Growing Alstroemeria
I never really put much thought into growing alstroemeria until last year, because I felt like the small farm specialty cut flower movement dismissed it as invaluable, mundane, generic.
But as I’ve dug more and more into growing perennials I came across them and realized that with the help of cover in our unheated tunnels, we could grow some. -And that there is a lot more to these varieties than I previously thought.
Alstroemeria have a great vase life, but they are also perennial, and grow easily from rhizomes. They are productive— offering up to 80 stems per year (depending on where and how they are grown) and they are pretty easy to grow, too!
Alstroemeria like cool soil. Their ideal growing range (air temp) is 65F to 80F. In warm climates they slow down and go dormant during the high heat of summer. We think we may be able to keep them going a bit longer because of our natural temperatures here.
They can be prone to root rot problems, so it is important to plant them in well draining areas and to allow them to dry out some between waterings and during the hottest part of the season.
They REQUIRE support. If you grow them without support you will end up with a bunch of wonky stems and flowers pointing in odd directions, so net early and in layers.
Alstroemeria are picked by plucking them right off the rhizome (not cutting). It’s a fast and easy way to harvest. They can be susceptible to viruses, and if you avoid cutting them, you also lower the risk of spreading disease mechanically.
The varieties of alstroemeria that are available to us here in the US as small farms are completely different from those that are grown on a large scale for the large commercial floral industry. Those plants grow to be able 4-6+ feet tall and come with hefty price tags and patent leases that expire after a few years. Upon that expiration of the patent leases, the plants must be destroyed because the hybridizers have elected to control the availability of their products in the marketplace and are fearful of the loss of their decades of research in breeding to their competitors. In addition to being taller, those hybrid varieties have more nuanced and interesting color combinations and even some physical mutations.
We’re going to try some of those varieties here next year, to learn how well they over winter and to study their features. For now, we’re testing many of the types that are available to us in the US because we’ve seen that we can over winter them here with some cover. We’re also interested to learn more about breeding the best varieties that we can work with here.
Alstroemeria are very easy to multiply via divisions. Once you get a seedling that you like, it can be divided and grown into a large quantities faster than many other plants without implementing something like tissue culture propagation (which makes that process even faster).
Some varieties from our harvest today
I think there is a lot to love about these plants, and it will be fun to give these under appreciated plants some significant attention in our program moving forward.
We are not quite ready to recommend vendors for sales. Unfortunately, each vendoe we worked with sent us some product that was not up to par. from one company, we received plants that were supposed to be much taller growing. From another, we received some lots with a virus problem. So I’ll have to check back in with you in the future and offer some ideas about sourcing. We’ll also monitor our plants’ growth another year and then consider offering some divisions of the non-patented varieties.