I first wrote a post about tips for growing lisianthus in 2015.  That post has since become the most popular one on the blog… actually the top hit for the entire website!  And I hear repeatedly from new flower growers about how they’ve found that original post to be so helpful as they tackle growing lisianthus themselves.  But I’ve fine-tuned our lisianthus production here at our farm even more over the past three growing seasons.  So an update to that original post seems in order! The text that follows is a mix of old and new.  Happy growing!

When I first started designing for weddings, nearly every couple asked me for roses. My first season as a farmer florist (way back in 2009), I stuttered a good bit, trying to explain how I didn’t have them because they are very challenging to grow organically in our climate. I didn’t mention that I also happen to strongly dislike roses. Too much fuss, and I hate those thorns! However, I realized pretty quickly that I needed to have a good alternative to offer if I was going to be successful as a wedding florist. Enter growing lisianthus – a far superior rose!

I remember attending my very first ASCFG conference and listening to experienced growers debate the merits and shortcomings of growing lisianthus. I got the decided impression that, while gorgeous and long-lasting in the vase, they were hard to grow.  So when I started growing lisianthus myself, I was so surprised at how easy they were!! Lisianthus have consistently been one of our top crops over the years in terms of quantities and profitability, second only to the dahlias.  With all the new flower growers out there, especially farmer florists, in their first few seasons at the moment, it seems like a great time to demystify this crop that really is ridiculously easy to grow with a few tried-and-true tricks up your sleeve.

It is important to note that all our lisianthus at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers are grown in the field. You do not need a greenhouse or tunnel to grow beautiful lisianthus!  However, many growers do grow them under protective cover in areas that receive a lot of rain and/or do not have particularly hot summers.  When it comes time to flower in the summer, lisianthus like it dry and hot for best quality of blooms.  They originated as a prairie wildflower so that gives you a clue about what conditions they prefer.   Fun fact: lisianthus are native to the United States!

Five Tricks to Growing Lisianthus in the Field

1. Plant Early

Just about everyone knows how slow growing lisianthus are. If you don’t, you’ll soon find out with your first crop. What is maybe less common knowledge is how cold/frost tolerant lisianthus are since these blooms are often associated with the high heat of summer. While the plants love the heat to throw up their flouncy blooms, they actually also love cool temperatures for putting on root growth, which is what ultimately supports tall and bountiful harvests.

As such, we are religious about putting our lisianthus in the ground, out in the field, on April 1st each year, regardless of the spring conditions. That’s about 2 weeks before our average last frost.  The tiny rosettes hug the ground and therefore are pretty well protected against freezing and frost. If the weather is particularly nasty, we will cover them with a layer of frost blanket, but that’s rare. 

UPDATED: The spring of 2018 was an incredibly wet one and we lost quite a number of our lisianthus to rot at an early stage.  Moving forward, we’ll have short wire hoops over the newly planted lisianthus with a layer of plastic at the ready to shield them from heavy rain until they have their root systems well-established.  The plastic will always come off on nice days as we don’t want to get the young lisianthus hot in the spring, but we do need to do something about all the rain!

To get them in the ground April 1st, we make sure to talk to our plug broker in November so the plug grower has enough time to get our plugs going. While we historically have grown 99% of what we have at the farm from seed ourselves, lisianthus is the one crop that I will never bother to grow from seed again (I did for my first season, but never again). Instead, we get our plugs from our supplier the last week of February or the first week of March in 210s and typically bump them up to two inch soil blocks or #72 trays as soon as we get them and grow on in those for a month until planting out.  If you do not have a greenhouse, you could order the #128 tray size to arrive right before you are ready to plant and put them directly in the ground. 

This early planting date gives the plants plenty of time to put on growth before the heat of summer and also gives them a bit of an edge over those tenacious summer weeds.

UPDATED:  I’ve gotten asked a lot about where to source lisianthus plugs.  We get ours from Gro ‘n Sell based just 20 minutes away from us here in Pennsylvania.  They always grow incredibly high-quality plugs and are committed to using sustainable practices, particularly IPM, whenever they can.  We place our orders through Farmer Bailey’s site, but there are several other brokers who can help you place your order if you’re already working with one (i.e., Rakers, Gloeckner, Harris, etc).  Please note, this is a wholesale grower/broker situation that we are using.  So to do the same, you’ll need to have a business license to set up an account and be willing to order several hundred plants.  We typically order about 1500-2000 lisianthus plugs each season from Gro ‘n Sell. 

If you are a home gardener interested in growing lisianthus, you’ll have better luck looking in your local community for an outstanding, independent garden center and asking them if they carry lisianthus.  If they don’t, you might want to tell them about this blog so you can start growing lisianthus too!

2. Weed Management

Speaking of summer weeds, if you’re going to grow lisianthus, you need to have a serious weed management game plan in place for them! Because these plants stay small for several months and the leaves are at the base as a low-growing rosette, aggressive weeds will quickly overtake plants and smother them. Creepers like crabgrass are particularly tough when growing lisianthus.   

Lisiathus is a high value crop worth investing in so I gladly pay for a plastic mat system called FloraFlow  that comes with uniform pre-punched holes that are only two inches in diameter so there’s very little room for weeds to grow up though the holes. It also keeps the lisianthus cropping system very tidy and efficiently spaced as a whole so we can fit a lot of plants into a small amount of space.  You can space lisianthus plants as close at 3” on center.  When we’re really tight for space, we even put two plants per whole and they still seem to produce well (enough). 

But plastic is not a silver bullet for weeds. We make weeding the lisianthus top priority around the farm. It’s much easier on us and better for the crop if we weed early and often rather than waiting until the situation is dire and we pull up as many young lisianthus as we do weeds. So put some reminders on your calendar to get those lisianthus weeded at least every two weeks if you have decent weed pressure at your farm. Make sure to water well immediately after each weeding so that the delicate roots get re-settled into the ground.

3. Watering and Feeding

When prepping the lisianthus beds in the spring, we amend them with compost, cotton seed meal and green potash. We have a really nice loamy clay soil at our farm that the lisianthus love because it holds water and nutrients well, but does not stay wet. I suspect that growing this crop in sandy soils or heavy clay might be more challenging, but I don’t have experience with that.

After planting, we do a weekly foliar spray of an emulsified mix of fish powder, bat guano, and kelp powder.  This seems to be a good balance feed to keep the lisianthus healthy while they put on their roots through the early months.

UPDATED: If you are using a similar foliar application as we do, it’s best to spray right after the lisianthus are weeded so you are not also spray/feeding the weeds and shooting yourself in the foot.  We only spray the plants when they are not flowering.  Once the lisianthus have developed plump buds, we stop spraying since the blooms get discolored if any of the spray gets onto them.

Also, it’s important to use drip irrigation when growing lisianthus. The flowers do not like getting wet and are prone to spotting and/or molding if you water overhead with a sprinkler or hose.  For this reason, it’s also important to keep an eye on the forecast when your lisianthus are in bud.  If a heavy rain is coming the next day, it’s best to get those lisianthus harvested the evening before so the blooms don’t get saturated!

4. Variety Selection

UPDATED: Before you start drooling over every cool lisianthus photo on Pinterest, think carefully about who’s going to be buying from you. We use all our lisianthus “in house” here at Love ‘n Fresh, mostly for weddings and occasionally for straight bunches sold through our grocery store accounts and in our CSA bouquets. As such, we have the luxury of being able to grow some of the shorter varieties that hold up better to bad storms and do not need netting. We also grow some of the oddball colors like Roseanne Brown and Doublini that work well for weddings but would not pass mustard in retail.

If you are selling wholesale to florists, you will be expected to grow the taller varieties since stem length (sadly, in my opinion) means more money.  If you are selling to florists, I would stick with the ABC series and then try just a few specialty varieties like Roseanne Brown and Coreli Light Pink until you see exactly what your florists want. 

If you’re selling mostly at a farmer’s market, you should avoid Roseanne Brown because all your customers are going to think it looks dead (and frankly, it does).  I’ve always found that the brighter/saturated colors of lisianthus sell best at market, so stick with bright pinks, deep purples, and maybe try a few Roseanne Green if you want to spice it up a bit.  But, really, steer clear of anything too “funky”.  Farmers market customers generally aren’t interested in funky; they want easy, fun, cheerful bouquets.   

Something to also consider when choosing lisianthus varieties is if you want to net them in the field or not. I’m going to be honest: I hate netting. We’ve completely stopped using it at our farm at this point.  It’s expensive, both to purchase and to put up every season (mucho woman hours) and it makes harvesting so much slower and often a bit wasteful with all the broken stems, especially when it comes to brittle lisianthus. So we’ve been net-free on our lisianthus for five seasons now. This means that some old favorites have been given the boot (ABC 3-4 Pink, I’m looking at you) and a lot of new varieties have been trialed specifically to find out if they’ll stay upright on their own, even in our wicked summer storms here in the Mid-Atlantic. Some varieties that have done particularly well for us without netting are ABC 3-4 White, Falda Salmon, the Echo series, Arena Apricot, Corelli Light Pink, the Doublini series, and the Rosanne series.

Like snapdragons, lisianthus are segmented into bloom-time categories so you will sometimes see numbers associated with variety names (i.e., ABC 3-4 White). Also like snapdragons, I have found that attempting to “program” blooms in the field is much harder than it would be in a greenhouse, which is where that number system were developed. Inevitably, your lisianthus are going to bloom pretty much all at once when field grown, even if you did try to succession plant them for staggered bloom times. Be prepared for this with a sales outlet eager to buy them as soon as you pick them.

A note on storing cut lisianthus:  They do not like a cold cooler.  In my experience, it’s best to store them around 42-48 degrees if possible.  They resent being much below 40, and if given a choice, I’d rather leave them out in the shade of a tree or in a cool basement instead of a cooler below 40.  If stored properly, we can generally keep them in the cooler for up to 2 weeks until we use them in our floral designs for weddings.  I would say storing them for a week in a cooler is still fine for selling them at farmers markets or to florists.  So if you have a sales outlet ready in a week but you see big storms rolling through soon, get out there and pick those lisianthus and store them rather than letting them on the plants to get hit with heavy rain!

5. Second Flush

Assuming you were diligent in getting your plugs into the ground in early April, in the Mid-Atlantic area (we are zone 7 here) there is a long enough growing season to get a very nice second flush off of your lisianthus, usually sometime in early to mid-September. The first major bloom happens in mid-July. But this second flush is particularly welcomed at our farm since it’s perfectly timed for our very full autumn wedding season!

To get a good second flush, you need to do a few important tasks. First, when you harvest the first flush of blooms in July, make sure you are cutting the plants back almost to the base. Do not leave stumps of stems that will just result in weak secondary growth.

Once you’ve gleaned all of your first flush of blooms, take time to thoroughly weed the bed, irrigate, and fertilize, ideally all on the same day. This gives the plants a huge boost and the signal to go ahead and put energy back into putting on new growth instead of shutting down. Then remember to be diligent about weeding every week or so thereafter. At our farm, we have to battle the crabgrass in particular in late July when it’s rampant.

Remember to keep your lisianthus irrigated while it puts on this new growth in the heat of late summer, especially every time after you weed. As the plants grow for the second flush, we return to our weekly foliar applications, which really helps those new stems get taller. Any and all TLC you can give the lisianthus while they put out the second growth will result in taller and more plentiful blooms in September.

So, what do you think?  Will you be growing lisianthus this season?  I hope I’ve help make them much more approachable!  And you can find out a lot more advice about growing lisianthus and every other flower by joining the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, an amazingly generous group of professional flower farmers who are happy to share advice!  

For more flower farming tips, be sure to check out this past post on Growing Ranunculus and Anemones in Zone 6b/7 or this previous post about my Five Favorite Native Perennials for Cutting.

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NEWLY UPDATED 2019 POST AVAILABLE BY CLICKING HERE. 

When I first started designing for weddings, nearly every couple asked me for roses. My first season, I stuttered a good bit, trying to explain how I didn’t have them because they are very challenging to grow organically in our climate. I didn’t mention that I also happen to strongly dislike roses. Too much fuss, and I hate those thorns! I realized pretty quickly that I needed to have a good alternative to offer if I was going to be successful as a wedding florist. Enter lisianthus – a far superior rose!

I remember my first ASCFG conference and listening to experienced growers debate the merits and shortcomings of lisianthus. I got the decided impression that they were hard to grow. So when I started growing them myself, I was so surprised at how easy they were. Lisianthus are now one of our top crops in terms of quantities and sales, second only to the dahlias. Realizing that there are currently a lot of new growers, especially farmer florists, in our membership, I thought it might be a great time to demystify this crop that really is ridiculously easy to grow with a few tried-and-true tricks up your sleeve.

It is important to note that all our lisianthus at Love ‘n Fresh Flowers are grown in the field. You do not need a greenhouse or hoophouse to grow beautiful lisianthus.

1. Plant Early
Just about everyone knows how slow growing lisianthus are. If you don’t, you’ll soon find out with your first crop. What is maybe less common knowledge is how cold/frost tolerant lisianthus are since these blooms are most often associated with the high heat of summer. While the plants love the heat to throw up their flouncy blooms, they actually also love cool temperatures for putting on root growth, which is what ultimately supports tall and bountiful harvests.

As such, we are religious about putting our lisianthus in the ground, out in the field, on April 1st each year, regardless of the spring conditions. The tiny rosettes hug the ground and therefore are well protected against freezing and frost. If the weather is particularly nasty, we will cover them with a layer of frost blanket, but that’s rare.

To get them in the ground April 1st, we make sure to talk to our plug broker in November so the plug grower(s) have enough time to get our plugs going. While we grow 99% of what we have at the farm from seed ourselves, lisianthus is the one crop that I will never bother to grow from seed again. Instead, we get our plugs from our supplier(s) the last week of February or the first week of March in 210s and typically bump them up to two inch soil blocks as soon as we get them and grow on in those for a month until planting out.

This early planting date gives the plants plenty of time to put on growth before the heat of summer and also gives them a bit of an edge over those tenacious summer weeds.

2. Weed Management
Speaking of weeds, if you’re going to grow lisianthus, you need to have a serious weed management game plan in place for them. Because these plants stay small for several months and most of the leaves are at the base as a rosette, aggressive weeds, especially creepers like crabgrass, will quickly overtake plants and smother them. This is a high value crop worth investing in so I gladly pay for a plastic mat system called FloraFlow (www.floraflow.com) that comes with pre-punched holes that are only two inches in diameter so there’s very little room for weeds to grow up though the holes. It also keeps the lisianthus cropping system very tidy and efficiently spaced as a whole so we can fit a lot of plants into a small amount of space.

But plastic is not a silver bullet for weeds. We make weeding the lisianthus top priority around the farm. It’s much easier on us and better for the crop if we weed early and often rather than waiting until the situation is dire and we pull up as many young lisianthus as we do weeds. So put some reminders on your calendar to get those lisianthus weeded at least every two weeks if you have decent weed pressure at your farm. Make sure to water well immediately after each weeding so that the delicate roots get re-settled into the ground.

3. Feeding
We grow organically at our farm so we rely on regular foliar applications of fish and kelp emulsion to feed our lisianthus. When prepping the beds in the spring, we amend them with compost, cotton seed meal and green potash. We have a really nice loamy clay soil at our farm that the lisianthus love because it holds water but does not stay wet. I suspect that growing this crop in sandy soils or heavy clay might be more challenging, but I don’t have experience with that.

4. Selection
As with all flowers, you need to consider your end buyer before you make any decisions about which lisianthus varieties to grow. We use all our lisianthus “in house”, mostly for weddings and occasionally for straight bunches sold through our grocery store accounts. As such, we have the luxury of being able to grow some of the shorter varieties that hold up better to bad storms and do not need netting and some of the oddball colors like Roseanne Brown. But if you are selling wholesale mostly to florists, you will be expected to grow the taller varieties since stem length (sadly, in my opinion) means more money. If you’re selling mostly at a farmers market, you probably should avoid Roseanne Brown because all your customers are going to think it looks dead (and frankly, it does). So, before you start drooling over every cool photo in the catalog, think carefully about who’s going to be buying from you.

Something to also consider when choosing lisianthus varieties is if you want to net them in the field or not. I’m going to be honest: I hate netting. I’m working hard to get away from it as much as possible at our farm. It’s expensive, both to purchase and to put up every season (mucho man hours) and it makes harvesting so much slower and often a bit wasteful with all the broken stems, especially when it comes to brittle lisianthus. So we’ve been net-free on our lisianthus for two seasons now. This means that some old favorites have been given the boot (ABC 3-4 Pink, I’m looking at you) and a lot of new varieties have been trialed specifically to find out if they’ll stay upright on their own, even in our wicked summer storms here in the Mid-Atlantic. Some varieties that have done particularly well for us without netting are ABC 3-4 White, Echo Champagne, Echo Lavender, and Rosanne Green.

Like snapdragons, lisianthus are segmented into bloom-time categories so you will sometimes see numbers associated with variety names (i.e., ABC 3-4 White). Also like snapdragons, I have found that programing blooms in the field is much harder than it would be in a greenhouse, which is where that number system were developed. Inevitably, your lisianthus are going to bloom pretty much all at once when field grown. Be prepared for this with a sales outlet eager to buy them as soon as you pick them. There was an article in a recent Quarterly that talked about experimenting with pinching lisianthus. We did not have a chance to try pinching to stagger the blooms this year, but plan to give it a go next year.

5. Second Flush
Assuming you were diligent in getting your plugs into the ground in early April, in the Mid-Atlantic area there is a long enough growing season to get a very nice second flush off of your lisianthus, usually sometime in early to mid-September. This second flush is much welcomed at our farm since it’s perfectly timed for our very full autumn wedding season.

To get a good second flush, you need to do a few important tasks. First, when you harvest the first flush of blooms in July, make sure you are cutting the plants back almost to the base. Do not leave stumps of stems that will just result in weak secondary growth. Once you’ve gleaned all of your first flush of blooms, take time to thoroughly weed the bed, irrigate, and fertilize, ideally all on the same day. This gives the plants a huge boost and the signal to go ahead and put energy back into putting on new growth instead of shutting down. Then remember to be diligent about weeding every week or so thereafter. At our farm, we have to battle the crabgrass in particular in late July when it’s rampant.

Remember to keep your lisianthus well irrigated while it puts on this new growth in the middle of the heat of summer, especially every time after you weed. I try to spray again with fish and kelp emulsion as the new stems are beginning to get taller. Any and all TLC you can give the lisianthus while they put out the second growth will result in taller and more plentiful blooms in September.

Now is a great time to start thinking about what lisianthus plugs you want to order for next year!

When I first got into flower farming, I immediately ordered myself a couple hundred corms (the proper term for the “bulb” that produces ranunculus and anemones) and thought I’d just pop them in bulb crates in my basement in February to start and then set them outside when the spring weather warmed. That plan was a total flop. The plants were sickly, and the blooms stunted and deformed.

Anemones and ranunculus like a very long, cool establishment period to develop a robust root system and lots of foliage to support an explosion of blooms in the few months of cool spring weather around here. After several seasons of growing these beauties in zone 6b and 7, in my opinion, only those planted in the ground in the autumn and protected through the winter really produce enough high-quality blooms to make them a profitable crop. We typically have anemones starting to bloom in our hoop house in late January, and ranunculus coming along a little later when the daylight hours lengthen, usually in late February. Steady production for sales runs from March to May. This year’s been a bit different thanks to the intensity of the winter cold, but this hopefully isn’t the norm. Hopefully.

A hoop house is very handy to have when growing anemones and ranunculus. But even if you don’t have a hoop house, you can still produce a lovely crop of these flowers with some carefully engineered low tunnels (or “caterpillars”) out in the field. The low tunnel concept was originally popularized by Eliot Coleman for winter veggies, but low tunnels work just as well for flowers. It took a couple (frustrating) years to figure out how to build these to withstand fierce wind and heavy snow. We finally have the formula down and our low tunnels can take just about anything.

We build these inexpensive structures with half-inch metal electrical conduit from Lowes, a hoop bender, greenhouse plastic, tomato twine, and Agribon fabric. If you’re a subscriber to Growing for Market, there was an article a few issues back about how Tony at Bare Mountain Flowers builds his. Tony is a wiz at building and inventing. We based our design off his and then tweaked it with metal hoops and a few other adjustments to withstand our heavy snows. We’ll be demonstrating how to build low tunnels at some of our workshops this spring.

A great rule of thumb for any crop is to think about ordering for next year when the current season’s crop is finishing up. Therefore, anemones and ranunculus corms should be ordered in early summer. My favorite supplier is Gloeckner. They are a large wholesale supplier with high minimums. If you want to try a small batch first before committing to a big crop, a quick online search will yield several retail suppliers for ordering smaller quantities.

For ranunculus, I’m especially fond of the Le Belle series for our climate here. We’ve also been trialing the Amandine series in smaller quantities over the past two seasons. This series has been bred to withstand a bit more heat before going into dormancy in May or June. However, it seems this breeding has made it harder for Amandine to grow as well through the cold of the winter months so the plants are weaker than the Le Belles overall. Therefore there’s been no increase in production by having a longer harvest window. Amandine does seem to be coming up with some unique colors though so we’ll keep trying them.

For anemones, we’ve had great success with the Galilee series. This series has the ever-popular white face with the black eye, sometimes called the panda anemone. The plants are super productive, amazingly tough, and the stem length is outstanding at 18 inches plus. We’ve also grown the Jerusalem series in the past but have since switched to Galilee entirely as the plants are just so tough and productive.

Planting of both anemones and ranunculus ideally takes place in the first half of October but can happen as late as mid-November for abundant spring blooms in our region. We soak and pre-sprout the corms per the directions sent by Gloeckner with the order.

If you’ve been following along here on the blog, you already know we’ve gone through several intense “polar vortex” spells this winter, making it one of the coldest and snowiest on record. The temperatures routinely dipped to the single digits and the wind chills were often well below zero. There were many days too when the sky was cloudy, greatly limiting the available light and solar gain inside the structures. I was fearful that the ranunculus and anemones wouldn’t survive these harsh frigid conditions (and that the low tunnels would collapse under the weight of the snow, but they didn’t). I’m here to say, these babies are TOUGH! In fact, I’m expecting a bumper crop this spring.

Both the plants in the hoop house and the low tunnels have been kept under a double layer of Agribon fabric during the coldest stretches of the winter. The fabric is taken off on warmer days so the plants can get the maximum light. Watering and fertilizing with a cocktail of fish emulsion, kelp, and compost tea has been limited to when temperatures were going to be above 25F at night for at least three days (that’s only happened twice all winter!) so growth has been a bit limited by the lack of water and nutrients. Ideally both crops should be watered deeply and fertilized once a week when they’re actively growing. These crops love to soak up water and nutrients. Anemones in particular love a deep drink.

Weed management is a crucial key to a highly productive crop. If it’s warm enough in the tunnels and hoop house for the ranunculus and anemones to grow, it’s warm enough for the weeds. Weeding in the hoop house is not that hard and actually kind of nice on a winter day when it’s warm inside and cold outside.

But weeding the low tunnels is really tricky since you have to kneel on the ground in the snow or mud. We’d struggled to keep up with the weeds until this season, when we’ve started using a new product called FloraFlow, which is black plastic with pre-punched holes that are perfectly spaced and sized for growing ranunculus and anemones. This weed barrier has been superb at suppressing weeds and no doubt key to it looking like one of the best crops to date in the low tunnels. I think the black plastic has also kept the soil warmer through the cold snaps. That’s great in the winter but a problem once it gets hot outside so we’ll be covering the plastic with straw as things heat up.

For growers who have not tried either of these crops yet, I would highly recommend starting out with just anemones. They are able to withstand cold better than ranunculus, and they have a longer bloom window than ranunculus, making it easier to get a profitable number of stems while you fine-tune the mechanisms for keeping them happy in our cold winters. Once you’ve tried your hand at anemones and feel confident, add ranunculus.

Both crops fizzle out when the temperatures get in the 70s. Usually plants are done producing by mid-May. If we’re lucky, we can eek out a couple dozen stems for weddings until the first weekend of June. I really love it when the peonies and ranunculus overlap. Pure designer bliss!