly weed (Asclepias spp.) and the varying shapes of the celosias and amaranths (Amaranthus spp.). Keep your eyes open to the possibilities presented by landscaping plants, such as the many different types of leaves and flower spikes offered by columbine (Aquilegia spp.), dusty miller (Senecio spp.), and hosta (Hosta spp.).
Arranging flowers will probably take more time than you expect, so consider arranging at the market itself. You’ll need good timing, calmness under pressure, and maybe an extra person at the booth. If you’re going to be assisted at the market anyway, this could be a great way to multitask. Plus, I’ve enticed many customers by on-the-spot arranging.
Make pleasing bouquets that show your style, but be sure to include some that push the boundaries a bit. People’s tastes aren’t identical, after all, so experiment! Observe the basic rules for market presentation with your flowers. Have a tidy booth, with tablecloths and a persistently full display. Keep rearranging to maintain this. Clean containers are important, as is a tent for shade, and think about whether you want no-drip plastic bouquet sleeves or wraps and business cards.
Leah Smith is a freelance writer and market gardener. She works on her family’s mid-Michigan farm, called Nodding Thistle, and is a graduate of Michigan State University. She can be reached at NoddingThistle@Gmail.com.
