SPRING WEEK 3

BOUQUET INGREDIENTS

campanula, nigella, bupleurum

In your bouquets this week you'll find bell-shaped flowers fit to be the home of a fairy princess, a delicate cup for a wee drink, or the upside-down skirt of a tiny doll's gown (complete with little feet inside). Whatever their whimsy reminds you of, I hope you'll love our first ever harvest of campanula.

We planted this trial of campanula with hopes that it would bloom in the dreaded gap for local flowers that I mentioned last week. Despite the fact that campanula will only bloom in Kansas for a one or two week span, filling this gap makes it a wonderful crop for us (plus, she's a real stunner). The reason campanula blooms for such a short time is that this plant is highly sensitive to photoperiod. It requires many days of vegetative growth under short daylength and is triggered to bloom when the days lengthen in spring. Without adequate time under these short days, campanula will bloom prematurely on short, unusable stems.

This also makes campanula what we call a "one-and-done" flower. It's specific response to daylength means it cannot be coaxed into blooming at any time other than when the days lengthen (to around 14 hours of sunlight, specifically) and it will not produce another flush of usable stems after the first cut. In order to meet these requirements, we planted this campanula in our high tunnel last November and have been tending these plants for the past seven months -- through all the wild cards this winter and spring gave us -- to enjoy this one week of blooms.

I couldn't bear the thought of you all missing this special and ephemeral flower, so I hope you'll forgive me for shifting our delivery schedule a bit. Enjoy the blooms and the rest of your week!