Whether you're growing cut flowers for florists, CSA’s, wholesale suppliers, grocery stores, farmer’s markets, or a roadside stand, adding heirloom chrysanthemums to your fall flower lineup is a must. These old-fashioned flowers come in a stunning range of colors, styles, shapes, and sizes—there’s a mum for every occasion!

At Goose Creek Gardens, we have been growing heirloom chrysanthemums for over ten years and now cultivate a collection of over 60 varieties. Initially, we introduced mums to our farm to extend our season, ensuring we could continue supplying flowers to our customers even as cooler temperatures arrived. By incorporating mums into our fall lineup, we successfully increased our harvest and sales by five to six weeks, stretching from October through November. They are perfect for Thanksgiving sales!

It was a no-brainer to continue growing mums each year. Not only do our customers love them, but they also make fantastic cut flowers with an impressive 2-3 week vase life. As flower farmers, having a late-season flower that lasts so long means our customers remember us, making them more likely to return in the spring.

How We Grow Our Heirloom Mums

Treating Mums as Tender Perennials

On our farm, we treat our heirloom mums as tender perennials, meaning we dig them up every fall and store them in a heated space over winter. We do this to protect our investment and ensure our collection survives the cold months. While some early and mid-season blooming mums might overwinter successfully in our Zone 6a climate, we choose to dig up all of our mums to guarantee their survival.

Why We Grow Mums in a High Tunnel

We grow our mums in an unheated high tunnel rather than in the open field. While the plants themselves can handle cool temperatures, their blooms are highly susceptible to frost damage. Even if a flower appears to survive a light frost, the petals can later turn brown, rendering the bloom unsellable. If temperatures drop too low, we use a space heater and a fan to circulate warm air, preventing frost from settling on the blooms. Home gardeners can cover their plants if necessary, but in a home setting, mums don’t need as much protection since they aren’t being grown for sale.

Our mum mother planted are over wintered in our greenhouse.

A chrysanthemum rooted cutting ready for transplanting.

Propagating Mums from Cuttings

Our mum-growing process begins in February, when we take cuttings from the mother plants we stored in the greenhouse over winter. We root thousands of cuttings each year to supply both our own farm and customers who purchase rooted cuttings. The cuttings typically take about three weeks to root, after which we continue growing them in the greenhouse until our high tunnel is ready for planting.

Planting and Pinching for Maximum Production

We plant our mums in the high tunnel at the end of May or early June, following our ranunculus and anemone crops. As the cuttings grow, we pinch them back every two to three weeks until July 4th. This encourages the plants to produce multiple stems instead of just one or two, significantly increasing yield. With this method, each mum plant can produce anywhere from five to twenty stems, depending on the variety.

Bonus tip: The tops that are pinched off can be rooted to create even more mums!

Here is a freshly planted bed of mum cuttings in a high tunnel.

Preparing High Tunnel Beds for Mums

Before transplanting the rooted cuttings, we prepare our high tunnel beds by:

Amending the soil with fertilizer
Laying down irrigation lines
Using biodegradable plastic mulch to suppress weeds and retain soil moisture
Installing netting to support the plants as they grow

We plant mums six inches apart, using the netting as a spacing guide.

Caring for Mums Throughout the Season

Once planted, mums require consistent weeding, watering, and fertilizing. We use a 20-20-20 fertilizer weekly during the growth phase to encourage strong plant and root development. Once buds begin to form, we stop fertilizing and focus on maintaining consistent watering.

Weeding is crucial! Ignoring weeds in a high tunnel leads to a messy, tangled disaster. To stay on top of it, our team dedicates early mornings to weeding, aiming to finish the entire high tunnel in just two sessions.

Why We Don’t Disbud Our Mums

Since we primarily produce wholesale bouquets for grocery stores, we don’t disbud our mums. Removing buds takes time and would reduce our total flower count. Instead, we prefer to harvest stems with multiple blooms, which makes our bouquets look fuller. While disbudding can be beneficial for florists seeking single-stem, large-bloom mums, our method works best for our production style.

Our mixed fall bouquets ready for our grocery store customers.

These bouquets are full of many different varieties of mum mixed with eucalyptus and salvia leucantha.

Supporting Tall-Growing Mums

Throughout the season, we continuously lift the support netting as the mums grow. Some varieties can reach up to five feet tall, and without proper support, the plants will flop over, creating a tangled mess. Keeping the netting in place ensures we harvest straight, high-quality stems.

Harvesting for Maximum Vase Life

We harvest our mums when about one-third of the blooms on a stem are open. This allows them to continue opening post-harvest and extends their vase life for customers. Since we store mums in our cooler for up to a week before shipping them to grocery stores, this method ensures they still offer a full 2-3 week vase life once purchased.

Labeling and Keeping Varieties Organized

As our mums bloom, we double-check their placement to ensure each variety is correctly labeled. Occasionally, a rogue plant gets mixed in, and we remove it to maintain consistency. We use bright-colored flagging tape (hot pink is our favorite) to label the base of each mum, making it easy to identify varieties later. This extra step simplifies record-keeping when it’s time to take cuttings in the spring.

A chrysanthemum plant dug of an ready to be potted in a mum pot for the winter.

Digging and Storing Mums for Winter

After the bloom season, we continue caring for the mums until we have time to dig them up—usually in December or early January. Since our high tunnel remains unfrozen longer than the field, we can work well into winter. Digging mums is very similar to digging dahlias, requiring careful handling to keep varieties separate.

Once dug up, we pot the mums and move them into our heated greenhouse, keeping the temperature around 50°F. While mums can handle lower temperatures, we maintain this warmth to encourage early growth, allowing us to take cuttings in February and start the process all over again.

**Lava**

It is a beautiful spider variety.

Why We Love Growing Heirloom Mums

For us, mums have become a year-round crop. While they don’t have to be, we’ve found that putting in the extra effort maximizes our return. We highly recommend these amazing heirloom mums to any gardener looking to extend their growing season or any flower farmer wanting to boost late-season sales. While they require some work, the effort is well worth it. The more you put into growing mums, the better your results will be!

Happy growing!

From Our Farm to Yours: How to Grow Heirloom Mums for Late-Season Sales.