Go behind the scenes of our first seed harvest and our bold 2025 transition to sustainable cultivation, where cut flowers give way to Floramama seeds!
It may not be much, but we finally managed to grow and harvest our first seed variety this summer! Yeah, well... it's just one variety, but we've been trying to accomplish this for years and it always falls through.
If you only knew how complex this is on a large scale! The point is that planning and managing cut flower cultivation versus growing flower seeds are two very different things.
I'm often told, "Can't you just harvest your flowers from a plot and let the ones you don't harvest (crooked, too short, or weird ones) go to seed and harvest that?"
The answer is unfortunately no.
Back to the basics of seed harvesting
In fact, to harvest seeds, you just have to let the flower be pollinated by insects and the plant will then automatically form seeds.
Except there's genetics!
Yes, flower seeds also carry the genetics of their parents. So, when we grow plants to harvest seeds, we want to harvest the best specimens from the plot to perpetuate their attributes. And the problem is, when we grow flowers for cutting, this is also the case. We also want to harvest the most beautiful specimens.
This means we have to plan the crop for cut flowers and, separately, the crop for seeds. So, double planning. It also means double cropping, double acreage, double brain juice! We have to have two different plots for the same variety.
Aside from the complexity of managing crops dedicated to 2 different purposes, there is also the complexity of cross-pollination which is the transfer of pollen from one flower to another of the same species by agents such as wind, insects or animals, promotes genetic diversity, improves plant resilience and increases crop yield.
For seeds, if you grow 2 different varieties of the same flower, 2 different colors of zinnia for example, you must make sure not to grow them at the same time, or at a certain distance from each other to avoid cross-pollination (genetic mixing) and to ensure you obtain seeds that will carry exactly the same characteristics as their parents.
In other words, we want to avoid cross-pollination.
We want to isolate the varieties or cultivate them alternately over time to stabilize the genetics and harvest seeds of red flowers, for example, which will in turn produce red flowers, not white flowers.
All these factors have meant that, for several years now, we have been trying to start growing seeds on a large scale alongside our very large production of cut flowers.
And every year, it was a flop, due to lack of time. The emphasis was never on seed production given the amount of energy devoted to cut flowers. So the project always fell by the wayside, then slowly died during the season.
So we came to the conclusion that we needed to plan a drastic transition if we wanted to grow seeds instead of cut flowers. We'll be starting this in 2025!
Our Floramama 2024 seeds
Coming back to our only seed variety harvested in 2024, it's the giant marigold !
We love this flower for its incredible yield, 30+ inch tall stems, edible petals, eye-popping orange hue, and delicious peppery scent!
This variety was chosen primarily for its ease of cultivation and seed harvesting. It is also a unique variety in gardens, so no cross-pollination management is required.
With this first, albeit modest, seed harvest success, we are embarking on an ambitious new chapter. By 2025, we will be focusing primarily on producing our own Floramama seeds, a radical shift that marks the end of large-scale cut flower production. This challenge inspires us to explore new methods, perfect our expertise, and share this transformation with you.
Stay tuned to follow this exciting transition and discover the next steps!
