When most people picture a farm, they envision a single crop stretching out into the distance. Not here. Let’s uproot that image and make room for a bigger, healthier picture of what a farm can grow and do. Rural Studio Farm primarily grows vegetables, fruit, and herbs, but we also grow a wide variety of flowers during the warm season months.

Over the summer, most of the crops we harvest are continuous producers of fruits—peppers, squash, okra, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, melons—and the same plants bear over an extended period. As such, these crops require relatively less space to produce a lot of food (for example, nine linear feet of cucumber plants have produced over 200 lb. of cucumbers). Since we don’t want to grow food we cannot use, and because we want to foster good soil health by having plants growing at all times in our cultivated beds, flowers make an excellent alternative. They add color and vibrancy to the farm, and we grow varieties that make good cut flowers for Studio events and for students and staff to pick and enjoy. Some of our favorite, easily grown, and long-lasting cut flowers that we grow each year are zinnias, cosmos gomphrena (globe amaranth), sunflowers, morning glory, tithonia (Mexican sunflower), salvia, celosia (cock’s comb), calendula, and marigolds.

This year, for the first time, we also grew many dahlias from seed, as opposed to starting them from tubers. They performed very well, and we were able to dig up some tubers this fall for planting next year.

Flowers also attract pollinators that are essential to produce many of the warm-season crops we grow, like corn and squash.

In addition, highly aromatic flowers, like marigolds, can help to deter damaging insect pests from nearby crops, such as squash bugs. Flowers also provide habitat for butterflies and other insects important to the ecosystem. This year, we planted a special pollinator habitat bed with a variety of flowers, many of which are perennial and native species, that are designed to bloom at different times from spring until fall: rattlesnake master, New England aster, butterfly weed, milkweed, swamp sunflower, garlic chives, abelia, chives, and tithonia. Stop by and treat yourself to a vision of the farm in bloom.