Lisianthus is a gorgeously ruffled, ridiculously long-lasting cut flower. It is native to Texas and so blooms in the blazing heat of summer which gives it a unique draw for cut flower growers in the South. But despite its nativeness, the fancy bred floral types have a few requirements that can make their production layered in complexity. Here's how we grow them on our farm.
Though Lisianthus loves blooming in the heat under long-day lengths, it prefers to start out in cool weather, which makes an Autumn or early Spring planting essential here in North Texas. They take an extremely long-time in the seed tray, 12-15 weeks, and can easily dampen off or become stressed. Several farmers I know have cracked the code on growing them from seed but I find it difficult to keep on top of during the busy end-of-summer seeding season. I also have very limited space for seed-starting, so I buy plugs from Farmer Bailey. The high sale price of lisianthus more than covers the cost for plugs.
Through-out my farming years, I have planted them in December, January, February, and March. I've found that the best quality harvests tend to come from crops that have fully overwintered. Now, I usually plant them at the end of October or sometime in November. If the plugs arrive and it's still blazing hot outside (We recorded a temperature of 90F just last week - Oct 23rd and the week before that, it reached almost 100F) I place them under grow lights in my cooler set to 55F to keep for a week or two until the temperature falls. This isn't ideal but it's much better than planting them in such hot temperatures which can easily fry the baby seedlings. Our winters tend to be mild and dry so we space our lisianthus tightly at 3-4 inches. This also helps crowd out the weeds. We don't use landscape fabric yet rarely have weed issues.
Lisianthus is susceptible to fusarium wilt and we have dealt with that on our farm. Two out of the seven years of growing lisianthus, we had a total crop failure due to wilt. Many farmers I know follow the suggested guidelines of dipping the roots into root shield and still suffer crop loss, so we don't dip them. I don't want the extra cost, labor, and exposure to chemicals if it's not going to help anyway. Many other farmers swear by it as a prevention method, so the choice is yours. Instead, we never plant lisianthus in the same row twice. We have 11 field rows on our small farm and use one row for lisianthus so that's 11 years before it'll be in the same place twice :) We solarize the row with plastic all summer (our crazy heat helps this!) and have begun to spray Mikrobs immediately after transplant to help fight root pathogens.
Lisianthus is sensitive to calcium deficiency and sometimes that can actually look like fusarium. So before you pull the plant, consider spraying something like cal/mag or (what we do) a homemade KNF formula for calcium. If it's a particularly wet and cloudy season, plants can have difficulty retaining nutrients due to transpiration. Even though we have clay soil that is naturally rich in nutrients, we have to watch out for deficiencies in long periods of winter wetness. Years where we've had a dry winter have produced some of my best lisianthus crops.
We could grow lisianthus in our tunnel to mitigate the potential difficulty of a wet winter but the tunnel gets extremely hot, even in winter, and lisianthus likes a cool start, so we've found it best to field grow it. It is rather hardy, down to 20F, though under one row cover, it has survived single digit temperatures without problem. We've also left it uncovered when the rare snow event occurred and it is unbothered by the snow (so long as there's at least an inch of it).
There's many varieties of lisianthus to choose from so you may have to do some trialing on your own to find your preferred variety. We found both Arena and ABC grow too tall and tend to flop over even with double-netting. We prefer Corelli for its manageable habit while still providing impressive stem length. Some preliminary research from Japan suggests that Voyage may have more resistance to wilt, so we grow that variety along with Corelli. Different groups have different bloom times, but in our hot Texas weather, the difference is only a week or two. The lisianthus gets excited by the heat and they all tend to flush at once, so we don't succession plant.
Lisianthus absolutely requires support in our hot climate, often two layers of netting. It's important to keep on top of support since the plants tend to shoot-up quickly once we reach 14 hrs of daylength. I don't pinch the plants in juvenile stage but I will pinch out the first center bloom to get a nice spray of 4 to 5 blooms on one stem. Most years, I get a nice robust first flush, then wilt arrives before a second flush. A handful of years, I've had a nice second flush too. They have never perennialized well for me. The second year harvest was always dismal. Not worth the space! I now get fresh plugs every Autumn.
I hope this gives you some helpful insight into how we grow lisianthus. Overall, I find them relatively easy to grow - I don't have to cover/uncover often, they aren't prone to diseases like botrytis or powdery mildew and I don't have pest or weed pressure with this crop. They are easy to harvest and sell, and the price I can get per stem is just lovely. :) I hope you can find your own success story with lisianthus!
Happy growing,
Sarah Jo
Resources:
The ASCFG's member section has lots of useful information, just use the search bar to look up "lisianthus".
Julia from Full Keel Farm has great lisianthus seeding and growing tips on her instagram. You can also hire her for one-on-one consultation via her website.
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