STATICE, EASY AND PROFITABLE

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Are you beating your brains trying to figure out a good homestead cash crop for this spring?

by Lenny White

For the past few years at our southern Oregon organic flower farm, we've grown hundreds of flower species and cultivars that we sell—both fresh and dried—to florists, supermarkets, businesses, offices, and individuals. Naturally, we continually seek to maximize the returns from our limited garden space, so we are always looking for any crop that is easy to grow and sell. One such discovery is statice, a plant whose several varieties are in the genus Limonium .

Having also been involved in a vegetable truck farm, we've had the opportunity to compare dollar yields per acre of the usual vegetables to those of our flower crops... and flowers, among them statice, rate much higher than vegetables in dollars earned. In addition, statice is easy to grow, is a cinch to sell, and offers little risk because it's easily dried. In other words, we think it's the ideal crop for the small-scale grower.

CHOOSING THE SEED

Statice seed can be purchased in single colors or as a mixture. The best colors, from the viewpoint of customer preference, are the roses, pinks, blues, apricots, and purples... with yellows and whites being the least desired. We plant half of our area in the individual colors and the other half in a mixture, giving us a usable proportion of yellows and whites.

You'll find that statice seed comes either "clean," called easy-grow, or still embedded in the dried flower heads, which we crush as finely as possible with our fingers. We've grown many strains from a lot of different seed producers without developing any particular preferences. However, because some colors are peculiar to particular strains, we grow small quantities of as many types as we can find, with the exception of dwarf varieties. These we avoid, since—as flower sellers—we need plants with long stems.

Seed catalogs may offer annual and perennial types of statice. Limonium suworowii , for example, is an annual that produces valuable blooms for dried arrangements, though it's more fickle to grow than Limonium sinuata . Limonium lacifolia and Statice tatarica are both hardy perennials that produce very airy, delicate blooms for fresh and dried arrangements, and as fillers, they are often considered superior to the popular gypsophila. Both of these varieties are relatively uncommon and in great demand, but they require a year before the first blooms are produced.

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