Full Keel Farm

10/12/2026

My jeans may have permanent orange stains but I’ve really come to love marigold season. Grateful for a clear forecast this week and that the field is already much less soggy than over the weekend.

On the practical side, even though there’s a lot we bunch in the field as we process we don’t ever bunch marigolds in the field- even though we try to grow cultivars with strong necks it’s just easy to break some moving the buckets from the field to the cooler so I prefer to just bunch as we pull orders. We do trim them all to length in the field which makes bunching much faster later.

10/08/2026

Working through lots of rainy weather this week, which is definitely not the best way to ease back into a speedy harvest routine or get much of anything checked off the to-do list. Marigolds are probably my favorite warm season crop to harvest, because they are so uniform, but wet marigolds are a big drag to harvest. The foliage sticks to everything, and the bloom holds water really well & we’ve got to get them dried before they go in the cooler which means extra handling.

These rows of orange & gold are just starting to open, I think most of what I cut this morning were plants that we missed pinching so they were a few days ahead, but there are so many beautiful marigolds coming!

09/08/2026

The heat, humidity & never ending list of fall tasks aren’t letting up, but sooner or later we will have some nice cool mornings and it won’t be 110 in the tunnel by 10:30 am. There are so many miscellaneous tasks at this time of year, with the major task of cool season seeding & planting looming on the horizon! Here’s a few things we are up to this week.

08/02/2026

One step we took to make paperpot planting on the new farm as efficient as possible was to set our bed lengths strategically so that we were planting beds with increments of full trays. This means that we set our bed length to 95’, about 15-20 ft shorter than on our original farm where the goal was to maximize the use of the available space.

Now we know that two 6” trays plants one bed, and there is so much planning and mental math that is eliminated- I’m not trying to seed partial trays of different things, or seeding full trays that we end up throwing away seedlings from.

Because everything is in increments of two, it also helps to quickly look at what’s in the prop house and do the math for how many beds that’s planting.

07/31/2026

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how quickly things can grow & flower in the fall here. Certain crops like celosia take longer, but for marigolds, zinnias & cosmos this is what we expect for our first couple successions.

For me the takeaway isn’t just that things grow quickly, but that a condensed timeline means that our workflow needs to be organized & smooth to keep everything on track. Looking at the data is also a reminder to be patient, and not panicked. Every fall I look at the plants and look at the calendar and can’t believe they are going to flower when they are supposed to, get myself stressed out, and then they inevitably do flower on schedule. I have even obsessively compared photos from the previous year to my current plants side-by-side, not believing that the plants are just a few weeks out from blooming.

07/27/2026

We grow warm season annuals 2x per year- in the spring for a late spring/early summer flowering, and summer planted for a mid-fall flowering. Even though the crops are the same, the way we grow them ends up being pretty different. When we are planting warm season annuals out in February and March, it’s before our last frost date, and right now we are planting out during the hottest time of the year. Over the next several days for example, our night time low is 79F. Our 6” soil temp during the afternoon is close to 90F. The pest & disease pressure is significantly different than our late spring production window. Because of this I treat these plantings much differently, and these are 5 ways they are different.

First is less a production one and more a crop choice one, but we grow a lot more marigolds in the fall because I love them, it’s the season for them, and we do some bulk marigold orders outside of our normal florist sales.

In our spring season, almost nothing in the field is sprayed regularly- I scout and we may treat if we notice a larger population, but most of our pest prevention is focused on the more premium crops in the tunnel. In the fall the combined effects of heat stress & stress from these insects can really affect how the plant is growing & our flower quality.

What do we spray? I use Botanigard, it has worked very well here when don’t regularly and it’s compatible with certain biological controls like the mite predators.

We also never spray zinnias for foliar disease in the spring, we do have some disease but it’s late in the season and late enough in the growth cycle that we can harvest nice stems from the plants. In the fall we see signs of bacterial leaf spot as early as 3-4 weeks after planting, and if we don’t manage for it, it just progresses faster than the plant growth cycle.

My preference is to use Cease, we are able to control things well enough with the product.

The number of stems a zinnia produces is not the same as the number of florist quality stems a zinnia produces, and in the fall we get substantially fewer of those high quality stems per plant. All the factors working against us mean there are more flowers that hav

07/17/2026

I always think of our production cycle as going from late July to early June, which means we are just about to begin another production year. I’ve shared some of these sheets in stories before, but now that I can write a caption for each picture it seemed like the perfect time to make a permanent feed post.

The biggest thing I had to learn along the way was that the best method is the one that works for my farm- there are so many approaches to organizing and documenting crop planning, and this is what works for my brain, for our scale, and for who I need to communicate and share information with.

The primary unit that the farm & my brain operates on is “zone.” We have multiple production blocks, and in the new field each 0.5 acre block is divided into six zones with six 32”x 95’ rows.

For my initial crop planning, I use this template where each sheet represents one zone, and I use the sticky notes to organize the crops within the zones, moving things around while I’ve got all the sheets laid out in front of me. For me this is the most helpful way to visualize & organize the big picture.

The hand written crop plan then becomes this block scale field map. Each column is a week # and each row is a bed. The colors signify different parts of the production cycle, which I base on my records but am not too concerned about having perfect. This provides a visual overview of what is happening over time in the block- I can look at what weeks we will be making a big push on seeding or bed prep, and look for where there may be gaps in flowering. This is also the primary sheet my husband & I use to coordinate our work, and to make sure that he’s able to plan his tractor/prep work. Using this map I also flag each zone in the field with when it’s going to be planted, so he can quickly look at the flagging tape if he’s mowing/shaping beds etc and make sure he’s prioritizing the correct beds.

I use the crop plan to generate weekly seeding lists, which just list crop, cultivar, # of trays and the chain size. As you can see from the scribbles and highlighter these seeding lists are the goal for the week, and not always reality, and things shift around based on weather, sc

06/17/2026

Recycling this post from last fall so it’s easier to find these strategies I shared about small steps we take to help overcome the challenges of the fall season. This post is specific to marigolds, but it’s the same practices for our other fall crops like zinnias.

The fall growing season is filled with challenges, it’s just a tricky time of year to grow flowers here in Florida. Temperatures are still really high when we are starting seedlings, pest & disease pressure can be high, and of course the hurricanes…

We can’t change any of those environmental factors, but there are steps we take to help reduce their impact and limit the stress the plants are experiencing. These steps aren’t that difficult, but they do mean that for us growing in the fall is more labor intensive.

06/15/2026

Last fall we trialed 9 different marigold cultivars, and collected tons of production data. It was incredibly fun to compare similar cultivars and growing them side by side gave me the chance to really evaluate traits that I am interested in.

What does that data mean for this year?

First, I’m making small adjustments to when we are seeding each succession, and reducing the interval between successions to more closely align peak production with late October demand. We are growing 5 cultivars instead of 9, focusing on top performers for each color. To keep them out of the rain and hopefully eliminate some issues with browning, we are giving ‘White Swan’ tunnel space, and we will squeeze in a quick crop of them before our cool season plugs go in. Finally, we really dialed in our pest management and kept thrips & whiteflies well managed during a time of year we usually have a large population increase. We kept up with our spraying schedule & that has to be a priority again this year!

06/12/2026