Our growing season officially started last month, and it has been lovely working with fresh flowers again. How I missed them so. Spring flowers are among my favorite cut flowers, and seeing them emerge and bloom after a long, cold winter is truly a boon to the soul. It’s also wonderful to see the pollinators returning to the farm. Now that the growing season is in full swing, it’s time to bring back our monthly What’s Growing on in the Garden series. I love to share what’s been growing in the garden each month, along with all the triumphs, failures, and experiences along the way. April certainly had its ups and downs, but there was also so much beauty.
Mother Nature and Spring’s fickle weather really threw us some curveballs last month. In mid-April, we experienced several days in a row where the temperature reached close to ninety degrees. Spring flowers enjoy growing slowly in cool weather, so when we get a record heat like this, it stresses the plants. Tulips will respond to high temperatures by opening quickly and blooming much earlier than they normally would. I always plant early, mid, and late-season tulip varieties to extend the bloom window. However, in these unseasonably warm temperatures, the tulips started opening in tandem, and several weeks’ worth of tulips bloomed in about three days.
Flower farmers harvest tulips when they are still in bud to lengthen vase life, as once the flowers are fully open, they won’t last as long. I harvested four to five times a day to ensure the tulips were picked at the right stage, and my cooler filled up quickly. Some of the later varieties were a bit smaller and shorter than they should have been because they didn’t have time to develop fully. We treat our tulips as annuals, planting them each year, and harvest our tulips with the bulb still on. This gives us the highest-quality flowers with longer stems and better storage life. Once the tulips are in the cooler, the clock starts ticking, as their quality decreases after 3-4 weeks. We had also lost several hundred tulips to a fungal disease called Tulip Fire, so between the weather and disease, growing our specialty tulip crop this season was a challenge.
Temperatures dealt another blow when we experienced two nights of frost after the heat wave. We went from shade cloth to frost cloth within 72 hours with a 65-degree temperature swing. Temperatures dipped into the mid-twenties, damaging many delicate buds. We lost a significant number of our narcissus, some scorched by heat and others claimed by frost. The buds never opened and just turned to mush. Many of our foliage plants were affected, including our smoke bush shrubs, hydrangeas, and lemon balm. Our peonies and dicentra slumped over from the cold, but seemed to recover eventually. Time will tell if the buds were affected.
We were also very concerned about our blueberry crop, as buds were just about to open when the frost hit. Many fruit farmers in the Hudson Valley suffered devastating losses from frosty nights and fear that entire crops, including apples and peaches, will be lost this season. We are optimistic that our blueberries were saved, as the buds hadn’t quite opened before the frost. Again, time will tell.
April is all about specialty tulips and narcissus, and despite the challenges, I still managed to harvest armloads of these beautiful flowers each day. We grew 29 varieties of specialty tulips and over a dozen varieties of narcissus this season. The tulips were exquisite and reminded me of why they are among my favorite cut flowers. My favorites are double varieties that look like peonies, such as Pink Star, Copper Image, and Drumline, and, of course, all the parrots, such as Super, Amazing, Black, Silver, and Apricot. I feel that these look like works of art when they open.
We also grew two new (to us!) varieties that stood out this season. We fell head over heels in love with Verona, a buttery-yellow, fragrant double tulip with a scent reminiscent of lemon sorbet, and Katinka, a gorgeous double lavender variety with a dusky antique finish. These two will definitely be on the grow list again next year!
Our heirloom narcissus also began blooming in April. It was lovely to see my favorite varieties blooming again. Sir Winston Churchill, Gay Tabor, Geranium, Stainless, Obdam, and Pink Charm are among my favorites, and many of these have a lovely fragrance. We’ve increased our daffodil plot yearly and have planted over a thousand bulbs. We added a new variety in the fall called Thalia. This heirloom has creamy-white, fragrant blooms that often appear in multiples on each stem. They are a nice addition to our narcissus collection. We’ve already ordered several new varieties to plant this fall for 2027, including White Explosion, Can Can Girl, and Ice King. We can’t wait to see and share these beauties next season. As a cut flower farm, we harvest them before they fully open, so I’ve yet to see a thousand daffodils blooming at once on the farm. However, I do enjoy them in the vase, where they fill the house with a clean, spring fragrance.
While the tulips and narcissus were the stars of the show in April, there were also a few supporting cast members.
Gravetye Giant Leucojum made an appearance, and I love the tiny, whimsical white-and-green bells, which pair beautifully with other spring blooms in arrangements.
Our Hellebores also bloomed in April. Two years ago, we planted several varieties as a trial and have been adding to the collection since. This season, when they bloomed, I continued to practice harvesting techniques and tested vase life. They did beautifully. They tend to wilt if not properly conditioned, so I needed to practice and gain confidence before sharing them with our community. I am pretty smitten with them and have added several more varieties to the shade garden this month.
Our early-season lilacs also made an appearance. First to bloom was a beautiful white variety named Betsy Ross. I adore her dainty white florets and heady fragrance. Each season, when I take that first whiff of freshly harvested lilacs, I am transported back to my childhood, watching my grandmother and mother tend to the lilac bushes. The fragrance is nostalgic for so many of us.
With all of these beautiful blooms coming in from the field, I couldn’t resist taking an afternoon to myself to make an arrangement. I’ve been inspired by Erin Benzakein of Floret, who encourages us to take time for ourselves and arrange our flowers. Years ago, she and a friend made one arrangement a week throughout the growing season, using what was growing on their farms and sharing the results on a blog. The movement was so popular that it inspired her first book, A Year in Flowers. If you read my gardening goals for 2026, you know that one of them was to spend more time on arranging. So, in an effort to reach that goal, I made this seasonal arrangement to represent what was growing on our farm. I view arranging as an art form and a creative outlet, using flowers as a type of medium. When I work with flowers in this way, it calms me, and I can be in the moment as all the outside noise and stress melt away.
Besides harvesting flowers in April, I kept busy sowing dahlia seeds and waking up tubers for our dahlia breeding project. I planted seeds that I’d saved from both open-pollinated plants and crosses that I had made myself. I’m so excited to see what new dahlia flowers bloom from these seeds! I’m also looking forward to watching our seedlings from last year progress. It’ll still be a few months before the dahlias bloom, but in the meantime, it’s fun to imagine what new blooms will emerge.
There you have a recap of what was growing on the farm in April. What’s growing on in your garden?
THISTLE BE THE DAY 