Flowers and Enjoyable – Evansville Residing Journal

Driving slowly to scan the fields and farms alongside Volkman Road, Bonnie MacArthur feedback, “That’s it.” The avid gardener has spied The Zinnia Meadow, an eye-popping palette of good colours within the beds alongside the street. In patches among the many zinnias develop stands of sunflowers and bursts of cosmos, irresistible to the bees and butterflies that lilt by way of the rows of stems and branches to the hum of cicadas.

The Zinnia Meadow sits on the 10-acre homestead Ellie Ziliak shares along with her husband, Austin, not removed from his household’s farm. Two years in the past, Ellie began tilling rows of zinnias and bought clients the chance to snip and pay. “I stopped at a U-pick while visiting my grandparents in Wabash and thought, ‘I can do this,’” she says.

So, she did, and her backyard grew. Customers returned and unfold the phrase. The discipline of blooms multiplied as Ellie sprinkled selection among the many rows of zinnias with bursts of cosmos and stalks of sunflowers. “The more flowers, the less moving,” she says, smiling.

Wandering the rows, Newburgh, Indiana, resident and visiting gardener DeeDee Shoemaker gazes round in awe on the panoply of crops as Ellie approaches her. “Beautiful. And bountiful. And big,” DeeDee says to Ellie. “You have zinnias galore and more.”

Farming is in Ellie’s household’s legacy. She studied agribusiness administration, farm administration, and crop science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, to arrange to proceed the custom of rising corn and soybeans in her north central Indiana hometown of Wabash. In class at Purdue, she met Austin, and blooms of affection flowered. After commencement in May 2022 and marriage the next yr, Ellie’s plans have been rerouted south to her husband’s household’s wealthy farmland in Vanderburgh County, the place Ellie works as an actual property agent for CENTURY 21 Scheetz.

The Zinnia Meadow takes effort and time, however Ellie’s farmer focus is effectivity. “Harvesting is easy if the heads are left on the stems to dry after the last bloom in October,” she shares. After harvest, she breaks the heads into seeds and lets them dry over the winter, then scatters them again into the flower beds within the spring.

Simplicity is essential and extends to watering. “We actually don’t water the flowers at all and just rely on rainfall, because for water for our house, we rely on a cistern. We don’t have wells because the water table is too deep,” she says.

In the approaching years, moreover the zinnias and sunflowers and cosmos, Ellie is contemplating including different seasonal flowers — maybe tulips, she says — and, later, even increasing her backyard’s number of flowers through a greenhouse. But child comes first: Ellie and Austin expect their first youngster in October.

Because its namesake floral enjoys a protracted flowering season, The Zinnia Meadow is open from early July by way of October. Customers can cease and snip flowers 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday at 2440 Volkman Road.