Dried flowers are not my thing, as I said in the previous post here. But statice, like strawflower, is valuable to any farmer-florist and it will always be included in my garden.
In my climate and soil, I find statice seedlings are slow to get established. But once they do, you’d better step back, because they explode with flower stalks. The blooms are easier to keep than strawflowers. I don’t bother with QuickDip and although I usually put them in hydration solution in the cooler, neither is absolutely necessary. If our cooler is full, I keep them in a bucket on the floor and they do fine.
I love the color of Seeker Rose and it’s the easiest to combine with other flowers in bouquets. Seeker Light Yellow is too bright and lemony, making it harder to blend in a bouquet except as tiny accents. Seeker Blue and QIS Apricot are excellent, but Rose is best of the varieties I’ve tried. Next year I’ll try a white variety.
In 2022 I’m going to try direct seeding some of our statice. So far, I’ve always started seeds in trays in our “greenhouse” (shelves in the garage with lights and a heat mat). But I’ve seen a few volunteers growing well in our planting bed (volunteers are plants that come up on their own from seeds that drop to the ground during the previous season). And I’ve seen how much our greenhouse seedlings struggle to get established after planting outside, so now I wonder if it’s the transplanting process that causes a lot of stress. Some plants are like that – they do better with direct seeding because they don’t like to be transplanted; poppies and larkspur are examples. I’ll try direct seeding some of our 2022 statice and let you know how it goes.
