Meet Diane

Meet the Flower of the week! Did you know that many growers (especially greenhouse growers) use week numbers to plan their crops? There are 52 weeks in a year, and we are currently in week 5 (Jan 28). We are featuring Dianthus (aka Diane) this week, because she is one of the few annual flowers we plant in fall to overwinter out in the garden until spring. Learn all about Dianthus this week!

Dianthus is such a great flower to have ready to bloom in spring. It can be tucked into spring bouquets to add depth and volume, and if you continue planting it, it’s possible to have dianthus blooming all year round (if you have a greenhouse that is). At Food and Blooms Farm, we only grow a spring crop from overwintered plants. The early flowers are a godsend for those first few weeks of the market in June. We don’t continue to grow successions of dianthus, because they’re extremely time consuming to harvest. Their stems are very inflexible, meaning they break easily, and the leaves on each stem need to be removed one by one. Before we had perennials established to bloom in the later parts of the season, we grew dianthus all season long. Now that we have other options, we give her her time in the sun in spring and move on.