Planning a flower farm isn’t easy – there’s no question about that. From choosing varieties and calculating how many seeds to purchase to figuring out when to start each variety indoors, flower farm planning can be mind boggling.
Fortunately, there are a few (free!) tools out there that can help make your planning a little bit easier, and get your flower farm off to an amazing start.
Find Your Frost Dates
Whether you’re a first-time flower farmer or a seasoned pro, you’ve likely heard about the importance of a last frost date. This is the date – unique to your area - when there’s unlikely to be another frost and you’re safe to plant your seedlings outdoors.
While there are plenty of tools that give you a single date using your zip code, none come close to the level of detail and accuracy that LastFrostDate.com gives. It uses your device’s location to locate the nearest weather station, uses decades of historical data from that specific station, and provides a range of frost dates at different risk levels. You can view other weather stations and really dive into the data, figuring out the date that works best for you based on your risk tolerance as a flower farmer.
And of course, it’s totally free!
Seed Quantity Calculator
Remember back in school during math class when you thought “I’ll never use this in real life!” Well, flower farming sure proves that wrong! There’s almost too much math. One of the hardest yet most fundamental calculations to do is to determine how many seeds you need to plant of each variety.
You can try figuring out the area you want the plant to take up, and then figure out the number of rows and then the spacing between rows and also between plants and… it’s complicated!
Fortunately, Seed Quantity Calculator that makes it easy. You can enter either your growing area or just the dimensions, put the germination rate for your seeds, pick row spacing and plant spacing, and voila – Seed Quantity Calculator instantly spits out EXACTLY how many seeds you should start, no math required
Besides being totally free, it also works with both metric units and imperial units for our friends in the United States.
All-In-One Season Planner: Bloom Manager
If you’re a flower farmer you’ve probably drawn up a season plan on paper before – with poorly scribbled shapes for beds and random notes in the margins. You’ve probably also tried to figure out when to start your plants indoors, when to pinch them, when to harden them off, when to transplant them, and – of course – when they’ll be ready for harvest. You also probably haven’t had much success staying organized with your hand-drawn masterpiece!
Fortunately, there’s a free tool for that! Perhaps the biggest and most impressive of the bunch, Bloom Manager is a free planning platform built specifically for flower farmers. It helps you plan the layout for your farm and automatically generates growing tasks based on the plants you choose and your local frost dates. You create a plan, enter your frost dates (why not use LastFrostDate.com for that!) and then you can simply draw your plantings where you want them - Bloom Manager will automatically generate tasks specific to the plants and your farm.
There’s a calendar and timeline to follow-along with your tasks and even a handy “Bloom Forecast” to know when your flowers will be in bloom. There are far too many other amazing features for flower farmers to go over in just one post!
Bloom Manager is free to use, but you’re limited to 25 plantings on their free plan. If you have a bigger farm, they offer a very reasonable $9/mo (as of writing) subscription that allows for unlimited plans, plantings and a ton of built-in presets to make planning a breeze.
Summary
Planning your flower farm is hard; but a few free tools can make it a whole lot easier. Now, you can focus on marketing your farm and growing your beautiful blooms! Know of any other tools that are helpful for flower farmers? Leave a comment below!