Allium: Fresh or Dried

We love a flower that we can use multiple times throughout the year. My biggest suggestion to new growers (and established growers, too) is to plant flowers that look beautiful and serve a good purpose to you fresh, and a purpose dried as well.

Dried flowers are an EASY way to add value by cutting waste on our farms. If we can keep usable flowers from the compost pile and sell every stem we grow, we stand to hold on to higher profit margins. Wasted fresh flowers not only mean a loss in potential sales but also losses in labor— all the planting, nurturing, and harvesting time.

And dried flowers (while they take a little extra effort) do not take up as much time or have as many added costs as a lot of other “value-added” products that we dream up as flower farmers. Yes— wouldn’t it be cool if we started a soap line to “use up” some of our extra flowers? But spend one day looking into the actual costs of doing that and you might run in the other direction (we did!).

Here are my 3 favorite types of allium— we’ve grown a whole lot here! These dry beautifully: Schubertii, Purple Sensation, and Nectaroscordum. I tend to stay away from the big Everest and Globemaster varieties— their price tags turn me away. Schubertii is on the pricey side— but they are so novel and so useful, that I think they’re worth it.

We’ve purchased most of our allium bulbs from Netherland Bulb Company. Their bulbs are some of the most commonly imported in the US, and you find them at MANY garden centers and retailers. If you want to offer a pre-packaged bulb display in your shop you can do that through them. Or you can buy bulbs from their landscaping line OR bulbs from their cut flower bulb line. There are a lot of options. We’ll share in a new post some of the ins and outs of ordering wholesale bulbs and plants. There is some helpful info about ordering that is not widely shared.