The case for growing something just because you want to

Photo by Belle Sofia on Unsplash

Sweet peas seem to be in the zeitgeist at the moment. At least in my inbox.

News of the Sweet Pea Society Show in England. An article about Milli Proust's sweet pea seeds in The Times. The bouquet carried by Harriet Sperling when she married the King's nephew last weekend was filled with them.

I'm excited to be back on trend, with the UK at least. After skipping sweet peas last season, I have a stack of new varieties ready to sow that I don't strictly need.

But a garden without sweet peas just isn't as much fun.

What trial crops actually do for you

There's a version of good business advice that goes: focus on what sells, cut out what doesn't, grow a few varieties really well.

That advice isn't wrong. But applied too rigidly to a growing practice, it can slowly drain the life out of it.

The flower growers I know who are building genuinely distinctive businesses — ones where people say "I'd know your flowers anywhere" — nearly all have some version of a trial bed. A corner of the garden, a few rows on the edge of the main production area, a pot on the deck. Somewhere they're growing things they're curious about, not things they've already proven.

That curiosity shows up in their work in ways that are hard to copy. It gives them something to talk about with customers. It generates the surprise variety — the one that turns up in a bouquet and makes someone ask "what is that?" It keeps the growing practice feeling like something you chose, not something that happened to you.

There's a word for what trial crops protect: distinctiveness. The thing that makes what you grow yours — not just seasonal and local and lovely, but specifically, recognisably yours.

Where our seeds come from — and why it matters

Most of the seeds we grow commercially come from a handful of very large companies. In the ornamental flower world, names like Ball Horticultural, Syngenta Flowers, Sakata, and Dümmen Orange dominate the market. Globally, four agrochemical companies now control around 60% of all commercial seed sales — down from roughly a thousand independent seed companies fifty years ago.

This isn't entirely a bad story. Commercial breeding programmes have given us genuinely marvellous flowers. The lisianthus selections, the snapdragon series, the ranunculus trials — professional breeders have invested serious time and resource into developing varieties that perform consistently and beautifully. We benefit from that work every season.

But consolidation also means that commercial breeding increasingly focuses on what's most profitable at scale: varieties suited to industrial greenhouse production, long-distance shipping, and mass retail. Shelf life and transit durability tend to matter more than fragrance, stem character, or the kind of fleeting beauty that makes a customer gasp.

The varieties bred for local, seasonal, small-scale growing — the ones that fall apart in a cold chain but sing in a hand-tied bouquet — those varieties are increasingly coming from somewhere else entirely.

How trial crops can lead somewhere new

Flower farmers are filling the gap that commercial consolidation has left.

Floret Flowers in the USA are the most visible example. Erin Benzakein and her team have spent years developing their own cut flower varieties — zinnias, celosias, dahlias — in what they call the Floret Originals collection. The first seeds went on sale in 2024, with more in development.

What's clever about the logic behind the project: Floret deliberately focused on varieties that don't ship well. If a florist wants these flowers, they have to buy them from a local grower. They can't be imported. And probably can't be sourced from a mass-production farm.

Growing flowers for seed isn't just Floret's game, either. Selling seeds you've selected yourself — to home gardeners, to other flower farmers, to seed libraries — is a perfectly sensible revenue stream that grows directly out of a curious, experimental growing practice. It starts with a trial row and a notebook.

The biosecurity challenge — and why it's actually an advantage

Here's where curiosity bumps up against something real for us in New Zealand and Australia.

Alliums. Fritillaria. Certain tulip and ranunculus species. There are plants that growers in the UK, Europe and US can order as bulbs and have delivered to their door that simply cannot come here. New Zealand and Australia's biosecurity rules exist for good reason — the consequences of getting it wrong can be catastrophic and irreversible — and I'm genuinely glad they're enforced.

But it does mean that if you want to grow alliums, for example, you're learning to grow them from seed. Which is slower, less certain, and requires more patience than popping a bulb in the ground in autumn.

Such patience can be rewarded with something nobody else has.

Growing alliums from seed means you develop a relationship with the plant at a level most growers don't. You learn what it actually needs. You discover the range of forms available from seed — and there are some remarkable ones, far beyond what's available in imported bulb catalogues. You end up with plants that are genuinely yours in a way that ordered-in stock never quite is.

The same constraint that frustrates you is what makes your flowers distinctive. Biosecurity restriction plus patience plus curiosity equals something worth growing — and worth selling.

One rule that makes trial growing work

Trial crops need to be held separately from your production thinking, or they'll drive you mad.

If you trial a new sweet pea variety and measure it against your usual crop metrics — stem length, vase life, yield, customer uptake — you'll probably feel like the trial failed, even if you grew something beautiful. You haven't given it time. You haven't given yourself permission to just learn.

The approach that works: designate a space as the trial area. Even just a few rows, a section of the cutting garden, a couple of pots. Grow what you're curious about there. Take notes, but light ones — what you notice, what surprises you, what you'd do differently. Don't expect it to perform commercially yet.

Your production beds are for what you know works. Your trial area is for questions.

And alongside the trials, it's worth keeping a small section of the garden that's just yours. A few vegetables, some ornamentals you love, whatever you'd grow even if no customer ever saw it. Not for selling. Because being someone who pays attention to growing things — not just someone who manages a crop — is what makes this work sustainable over the long term.

The growing practice is the business asset

The willingness to keep experimenting isn't separate from building a good business. It's part of it.

The growers who stop trialling — who lock down their crop list to what they know sells and never deviate — often find that their enthusiasm follows. The selling becomes harder when you're no longer excited about what you're growing. Customers feel it. The storytelling gets thinner.

The growers who keep a corner of their practice alive with curiosity tend to have more to say. More to show. More reason to come back tomorrow and do it again.

You don't need to spend a lot of space or money on this. A few packets of seed, a row or two, permission to grow something just because you want to.

Something to think about

What's the last thing you grew purely out of curiosity — not because it was on your crop plan or because you knew it would sell?

Is there a plant you've been wanting to trial but keep pushing to "next season"? What would it take to give it a few rows this year?

And if biosecurity has ever stopped you getting hold of a variety you wanted — have you explored what's possible to grow from seed instead?

Written by: Julie Treanor - Owner of The Pickery and co-creator of The Floral Business Activator who cannot shake off the need to keep buying and sowing seeds.

Follow Julie on Instagram @thepickery