~ A 6th Generation Flower Farm ~

8664 360th Street – St. Joseph, MN

320-437-0956

Drip Irrigation for Cut Flower Farming

Drip Irrigation for Cut Flower Farming

Hello! 

We are in the middle of our busiest season, meaning things like the written blog form of the podcast episodes get the back burner. You’re going to have to just go back and listen to this one, but I tried to summarize it a bit. I’ll add this to my to-do list in the winter to get this transcribed better.

In today’s post, we are going to talk about watering/irrigation for your cut flowers. In my early years, I just used to use an overhead sprinkler. It worked fine when I had a smaller garden, and I didn’t necessarily care too much about the production, but I had mostly veggies at the time occasionally, we would go around with a five-gallon bucket, pour some on the plants like the pickle plants because you can just get the center of the plant pretty good and water them deeply a couple of times a week and you can get by with it. However, when you’re growing between 1/4 and 1/3 of an acre of land, trying to get it all watered at once is pretty difficult to do and quite time-consuming. Additionally, if you use an overhead sprinkler and water the foliage or leaves, that can lead to diseases quickly.  For this reason and many others, you want to slowly water plants at the root over time.

What we use is some drip irrigation kits that have emitters equally spaced, and it produces water very slowly so that there isn’t runoff and it can be absorbed by the root system.

I try to divide my plants into categories: those needing irrigation and those that do not. There are some flowers, like sunflowers, for example, that have 50 days to maturity. I actually water them once or twice when I plant them and usually get a couple of rain showers in May or early June, and that’s really all I do. Here is the link to the kit I use.

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