Jenny (00:29)
Welcome back to another episode. Today we are talking about one of the trickiest times on the flower farm calendar, the dreaded July flower gap. And obviously this is probably going to depend on your climate, what zone you're in, where you live. But here where I am in zone six, central New York state, July is always a little bit of a lull in the season where early spring flowers are pretty much done, but summer flowers haven't quite started up yet.
And so this episode is all about how we fill gaps in our flower production and save our sales during this time. So that being said, I know a lot of flower farmers actually take the summers off. really focus on spring sales or fall sales. And sometimes even now winter sales with people getting into tulip forcing, you crazy people, you, but, ⁓ for, would say most people that's probably not an option or not something that you're doing.
⁓ for most people, it's pretty important to keep your sales consistent throughout the year for your customers. So you have customers that come back week after week. So for us, our sales are definitely lower in the summertime, this time of year. And I've talked about this before on the podcast, but our customers are usually on vacation. We live in a very, ⁓ I guess like vacation oriented area. live in the Finger Lakes region of New York and
Everybody comes here from the cities to go to the lakes and hang out. So that is kind of what everybody here is doing in the summertime. So our sales definitely slowed down this time of year, and we have a lot more sales in the spring and the fall. However, it's still really important to us and for a few of our different sales outlets to have the consistency of having flowers bloom all season long.
So if you've ever had like a booming spring and then all of a sudden you run out of flowers, like you're not alone. We're going to talk about it. And it's important because,
Consistent availability means that you have consistent customers. So if you disappear for a few weeks, you risk losing your weekly customers, CSA members, florist clients, and just general momentum. So let's just talk about this flower gap, like what it is and why and how it can kind of hurt you. Usually first thing in the spring, we have tons of early spring bulbs, like, know, tulips, ranunculus, anemones.
And then even in June in our area, and of course adjust this to wherever you are and what your season is like in your growing climate, your growing zone. You know, then we have lots of flowers in June as well. But then when we're waiting for summer flowers, like those zinnias, sunflowers, slosha, like they usually don't kick in in the field until late July. So in the middle here is just like, there's no flowers unless you plan ahead for it and strategically plant certain things.
to fill that gap. you're not proactive about planning for this gap and planting specific things to fill that gap, it can have a pretty big impact on your sales. You can have a loss of bouquet qualities, like especially like we are doing a full season CSA where
in July, if we hadn't planned for this, we would not have that many flowers and not great quality flowers. You don't want that. You don't want skipped weeks. Florist orders can be really hard to fulfill. And I will tell you what, if you are not there for your florists every single week, even when they don't order from you for weeks on end, they will move on to somebody else. At least that has been my experience and what I've seen in my area. You want to be that really dependable person that
shows up, you have flowers every single week. ⁓ also if you don't plan for this kind of July gap, your farmer's market tables or your farm stand is going to look kind of sparse. You, don't want that. want it to look nice and full and abundant to encourage sales and your customer confidence in you can sometimes take a hit because let's be honest, your customers probably really don't understand the seasonality of flowers. Most people don't even understand the seasonality of vegetables.
You would think most people would know that tomatoes bloom in the summer, but you'd be surprised how many people don't understand that. And when it comes to flowers, they just don't know. So the consistent availability of your flowers can really help you in your business. First of all, that weekly recurring revenue, like you just, it just helps to have that weekly recurring revenue, even through July. It also keeps your customer habits strong. So if you have like a subscription, they keep coming to pick up every week.
If you have those weekly florist orders, you have those loyal customers that come and buy from you week after week, you want to keep those habits strong. And if you take breaks, they can kind of fall off and forget about you. And you don't want that. also really reinforces your professionalism and your brand reliability, which is great. It can also help spread labor and income more evenly over the season. And this is something that I have actually wrestled with a million times is that, you know, we make.
the majority of our revenue really early in the spring, like I guess the whole spring, and then it picks up in the fall. Like we aren't making that much money over the summertime. And so many times I've thought about like, we just need to cut it out. We'll just really focus on where we're making money in the spring and the fall, maybe not do summer anymore. But the problem with that is my help, like me, I would be totally fine with that, but my hired help.
My employees, like they need a job all year, maybe not all year long, but at least most of the season. So if I only selling a product really early in the spring and then maybe in the fall, it's just going to be hard to find labor and reliable help to execute on that. And so for me, it's less stressful for me, less stressful for my team to just have consistency. And it can just help you find.
more consistent and reliable labor as well. So that's just another thing that I've like wrestled with a bunch of times. And the conclusion always comes back to trying to support both the team, the farm and our customers comes back to having this consistency throughout our main growing season. So as far as filling the gap, because I'm sure that's what you really want to know about there are.
several different strategies in place. And so again, I'm to say this caveat. It depends on where you live. on your growing zone. But we have kind of a two handed approach to bridge this gap between spring flowers and summer flowers. The first one is to plant early summer perennials for kind of like
easy hands off gap filling blooms. So key crops for this are, I'm going to say peonies in here, even though I would kind of put that into the spring section, spring category, but they do help bridge that gap. Other flowers that bloom later after our peonies are done are things like astilbe, Veronica, beptesia, which we actually use both the flowers and the foliage, yarrow, echinacea.
fever few, which is like not really a perennial. I would call it a very short-lived perennial. Usually fever few, get two seasons out of, and then it's done and we have to replant it. Unless you let it go to seed and reseed, but that doesn't really work that well for us because we're planting those in landscape fabric. But these are some really reliable plants that have saved us during this time, that July lull. Particularly my favorites are Yarrow and Baptisia.
Yarrow is super versatile for making bouquets with and just selling in straight bunches. Um, I love, love, love, love, just selling it as straight bunches And our customers actually go nuts over it, which I was shocked at, but there was one year when I just had a ton of Yarrow. planted like a full 100 foot bed of it years ago. And I think the first
I mean, it must've been like the second year it came into production for us. This was such a long time ago. I was like, what am I going to do with it all? So I just picked it and started selling it as straight bunches. And I did not think that people were going to buy it. And then went crazy over it. So was such a happy surprise for me, but it blooms in these super vibrant colors that my customers just absolutely adore. And you can grow some of the more muted tones as well. Like we have had some really cool.
really pretty like peachy ones that we've propagated. We've had some really cool blushy white, you know, creams, light yellows. The great thing about yarrow is that it blooms in so many different colors. There's so many different varieties. It fills that gap. It blooms for like a pretty, I guess I'm not gonna say a long time, but we usually get like three or four weeks out of the harvest, our harvest window from it. And it is the easiest thing to grow.
in the entire world. Like you cannot kill it. Okay. Maybe you can kill it, but it just comes back for us super reliably year after year after year. It gets bigger and better every single season and we just love it. So that is a crop that we really depend on and highly recommend. Baptisia is another one. So the flower season of Baptisia for harvesting is pretty short. have four different four.
I think four different varieties on our farm. And so we have some early blooming varieties, some later blooming ones, so we can get that little bit of an extended harvest. However, it's probably like two weeks out of the season, maybe three weeks, depending on the year, when we can harvest those flowers. However, when those flowers are passed, we just snip the flowers off and sell the foliage.
We use it in a bunch of our mixed bouquets. We just sell the fully adjust straight bunches. It's really versatile and I love it for that. So I want to talk about Echinacea for a second because I actually hate it. Well, I guess I shouldn't say that I hate it, but I don't think that it's a great cut flower. However, it blooms generally at a time when we have nothing else on the farm. Usually like peonies, like our stored peonies, we can't hold onto them any longer. We got to get rid of them.
And then we're waiting for our zinnias to bloom and we don't really have like that round disc flower available. And ⁓ Echinacea comes in right at that time in early July. Most of the time we're using it in a mixed bouquet capacity. ⁓ Not really just selling it on its own, but it adds so much sparkle and color to mixed bouquets that it works pretty well for that. I generally, they don't really sell that well for me in
straight bunches and I probably wouldn't want to because I don't think that they're crazy long lasting. Um, they're just like not my favorite cut flower. However, I've been really happy that we've had them planted every single early July. And so this year, it's a really hitting home this year. We actually don't have any Echinacea and I'm really missing it. And that is because at the end of last year, so end of fall, 2024,
We ripped out most of our perennial fields. We replanted some things, but we actually turned a big section of our perennials into an area where we could rotate our dahlias because we needed more space for our dahlias. And because we kind of did this big change with our perennial fields, we ended up losing our echinacea. And I just like never got around to seeding and planting new ones.
And I thought at the time like, it's not that big of a deal, but turns out we're really missing it this year and I'm going to be planting some more. So we have it again in the future. ⁓ and I'm also like kicking myself because like we've had it reliably and we've used so many stems of it every single season, every single July for the past, like, you know, eight years on the farm. And now I'm like, geez, what did I do that? But we all make mistakes. We learn from them and we move on. So those are some of my favorite.
early summer perennials that start blooming during this July gap that have been really, really reliable. Now, some other annuals that we plant that kind of fill in this gap are Dianthus, Sunflowers, Snapdragons, and then Rudebeckia could kind of be a perennial as well. I would call it also a short-lived perennial along with that Feverfew.
But we really rely on Dianthus and Snapdragon. So we plant those in the fall, and they tend to bloom for us in May and a little bit in June, depending on the year and the weather. And then we can also plant them really early in the spring to get them in this July gap. Now I said sunflowers, but we plant our sunflowers that early, early succession in our high tunnels early in the season.
important to understand that sunflowers do not like it cold. They are a warm, loving flower. And so you want to make sure that soil in your hoop house where you're planting it to get that early season succession is warm enough. You don't want it to be cold and plant them in the cold soil. They're just not going to do anything. They're not going to be that happy. So you can plant things like, you know, zinnias, sunflowers, ⁓ stuff like that earlier in a hoop house to get that earlier bloom.
I will say that it can be kind of tricky depending on what the weather is. And just remember that you really don't have that much control over it. You're kind of just hoping for the best, and it may or may not happen. Now, some years, it depends on the year, some years we will have early groups of our Lysianthus start,
Particularly these varieties, Lysianthus, Misty Blue, ABC Deep Rose, and Echo Series.
particularly, I usually just plant like the echo mix. So obviously there's some that bloom later, some that bloom earlier, but those are all group one, Lysianthus and they have bloomed in early July for us before, which has been great. Now these are not my favorite Lysianthus varieties because the petals on the like, especially the ABCs are, you know, they're kind of flimsy and delicate. don't hold up.
as well as some of the other varieties that we grow, some of the group twos and threes. However, because they bloom super early in the season and can kind of help fill that gap, it can be really helpful. So just something to think about. And again, some years, not every year, we will also have zinnias early in July, but ⁓ kind of depends on the year and when we get to planting them in our hoop houses.
So all this being said, most of the things I am talking about right now are either perennials that are planted outside that bridge this gap or annuals that are planted early in that side of our hoop houses. So high tunnels and hoop houses really can play a critical role in filling flower gaps, especially for colder climates. So if you're a warmer climate person, this probably doesn't apply as much to you, but for colder climate folks,
We can talk about it for a second. So for things like snapdragons and dianthus, especially things that like those cooler temperatures, they're the cool loving flowers. We plant those late in the fall, sometimes in the winter and early spring, and then they will start blooming this time of year, know, late June, early July for this gap.
We also really depend on flowers like snapdragons and Campanula also Dianthus, ⁓ feverfew you could put in there as well that are planted in the fall that will bloom in early June. So if you also feel like your flower gap is kind of like from when your tulips and your bulbs stop until your summer flowers, you can also consider planting things like.
that in your hoop house in the fall and they will fill that gap for you in like that June time. If you're in zone six, five, six, seven, something like that.
So just a quick recap of what we talked about so far are the main flowers that we depend on for this gap in the season. This production gap is first of all, Yarrow, Estilbi, Veronica, Baptisia, Echinacea, Dianthus, Sunflowers, Snapdragons, Feverfew, Zinneas, Rudebeckia, sometimes Lysianthus.
but definitely like early, early succession of that in a hoop house. And something else I want to talk about is that you've probably heard me say before that I sell a lot of straight bunches of flowers and we do a little bit of mixed bouquets on the side. That's our bread and butter. That's what we like to do. It's just so much easier, so much faster, so much more efficient to sell those straight bunches of flowers than making the mixed bouquets.
However, this time of year, like late, late, late June, early July, during this flower gap, we are making way more mixed bouquets than we normally are. And that's because you'll notice a lot of the flowers I just listed, not a lot of them are like showy focal flowers. They're more of like filler flowers, spike flowers. And so we will end up making a lot more mixed bouquets during these few weeks of the season just to have more
bouquets to offer at our local farmers market. And it's because things like Veronica or snap dragons, although snap dragons sell pretty well as straight bunches, but ⁓ those kinds of things tend to sell better in a mixed bouquet rather than just on their own. so making a bunch of mixed bouquet recipes during this time of the year is not what we want to do, but it helps us move product. helps us sell things that we
probably wouldn't normally be able to sell just as straight bunches and just helps us get it through the season.
And if you've listened to the show, particularly last summer, you've probably heard us say that our sales do dip this time of year, but staying consistent with having an offering all season long is really important to us and our customers. And I know I mentioned it before, but I just want to say it again. We can keep our bouquets high quality during the mid season. You know, we used to not do a July flower subscription or CSA because we were afraid of not having flowers.
and we did for years and years and years, but we were just like, but what if we didn't? Because this is like supposed to be the July flower gap, but now we are doing a July CSA because we can offer it with this consistency of flowers that we have.
It also just maintains predictable cashflow. Like we know we're not going to be like hitting it out of the park in July and August, but we know that we're still going to be bringing in thousands of dollars every week. And that is not something to balk at. So I would take a careful look at your Bloom calendar and see if you have any areas that you have gaps that need to be filled in so you can be more consistent with your offerings.
So your customers can rely on you more and you can make more reliable customers that come back week after week, increase your sales and increase your revenue. Do you have a July gap or do you have a June gap or maybe you have a gap in production somewhere else. Maybe for you it's really early spring. I need to think about how you can extend your season more to start selling earlier in the year or extend your season to keep selling later into the year. Maybe hit like ⁓ Thanksgiving or some of those later holidays.
And as you're going through the rest of the season, pay careful attention to times when you are scrounging for flowers. And if you have that problem, make note of it somewhere where you can come back to it. When you're doing your crop planning for next season, you can say, okay, I know that I need more flowers during this time of the year, that time of the year, and you can make a plan to do it. You can make a tunnel planting list, a perennial planting list, a wish list.
and just write it down somewhere so you can refer back to it later, so you can try to bridge that gap. My one piece of advice here though, would be careful not to go too overboard, particularly when you're buying perennials. Now perennials can be an amazing investment. However, one mistake that I made early on is I bought a ton of different perennials that I ended up never really using. And so I invested all this money in buying them and
and growing them and then when they were mature, sure I harvested some, but it wasn't enough to really make it worth it for me to grow them. And so I think that you need to sit down and really consider who your customer is, what your sales outlets are, and what kind of flowers and plants they would wanna buy, not just the things that are available or things that you would wanna grow. Like for example, I don't sell a lot of foliage,
Customers don't buy a lot of foliage. So the only foliage we have on our farm are really eucalyptus, that Baptisia foliage, which is very versatile, because we also saw the flowers. And then we just planted some raspberry foliage a few years ago that we love. And that's pretty much it. If I had planted a ton of perennial foliage, I just would not have ever ended up using it. And so it's just something to think about.
making sure that when you're buying in those perennials, it's something that you can sell pretty easily. And that's something that you can charge a pretty high dollar amount per stem and something that's easy to grow as well. I, I always come back to this lately that like, we don't need to try to force ourselves to grow things that don't want to grow here that don't like to grow here. Like sure, it's fun and challenging and cool, but like sometimes just grow the things that are easy to grow.
It's just going to be less stressful overall. Just thinking in systems here, like how are these crops going to integrate into your labor, your harvest and your sales flow? So in conclusion, consistency is king and filling the production gap requires some strategy. You know, it's not just hustle.
it's thinking analytically about what could fill the gap for you and planting and planning strategically. So obviously this also will depend on your business model, but for me, this is what has worked really, really well. And so I hope that this has helped you. And if you are feeling some other challenges of the July gap, ⁓ especially if your sales are slow, I also recorded a different podcast about this time last year.
about pricing strategies to boost your summer revenue, particularly during the slow months of July and August. And yet that is episode number 13. It's three pricing strategies to boost your summer revenue. Now, ⁓ highly recommend going back to giving that a listen. If you think it could help you boost your sales during this time of year. Well, that's it for today's episode. I hope this gave you some things to think about and could help you fill this July gap.
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