What is the crop with the purple flower?
Phacelia is used in the UK as a brood rearing crop. Its purple flowers have the tremendous ability to attract a large array of insects. In the summer you can hear a crop of phacelia buzzing.
They're winter annuals called Henbit and Purple Deadnettle. Both are in the mint family. They grow in fields every year, but they are especially colorful in years with mild winters, when the warmer weather gives the cool season plant more time to germinate.
– There's something special about a flax crop in bloom. The blue-purple flowers are easy on the eyes and calming. Almost therapeutic. Driving east of Weyburn, on the last day of July, the blue-purple flowers were seemingly everywhere.
The two most responsible for purple patches in fields are henbit and purple deadnettle. Both grow close to the ground, and can produce thick patches of cover. Purple deadnettle is more likely found in southern counties.
Another spring vegetable with brilliant purple color is the crisp violet-purple kohlrabi 'Kolibri', which looks great alongside the vibrant 'Graffiti' cauliflower. Eggplant is fabled for its purple skin and lavender flowers, a visual double whammy in the garden.
Potatoes are in the Solanaceae family, also known as the Nightshade family. The pretty purple flowers that grow from potato plants are a good reminder that potatoes are cousins to eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes.
62 Types of Purple Flowers.
Henbit turns fallow fields pinkish purple in early spring. Henbit draws attention in early spring when it blasts entire fields with the pinkish-purple of its flowers.
Driving home from NC beaches, you may come across a sea of purple. Beautiful fields filled with flowering plants dot the sides of roads headed to the coast. These fields of flowers are not simply to look pretty, nor are they volunteer wildflowers.
Henbit is a cool-season weed that's known for its purple flowers and is prevalent across Kansas in the early spring.
Why do farmers grow phacelia?
Phacelia is a rapidly growing, high biomass plant. It is a nitrogen holder and weed suppressor. Its eye catching purple flowers are particularly good at attracting bees and other beneficial insects. Used as a soil improving green manure.
Echium is grown for extraction of oil from its seed. The extracted oil contains Gamma-linolenic Acid and Stearidonic Acid. It is a plant based alternative for fish oil and a source of Omega 3,6,&9.
Borage is a spring-sown oilseed crop that can act as a useful break crop in arable rotations. In the late 1990s there was possibly 2,000-3,000 ha being grown, but competition from imports and overproduction led to a fall in market prices leading to a reduction in planting.
Linseed (Linum usitatissimum L.) is an annual oil crop that is grown either for its fiber (fiber flax) or for its oil (oilseed flax). From: Industrial Oil Crops, 2016.
