As the weather cools down and a new season officially begins, front porches are shifting from the bright colors of summer to the yellows, reds and oranges of fall.
While there are some options in terms of flowers that feature the classic autumn hues, mums continue to reign supreme.
“I think mums will be here forever and ever,” said Krystal Snyder, a horticulture educator with Penn State Extension. “Mums aren’t the only fall color thing in town any more, but I definitely think they’re still the queen.”
Mum lovers should have plenty of good options to choose from this year thanks to the summer weather experienced in the Mid-Atlantic.
While the weather wasn’t the ideal for crop farmers, mum growers flourished.
“This has been the best summer for growing mums in quite a few years,” said Vincent Fry of Frysville Farms in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. “Mums are top quality this year because it was hot and dry.”
Vincent Fry holds up a 14-inch mum pot at Frysville Farms in Ephrata, Pa.
Fry has been growing mums since 1979, and this year rooted 110,000 plants on 15 acres.
While the farm does have a retail location, most of the plants are sold wholesale.
The farm ships mums all over the Mid-Atlantic six days per week and has five trucks on the road each day, sending the plants to garden centers, nurseries, grocery stores and roadside stands.
But each location is looking for something specific depending on their market.
“Garden centers like to have their plants just starting to show flower. They want full shelf life for that plant,” Fry said. “Grocery stores are the other side of the coin, so to speak. They want full-blooming flowers that will catch the eye and sell quickly.”
Much of this demand difference comes down to the ability to keep the plants watered and cared for while on the premises.
But this could potentially lead to a difference in quality in the long run.
“You have to think about how stressed out they’ve been in wherever they’re at,” Snyder said. “If they’re in somewhere that has a garden center and they’re well cared for then it’s totally OK. But places where there’s not good care at the store, that is an issue.”
With proper care at all levels, mums should last 4-5 weeks, keeping front porches looking festive throughout the whole month of October.
And while the bright colors of a mum in full bloom will certainly catch a customer’s eye, buying one that has only a few flowers in bloom might be the better choice in the long run.
“When you’re buying a mum that is just breaking color, you are going to have way more longevity on that mum than you will if you buy it totally full in color,” Snyder said.
Varieties of mums grow at Frysville Farms in Ephrata, Pa.
But before the customers can pick out their perfect porch decor, the plants have to make it to the stores.
“Mums are kind of fragile,” Snyder said.
But, plant breeding over the years have made the plants more flexible.
Years ago, Fry used to only be able to load about 350 mums into a truck due to the plants rigidity. Now, on the same truck, he can get almost double that at 650 plants.
There are also precautions growers and shippers can take to ensure the mums arrive all in one piece.
Lowe’s, for example, receives its shipments packaged in sleeves and also puts temperature control measures in place, said Harry Barker, a divisional merchandising manager in Lowe’s lawn and garden department.
During the peak season in the fall months, mum deliveries are happening almost constantly.
“Our growers schedule plant deliveries in stages, aligning with the season’s peak demand to ensure that customers have access to fresh mums whenever they visit our stores,” Barker said.
Many of Fry’s wholesale locations are getting flowers at least every other week, with most getting weekly deliveries or even twice per week.
Fry’s peak delivery season starts to slowly tail off the second week of October. However, it starts much earlier than it used to.
“When I first started raising mums, we didn’t even think of shipping mums until the 1st of September,” Fry said. “Now we’re getting orders for the second week of August.”
Mum varieties grow at Frysville Farms in Ephrata, Pa.
The hot, dry weather wasn’t only good for growing mums this year. It also led to some customers looking to replace dried out summer plants with fall colors sooner than they typically would.
But if consumers prefer buying mums later in season toward the end of October, they should still get good fall color possibly through Thanksgiving.
“Mums that are grown for the fall are somewhat frost resistant,” Fry said. “When they get frosted it doesn’t cause them to lose their flower or lose color.”
Water is the biggest concern homeowners need to consider when buying mums. The plants have a very dense root system in their pots, making them very thirsty, Snyder said.
Regardless of when or where consumers buy mums to add a little touch of fall color to their porch, growers and retailers are working to make sure the plants are good quality and will last.
“We would like all the people that receive at the retail level to have a plant that’s going to hold up for them on their porch for a maximum amount of time,” Fry said.
