Deciding how to orient and lay out your growing space might be one of your most important decisions for your cut flower field. However, it can also be one of the most intimidating decisions. After all, once you start creating the growing space and placing plants into it, it’s fairly finalized.

But how could you know what to consider before you sowed your first crop?

Well, today, we are going to go through key areas to consider in your row layout:

Orientation
Sunlight
Wind
Slopes
Growing bed and walkway dimensions

We will cover everything you need to consider to ensure that, down the road, you don’t think about tearing everything out to change your growing space to better suit your property and environment. First, let’s go over working with what you have.

Working with the area you have

First, consider the property you are looking to transform into a cut flower production field: What am I working with?

We each have unique opportunities and challenges related to the microclimate and property we are working with.

For example, our first property was 2/10 of an acre with a house right in the center. We had fences, neighbors, a side driveway, and not a whole lot of space, but we wanted to make a go of the flower farm and had to work with what we had.

For the backyard growing patch, our row layout had previously been determined by the existing fence, shed, and the previous year’s garden space. Our premiere growing patch was in the front yard. Many times, I had to go onto my neighbor’s side to reach sweet peas to harvest, or said neighbor weed-whacked my dahlias by accident! Yet, despite those issues, it was the patch with the best soil and most sun.

Moving to our current property, the growing area was already determined for us but in a much more ideal scenario. A bare area fenced off where, in years past, was home for horses. Other than a handful of large evergreen trees, for the most part, the area is in full sun. As a bonus, we no longer have a weed-whacking neighbor to contend with!

Unless you are working with a large open field, most of your growing patch layout has been determined for you. The focus here is to consider those variables while making other decisions to maximize the space you have available, whether in square feet or acres.

This leads us to our first consideration: how much land will you grow on?

How much land are you going to put in production?

It is easy to get caught up in the idea of turning every inch of your available space into a cut flower production patch.

This may not be problematic when considering a minimal amount of space. However, for growers who have a lot of space, an acre or more, this can create a scenario where you bite off more than you can chew.

From our experience, even starting with a mere 1600 square feet of annuals can make for a steep learning curve when first starting to grow cut flowers to sell. When we moved to the current property, the empty patch had a half acre as potential growing space. We opened that half acre throughout three seasons, expanding as needed.

For a first-year flower farmer, I recommend planting no more than a quarter acre of annual flowers, especially if you are looking to pack in a lot of plants in a smaller amount of space. To learn more about maximizing your production with a small amount of space, read our blog on that topic here.

When deciding on how much land to open take into consideration the following:

How many stems can you honestly sell?
How much time do you have to tend to the field?
How much labor can you muster?

You don’t want your flower field to become a money pit or your ball and chain. An intensely planted cut flower field will produce a mighty amount.

Flowers demand a high price because they are incredibly labor-intensive. Many tasks require human time and hands. The more land you open and put into production, the more demand there is.

Once you know where you will open up your cut flower patch and how much space you will put into production, it is time to begin assessing the growing area.

Assessing Your Cut Flower Production Patch

When we moved to our current property, it was late August/early September. It was a fast turn around. Needless to say, before knowing we were going to switch properties we had already begun booking weddings and had invested in spring bulbs. Even though we were only a fifteen-minute drive away from our first property, the soil and the microclimate of the new property behaved very different. We planted the tulips, which just happened to be in an area of the growing patch where the rain storms created a lake. Yup, right on top of where we had just planted the tulips. Today, the soil in the patch drains beautifully, but that was not the reality in the first year of growing.

We didn’t take the time to observe the various microclimates and terrain features of the new growing patch, and the tulips were only the first crops we faced challenges with.

Ideally, you would like to have an idea of the microclimate and terrain features of the area you want to put your cut flower production patch in. Don’t be like us if you can help it.

If you aren’t already acquainted with the nuances of the cut flower patch, now is an excellent time to grab a notebook and pencil. Lets begin by mapping out the space and taking notes.

One of the most important factor to consider when determining how to lay out your cut flower patch is sunlight! Since most cut flowers require at least part-sun, with many needing full sun, let’s get into row orientation.

Row Orientation

One of the most asked about considerations when laying out a growing patch is how to orient it to provide your growing area with the most ideal sun exposure. This is particularly important for growers more north of the equator since this does not matter as much as you get closer to the equator.

Aside from outbuildings, trees, or fences that may inhibit sunlight, you should consider the sun's angle. Even more importantly, you should consider the sun's angle at specific times of the year.

Should you orient your growing rows north to south, east to west, or somewhere in between?

This will depend on your distance from the equator and what you are working with regarding the layout of your property.

If you are unsure what your location distance is from the equator, simply Google “What is the latitude of (insert your city and state) from the equator?”

We are located close to the 39th parallel from the equator. This means that in fall and early winter, we get long shadow casts on the property. This isn’t too problematic since most of the field is in its winter slumber.

In general, our property has full sunlight from April through September. We have oriented our rows west to east. We preferred having shorter growing rows rather than a few long ones. We believed having shorter rows would provide more efficient access for harvesting and best utilize our space. When overwintering crops using low tunnels, the low will shade their neighboring ones a little in the darkest part of the winter. However, our distance from the equator doesn’t make this too problematic for the crops but they definitely don’t receive maximum sun exposure at a time of the year when they could use it.

If you are located much further north than where we are, you could run into more problems with sunlight, where low tunnels cast longer shadows north of them then we experience. though, this is only a problem if your rows are orientation east to west. Overwintering crops with this particular row orientation in winter could create a lack of sunlight, which means lacking heat. In this situation, running your rows north to south would allow you to get even sunlight exposure even during the more sunlight-starved months of the year.

The bottom line is that ideally, if you are fairly north of the equator and can orient your rows north to south, you will get the most even sunlight exposure on your crops, even with the use of low tunnels.

Once you have the sunlight figured out for your growing patch, the next consideration to make is wind.

Wind

Wind. The greatest foe on our property and one that is not too kind to cut flowers. This area is one that I consider even more important than light exposure, but that could be because of our personal experiences of fishing low tunnels out of an old elm tree on more than one occasion.

The wind at our property typically blows from south to north, which can wreak havoc on our cut flower field. Due to the constraints of our property's orientation, we had to orient our rows from east to west.

Fortunately, the wind isn’t much of a problem during the peak growing months of summer. We also don’t have much temporary infrastructure in the summer, like low tunnels. Unfortunately, it rears its ugly head during the winter and spring months. It's the time of year when we are battling big temperature swings and frosts; let’s heap up insane winds on top of it! As mentioned, we have fished quite a few low tunnels that the wind had picked up. Every windy night, our nerves still rattle, even if we have stout low tunnels out or not even a low tunnel out in the field. Had we oriented our rows from north to south, we could have lessened our past low tunnel woes by exposing less surface area to the wind.

Every location has its wind patterns. The best action you can take is to observe the wind pattern on your property, ideally for a season. If you cannot follow the wind pattern for an entire season, talking to your neighbors will probably give you more than enough information!

If you are in an exceptionally windy location, consider planting or building windbreaks to help. Also, take appropriate measures to tie down infrastructure, such as using sandbags and landscape staples, burying the edges of tunnels, or, our favorite, rolling up giant pieces of pipe to hold down the tunnels.

Suppose you don’t live in a location with a lot of wind or you aren’t using season extension methods. In that case, you can probably skip over considering the wind direction. Still, if you consistently get high winds in the winter and you will use season extension, I can’t stress enough how important it is to consider this when deciding on your growing bed orientation.

Another critical factor to consider is the sloping of your cut flower patch.

Slopes

We’re not out of the woods yet; another prominent feature to consider is the slope of your cut flower patch. Even the slightest slope can cause problems with flooding from your irrigation.

In our main annual growing area, the rows slightly slope away to the back of the row, less than a 1% grade. Still, this slope is enough to cause the irrigation to flood out the back of the rows since the leftover water from the drips will slowly drain out at the lowest point, the back of the row. This problem has been solved by adding low-pressure drains at the end of the row, but this is still something to consider. We could have avoided this problem if we had oriented the rows slightly differently.

For growing areas with significant slopes, you could be faced with several other issues, such as:

Soil erosion
The challenge to work on or even dangerous
Poor soil quality

Often, growers looking to grow on a slope combat these challenges by terrace producing or through selective crops that thrive under the conditions that come with sloped hillsides.

Unless your property has a major slope of more than 2%, I would not suggest making the slope a deciding factor for row orientation or location.

Up until this point, we have gone over aspects of your property that are relatively out of your control. The last attribute to consider is your future plans.

Current and Future Infrastructure

Along with considering current infrastructure, you will also want to consider any future infrastructure plants. This may not impact your row orientation but can significantly impact where you want your cut flower patch to be.

We have a few last rows we can easily open up to put into production, but we need to hold off since our ultimate vision is to build a couple of outbuildings in that location. We also have other areas on our property that could make for prime growing space but are impeded by the septic tank and wellhead.

Along with pretty visible items, you will also want to take into consideration the items you cannot see on the surface, such as:

Underground electrical wires
Underground internet cables
Irrigation lines

Before committing to breaking ground, we suggest you contact your utility and cable companies to mark the under ground untilities before you possibly make a mistake.

Be sure to not overlook having access to current items on your property that may need to be accessible in the future, and give yourself space to utilize for future projects.

As soon as you have made notes and considerations on all these areas, it is time to officially layout your cut flower patch!

Deciding the Dimensions of Your Cut Flower Rows

Now that the location of the growing space has been selected and the direction of orientation of the rows has been made, it is time to consider the dimensions of your growing rows and walkways.

Determining the size of your growing beds and walking paths is a balancing act between maximizing your growing space and keeping the paths accessible.

Our growing beds at Sierra Flower Farm are 42 inches wide, and our walking paths are 18 inches wide.

There were a few factors that went into settling on the dimensions of our growing rows and walkways, with the biggest factor being that these were the dimensions we settled on at our previous property.

At our last property, we knew we wanted to give up the least amount of space to walkways possible while still being able to walk down them comfortably. It is commonplace to see vegetable market gardens having twelve-inch walking paths, but there is a significant difference in plant size for most vegetables versus flower plants. Twelve-inch walkways can work with arugula and carrots, but when you get into Cosmo or Dahlia plants, the walking paths can get too snug, even with the help of trellising. We decided to give ourselves and the plants a little extra room.

On the other hand, many flower farmers have significantly larger walking paths. Mainly, this is to allow flower carts to squeeze down the walkways or even a lawnmower to mow down weeds or pasture grass in between the rows. For flower farming operations that welcome the public to experience picking their flowers, more extensive walking paths may be needed for the safety of those guests. The amount of space, the equipment you want to be able to utilize, and your flower farm’s business model will all contribute to the width of your pathways.

As far as the forty-two-inch wide growing beds are concerned, it was the maximum width where the center of the row could be easily reached for harvesting. Something must be said about not having to lean out too much to harvest. Taking proper care of our bodies begins now to flower farm for years to come without killing your back.

The industry standard for growing row dimensions is thirty-inch wide rows and eighteen-inch wide walkways. This was standardized by the market garden industry, which heavily influenced the small-scale cut flower industry. The determination for this was the ease of planting, harvesting, and processing the plants for subsequent crops. Tools and equipment are made to work remarkably with thirty-inch wide growing beds.

Unless you are starting with limited space, I recommend going more with industry-standard growing beds. It will allow you to easily find low tunnels and hoop benders that will easily be used with your growing bed width. For us, we custom make much of our infrastructure to accommodate our growing bed’s width.

Hopefully, you aren’t getting crosseyed and tired from decision fatigue at this point. Thankfully, we have finally come to the point of laying out our first row- yay!

Laying Out the First Row

Watch the video below to learn how to lay out your first row, and use the 3, 4, 5 triangle below to learn how! Jump to 9:52 mark to get right to it.

We hope that this post has given you some guidance on how best to layout your cut flower growing patch to suit your property's unique traits.

Laying Out Your Cut Flower Field