Monday, August 6, 2012

Tips On How To Plant Cornflower

Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) is a sturdy, drought-tolerant annual that will grow in poor, dry soil with very little care. Also known as bachelor’s button, cornflowers were originally blue, but the plants are now available in a variety of colors, including red, white and pink. The fuzzy foliage has a grayish-green appearance. The colorful blooms appear in March and usually last until the middle of May. Cornflowers are often used in dried flower arrangements, because the dried blooms retain their shape and bright color.
Thanks to herbicides, the cornflower has disappeared from the corn – together with other plants which were probably more toxic. Disappeared along with the word ‘corn’ – until the 18th century, all grain was called ‘corn’, and after that the term was gradually applied exclusively to Indian corn or maize (Zea mays). But thanks to the European Union policy of ‘set aside’, where farmers can be paid to leave fields fallow (jachère in French) rather than grow crops for which there is already a surplus, the idea of sowing with an annual flower mix which won’t persist into the next year (jachère fleurie) and which almost always includes cornflowers, has taken off. I’ve seen it a lot in central France, and local authorities are encouraged to sow flower mix on any empty ground they own, but this is not widespread in the Midi, where vines are predominant – if they are grubbed up, winter wheat or maize are often sown.
Research has also shown that the flower mix increases the number of true wild flowers, since the fields are untreated with chemicals and undisturbed all year. It made me think how all the activities of a village are connected, so that hunting is tied in by many links to other crops and products, to biodiversity and sustainablility. In fact I found that the Departmental Federations of Hunters are the main bodies giving advice and distributing seed.