Growing and Harvesting Hellebore with Petal Pink Flower Farm

Hi guys, I'm Heather with Petal Pink Flower Farm and it is the middle of February, it's freezing cold and I have been just missing flowers so I decided to come out and scrounge up whatever I had blooming and I knew that I would only have one thing blooming because here if you're gonna have flowers outside, not in a greenhouse, you're gonna have hellebore. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and I literally, even though I was super tuned in to flowers and knew a lot of flowers, never had I ever heard of hellebores in my entire life and I don't know if they're not grown in that area but I had never seen them, I had never heard of them, but fast forward to when we moved to Oregon. I was going for a walk and it was probably the same time of year because no one really had any flowers in this neighborhood. Everything was kind of like sticks and just maybe, you know, some greenery here and there but no color and then I saw this incredible patch of flowers just sticking up kind of along the sidewalk and I had literally never seen anything like this before. I took a picture and did all this research and that's how I discovered hellebores. They are kind of a winter blooming flower so if you live somewhere where they can do well, I think you should 100% get some of these planted in your yard. They're a long-lived perennial, they're pretty easy to grow and like you will be so glad that you have them growing in February like me where you can just come outside and actually literally have flowers blooming in the middle of the winter. I have hellebore growing in a few different spots on my but this here is the first bed that I ever planted. Once I started growing cut flowers, I was like I have to get something going that's blooming in February so that I have something to sell in February. To be honest, I very rarely sell these because I keep them for myself if I'm being really honest. When I first started growing flowers as like professionally as a flower farmer, I sought out the double version of literally every single variety I could find and what that means is think about a daffodil right so a daffodil typically just has a trumpet and then one layer of petals around it that would be considered a single but you guys may have seen all of the really fluffy ruffly varieties of daffodil that are out there. Those are called doubles so there's double daffodils, double tulips, kind of like double a lot of things and I discovered double hellebores. So what you can maybe see here is that instead of having just one layer of petals, this variety has three or four layers of petals. The center is still open but this is considered a double variety of hellebore and this is what I looked for when I first started growing hellebore as a cut flower farmer. But before you run out, don't pause the video and go buy a bunch of double hellebores because I actually have had second thoughts about this moving forward like now that I've been growing these for a few years I would probably not buy this variety for cut flowers and I'll tell you why in a little bit but it's still so beautiful. You can see just those extra layers of petals make it so fluffy and this entire bed here is a few different varieties of double hellebore and these are all from it's called the wedding party series. I don't know the specific names of each flower but if you look up the wedding party series you will see that they're all doubles which means that they have all of these extra petals and they're kind of fluffy and ruffly. Hellebore grow in these clumps that just come straight up from the ground and then all of these stems right here actually all have flowers on them and then these kind of tipped down stems have last year's leaves. Now there are some people who tell you that in the fall you should go through and cut off all of your dead leaves and that that just really cleans the plant up but then there are some people who will tell you to leave these leaves on the plant and that they actually help feed the plant for the next year's bloom. Either way what ends up happening after a long time of these leaves laying around is they get a little bit gross and it is okay to remove those leaves because the plant is going to make new leaves. So I'm going to just like remove some of these yucky old dead leaves here and those can just go to the compost pile so you can see how removing the leaves will get it really cleaned up and like looking a little bit more fancy but what this plant is going to do after it puts up its flowers it seems a little backwards but it'll put up its flowers first and then it's going to put up new leaves. So even if I remove all of these leaves these yucky dead leaves from last year this plant is still going to have leaves by this fall. It's going to just generate a whole new set of leaves. All right so let's talk about harvest stage for hellebores. Now these tend to have multiple flowers on each stem which is one of the amazing things about them and you can see all of these little fluffy guys inside of here are called stamens. So if on a stem all of the flowers have their stamens attached it is not ready to be cut. It'll even if it's like nice and stiff like this when you cut it it's going to be really prone to flopping over and wilting like within 24 hours. So what you want to do is find ones that have started to develop this kind of seed pod in the center. So this flower you can see that most of the stamens these little fluffy guys have fallen off and that means that this is mature enough to cut and you want at least one flower on the stem to have this look right. So this will end up becoming a seed pod but you want at least one flower to have dropped its stamens. That will tell you that it's probably going to be fine and you can leave this on the plant for quite some time. So these flowers kind of become more leathery and thick as they're developing their seed pods. So this will probably be fine as I wait for these other stamens to fall off. So unlike a lot of flowers where you're rushing to kind of cut them at the right time, hellebores are a flower that you can actually kind of leave on the plant and not be super stressed about cutting because they age just fine usually and you know it gives you time to come out and cut them kind of like as needed. I'm gonna go through this bed and cut some stems and then I'm gonna take you over to a different bed where I have a totally different type of hellebore growing and show you kind of the difference between the two. So I'm just looking at each stem and I'm pretty much the biggest flower to see if it's dropped its stamens yet. A lot of these have not so we're a little bit early but I know that some of them are ready so I'm gonna be able to bring some of these inside to enjoy. So I'll be honest I thought there were gonna be a lot more stems to harvest out here but even just a few is gonna be enough to cheer me up. Okay I've got a few stems there aren't a ton ready but these ones look pretty good and I'm walking out to my second hellebore area which is brand new. We planted these last year so I don't have a ton of flowers but I do want to just show you the difference between this wedding party series and this new series that I planted last year. So we have another raised bed and these are also under a tree. I try to put the hellebores always in an area that gets at least a little bit of shade. They can do just fine with full sun if you make sure that they're mulched really well and that they get like lots of water but they do kind of like think about it as wanting to live in the forest. They kind of want to mimic like the forest floors and we pretty much always plant them in raised beds because that just works better here on our farm. But this is the winter ballet series and this one is called Katie. So this is winter ballet Katie and these flowers are absolutely enormous. I will compare them for you to the ones that we just cut but they're they're just absolutely massive and you can see that these are singles. So I've cut this flower and again I know that I can cut this flower and that it's going to be fine because you can see here it's dropped all of its stamens on one and basically two of the blooms. These are just hanging on there. So they're still these guys still have their little fluff inside of them but because a couple of the flowers have matured to this point I know that this is not going to be super wilty when I bring it in the house. So here is the monster stem that I just cut off of that plant and I'm going to show you compared to the double variety that is the wedding party series. So can you kind of see like these are just like jumbo version and these are much smaller and petite. There's nothing wrong with that but that's just how different they can be from one one variety to the next. So again I don't actually have a problem with this wedding party series at all but it just feels like this winter ballet is much more conducive to selling to florists which is what we do. So I actually plan to move all of my wedding party hellebores which are the ones that I showed you at the beginning of the video into my yard because I think they're so beautiful but I just don't think I want to be growing these professionally because you have to leave hellebores outside in the you know basically winter weather the snow the rain the wind all of that stuff until they are mature. These wedding party variety which again is so beautiful with these double petals but the double petals are a lot more delicate with these little pointy ends and their little ruffles so these tend to be a little raggedy by the time they're ready to be harvested whereas the single varieties like this are just a lot more sturdy. You can probably just see by looking at it like these are pretty leathery and they're not as delicate so when these get left out in the winter weather they hold up a lot better. So as a cut flower farmer who I'm trying to sell basically perfect blooms to my florist customers this makes a lot more sense. So we are leaning more towards varieties like this for our flower farming adventures and again this is winter ballet and the other variety that's just like a must grow if you are growing cut flowers is the ice and roses and it's not ice and roses it's ice like the letter n roses. They have a lot of different varieties within that series and they're very similar to this. They're super big the flowers are more like forward facing whereas a lot of other hellebore varieties are downward facing so this is obviously more conducive to flower arranging right? So our florists love those outward facing blooms and they're single varieties that just bloom really prolifically. I wish I had some ice and roses to show you but ours are only they're baby plants they only have leaves on them we've just planted them so hopefully in like two or three more years I'll be able to make another video showing you my fabulous haul of um you know varieties like this but as it is right now I only have a few plants that are just starting to bloom. Okay I have my flowers I already feel happier they just are so beautiful but I'm not quite ready to arrange with these or if I was selling these to a florist they're not ready to go out the door yet because I do need to condition them and there's a little tiny trick that you may have seen that you usually want to do with your hellebore that will help these guys suck up a lot of water and prevent them from wilting. Once you get a hellebore flower harvested at the right stage and conditioned properly it can last for like weeks in the vase they're very long lasting flowers you just have to make sure that you're handling them right after you cut them to give yourself like maximum base life. Okay we are going to condition these hellebore plants so we made sure that we cut them at the right time right so each stem has at least one flower that is developing a seed pod and now we're going to just help them hydrate. I have these flowers which I cut I'm going to give them a fresh snip at the bottom which just makes sense right I also have a knife out here and I have two vases of water this one is full of hot water and I don't boil it I don't actually take the temperature of the water but I do just use the hottest water that comes out of our tap and our tap water gets pretty warm it feels good out here so I have a base of warm water and I have a base of cold water and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to score the stem along like the bottom maybe six inches a couple of times just to open that up and allow a lot more water to come in so I'm not going super deep I'm almost just like scratching kind of through that top surface of the stem once this is scored I just put it in the warm water so I'm going to let that sit in here for like 10 to 15 minutes and the warm water is going to just rush through all of those little openings that I just made and really really hydrate this stem it doesn't need to be in warm water forever we're just kind of giving it a burst of hydration basically so everything is going to get scored put in the warm water and then after about 10-15 minutes I will transfer them to the cold water now if these were going to florists I would put them in the warm water then in the cold water and once they land in the cold water they would go in the cooler for 24 hours and the reason that I don't send out any hellebore flowers without that 24 hour period in the cooler is that you may sometimes still get a stem or two that flops and droops now later in the season like once I've let these sit on the plants and everything has a seed pop and the petals are really leathery then I don't really worry about that as much but because of quality control and wanting to just provide our florists with the very best I always let hellebore sit in the cooler for 24 hours and then we look through each stem it's very obvious if your hydration didn't take your hellebore will just be a limp noodle just you just know that's for the compost pile and we do have that happen occasionally even when we do all of this every once in a while that will happen with like one out of every 20 to 30 stems so that's why we do the 24 hour period in the coolers that's only for my florists again these are for me I'm just gonna do this hot water thing cold water thing and then they're coming in the house so that we can enjoy them so here's another stem I'll give you a different angle again we're gonna just recut the bottom so that's a nice fresh cut and then I have my knife and what I'm not trying to do is slice the stem aggressively I'm just basically gonna let the tip of this knife poke in and then really carefully drag it down it's not necessarily going to be perfect but it's just kind of like a scratch to open up the outside layer of the stem it can be really hard to show this on video because again it's just like a really light scratch we're just scoring it we're not going in deep you just want to open that up a little bit so that it can absorb as much water as possible so the first time I did this it felt really hard but I promise it will get easier if you just practice just popping that knife through the top layer and dragging it slowly down the stem okay here's my base of beautiful winter hellebore I'm super excited so these are still in the warm water I'm gonna leave them in the warm water and go inside and warm up myself and then in about 10 minutes I will transfer them to their base I'll be able to arrange them and enjoy them for hopefully at least a couple of weeks so I hope that this inspires you to go out and find some hellebore plants right now at our local Home Depot there's a ton of really beautiful single varieties that look like this in all different colors of pink and burgundy I order mine as plants from like wholesale nurseries but hellebore is a really common plant to find at your local nursery so hopefully you feel inspired to go out and get some if you don't already have them get them in the ground so that next winter you can enjoy beautiful blooms like this