From spring tulips to sunflowers in fall, beautiful blooms are available year-round to add beauty to your home or brighten someone else’s. Flower farms allow customers to choose colors and provide CSA memberships, workshops, and farm stands.
Herrington offers visitors three sunflower stems upon admission for July – September.
Brittany Hollow Farm
Flowers add an elegant and romantic flair to any room in your home, setting the table for romantic dinners or making photos more engaging. Flowers don’t have to come solely from supermarkets or florists — local farms are offering fresh blooms through markets or flower shops as well as CSA membership and you-pick options on their stunning farms that offer this option.
Just a short drive from New York City lies this family farm, which cultivates beautiful cut flowers from rare and heirloom varieties, all grown sustainably for cut flower production. As one of the pioneers of the Slow Flowers movement – advocating locally grown blooms over imported varieties that may come from greenhouses or long-distance shipping and eventually lose their color and vibrancy once in your bouquet – they offer gorgeous cut blooms that truly add life and color.
Springtime at the farm is full of tulips; in summer, visitors can visit and pick hydrangeas, rose bushes, and fragrant lilacs, as well as organically-grown herbs, vegetables, and fruits without pesticides.
The husband-and-wife team behind this sustainable farm, garden center, and floral studio opened the business out of a passion for growing flowers in 2013. Since then, they’ve cultivated over 80 varieties for CSA members, weddings, and events and provided free guides for becoming green thumbs yourselves.
This small family farm is an undiscovered treasure of nature, offering colorful bouquets for home and special occasion arrangements at Columbia County Farmers Market nearby. Their flowers range from scabiosa, zinnias, peonies, and hydrangeas that they harvest directly from their fields and dry in the sun before drying in their areas for sale at Columbia County Farmers Market.
Kelder’s Farm in Rhinebeck provides equal parts flower picking and family fun. Your admission price comes with three free pick-your-own sunflowers; a petting zoo, corn maze, and other attractions are on site. They open throughout summer, usually starting pick season in June; the variety of blooms includes ageratums, zinnias, gomphrena butterfly weed snapdragons cosmos, and cockscomb.
The Cutting Garden
Adam Dooling, curator of outdoor gardens and herbaceous collections at the New York Botanical Garden. Adam recommends selecting plants with long sturdy stems that have good vase life as part of your cutting garden design, with flowers that possess long sturdy branches for extended vase life vases, adding filler plants like Gypsophila (baby’s breath) or coral bells for texture in arrangements; foliage plants like Artemisia or Coleus foliage plants could extend bouquet life through winter too!
Cutting gardens typically consist of annuals, perennials, and bulbs that thrive under full sun with well-draining soil conditions, according to Jennifer and Adam O’Neal, authors of Small Farm, Big Dreams: Turning Your Garden Into a Floral Business. For maximum efficiency when tending your cutting garden, consider planting it in wide rows separated by paths wide enough for you to easily maneuver a bucket or bucket of water for watering plants or cutting shears between rows.
The O’Neals advise adding compost to their garden in the autumn to enrich its soil and prevent disease and fungus, which can be particularly problematic when growing cut flowers. They suggest also installing French drains or building raised beds to aid drainage.
Creating an ideal cutting garden includes keeping the plants trimmed back regularly and pruning regularly to promote healthy growth, maintaining their appearance fresh while encouraging them to bloom. O’Neals cautions against fertilizers, as this may create salt buildup in the soil, which harms plants, and ensures that any dead flowers are promptly removed to prevent seed production by cutting garden plants. These tips from industry professionals will ensure a successful harvest, whether starting in your backyard or expanding into full-scale flower business operations.
Tread light Flower Farm
Flutter through vibrant flower fields and enjoy the sweet fragrance of fresh lavender at these picturesque New York flower farms, from Long Island to the Finger Lakes. Spend your day exploring these colorful fields while taking Instagram-worthy pictures, enjoying hay rides, petting farm animals, playing mini golf, and more. Please bring a bucket to select your flowers from among their vast array.
Maya Kosok owns and operates Hillen Homestead in Baltimore City, an urban cut flower farm that caters primarily to local florists and sells the flowers through sustainable methods. Kosok strives to foster community among her fellow growers by sharing best practices through workshops and conferences.
Jenny Marks of Trademarks Flower Farm in the Finger Lakes Region cultivates an array of flowers for bouquets and wholesale sales at Trademarks Flower Farm. She specializes in early spring flowers like ranunculus and tulips for bouquets. Jenny provides education programs through cooperative extension beginner farmer programs so new farmers can develop their farming practices successfully.
Treadlight Flower Farm in Rondout Valley stands out as one of the few CSAs in New York specializing in specialty cuts like lisianthus and delphiniums, offering customers high-quality products that promote sustainability. They aim to connect with their customers via websites, newsletters, and social media, striving for high-quality products with minimal environmental impact.
Treadlight’s Matthew Dell will discuss the advantages of selecting native species over exotics for supporting local ecosystems and how this translates to higher quality and cost-effective production. He will also share advice on incorporating native plants into garden or landscape designs and creating sustainable farms with minimal ecological impacts.
Wickham Farms boasts more than 30 attractions for you to experience during a delightful New York farm tour. Enjoy relaxing hayrides through five acres of stunning tulips, six acres of yellow sunflowers, rows of whimsical wildflowers, and much more during their Lavender Festival from June 22 – August 6 or Sunflower Spectacular from August 10 – September 4. Take pictures near their pink tractor, vintage camper, and other unique photo-ops across this picturesque farm!
Sister Silos
Fixer Upper star Joanna Gaines and husband Chip Gaines’ sprawling compound in Waco, Texas’ The Silos are a must-see attraction. Home to Magnolia Market at the Silos, Magnolia Bakery, Magnolia Table Restaurant, and Seed & Supply garden store, as well as recently unveiled expansion plans that would add a coffee shop, furniture showrooms, a Wiffle ball field, and a historic church that’s been relocated there!
The farm boasts an heirloom-style barn collection that hosts workshops on wreath making and flower arranging, in addition to hosting its own annual lavender festival each June and July. Aside from selling fresh herbs and flowers, local honey, handmade lavender soap products, etc, are also sold here.
New York’s Finger Lakes region is home to this fifth-generation family farm that produces lavender on three acres, selling its blooms through its farm store and online. Visitors are welcome year-round; summer is their peak harvesting period. You can participate in their lavender tour, which takes visitors through fields before culminating with a relaxing scented bath in their farmhouse.
Even though most people see grain silos as valuable structures, many communities have turned them into art. One such example is Guido Van Helten’s McKinney Silos mural in McKinney which serves as a tribute to its agricultural past and illustrates that beauty of grain silos extends far beyond their functional use.
This silo features two prominent cultural symbols of Putnam County — a deer and a covered bridge — both found throughout the county. Furthermore, its decoration includes dark pink peonies apropos of its location.
Mikey McCall, sister to Joanna and Chip from Fixer Upper fame, recently used her love of plants and vintage shopping by opening Ferny’s retro plant shop. On Instagram Stories, she gave a peek inside this temporary space that features a restored 1967 Yellowstone Cavelier camper – this received plenty of clapping hand emojis and green hearts from viewers!
