Deciding What to Plant: Sunflowers or Dahlias
Have you ever had an empty space in your field and wondered what to plant? Many just plant what they enjoy growing the most or maybe what’s easiest to grow. But when you are running a cut flower business, you gotta look at it from a business perspective. What flower will provide the most yield. And when I say yield, I’m talking about profit.
I’m in this exact situation now so I thought I would take you behind the scenes of how I decide.
Here’s the deal…I have a bed sitting empty and have 2 choices:
Plant a dahlia variety that I don’t care for (actually, I despise it) but does well in dahlia tuber sales.
Plant a sunflower crop and sell the 100 excess tubers in a quick sale.
First, let’s talk about the dahlia variety because I’m sure you wanna know! It’s A La Mode - a white and orange variety that attracts every Japanese beetle in the surrounding 30-mile radius. It attracts sooo many, I don’t cut a single flower during the season. Yes, I could organza bag every bloom to protect them, but I don’t have the energy or desire to do so!
Option 1: I can fit 100 tubers in one bed, and I have 100 A La Mode tubers available. I can plant them, not cut a single stem and dig them in the fall for their tubers. It is a good tuber producer at 4ish sellable tubers per clump and stores well. I sell this variety at $10. Assuming I have 4 sellable tubers per plant, I would have 400 A La Mode tubers to sell at $10 each which is $4,000 in sales. If I get 3 sellable tubers per plant, I would have 300 tubers to sell which is $3,000 in sales. Sales would fall somewhere between $3,000 - $4,000.
Option 2: I have sunflower seeds in my seed stash that I could plant in the bed instead. At 4” spacing, I can plant 12 rows of 48 or 576 sunflowers. (The bed measures 4’ x 16’.) If I sell them at $2 each and sell 90% of them, that’s $1,036 in sales.
I would then have a “flash sale” of tubers since it is early May and offer the A La Mode tubers at $7 to move them and to move them quick. 100 tubers at $7 is $700. If I take the proceeds from the sunflowers of $1,036 and the proceeds from the tuber sale of $700, option 2 yields $1,736 in sales.
$3,500ish versus $1,736. It looks like I’m planting a bed of A La Mode tubers.
To keep this example simple, I did not consider labor or costs. I can plant sunnies in the same amount of time as dahlias but there is definitely more labor involved in splitting tubers. But with such a difference between these 2 numbers, I don’t think it’s necessary to dig into the nuances. The answer is obvious!
A few key takeaways:
You should look at the profit potential for each flower you grow to help you decide what to plant.
My love of dahlia A La Mode is non-existent! But I will grow it because my customers love it.
There is good income potential when it comes to dahlia tubers. If I plant a bed of A La Mode every season, it will generate $3,000-4,000 every year.