Tutorials/Flower farming

Flowers are useful for decoration, dyes, or breeding rabbits.

To grow flowers, you can apply bone meal on a grass block. The block must either have no block above it (obstructing sun/moonlight), or be lit with at least a light level of 8. Flowers and tall grass will spread over grass blocks up to 7 blocks radius around, i.e. 13×13 maximal area of growth. However, approximately 95% of growth occurs within a 9×9 area around the source grass block.

Different flowers spawn from this in different biomes. See flower biomes.

Two-high flowers cannot be grown this way at all, instead they drop their copy when bone meal is applied.

If the planting conditions are not met flowers will quickly pop out. This allows flowers to be used in the creation of light-sensitive mechanisms.

Poppies are also a by-product of iron farms, as iron golems will, apart from the iron, drop 0-2 poppies on death.

Poppies seem to be in "high demand" since they spawn much less than dandelion, so you may be able to sell them for high prices in Economy plugin servers. If you're having a hard time finding poppies, they tend to be most abundant in Extreme Hills biomes, but are also passably common in Taiga and Tundra.

Flower farm design using water dispensers
On this design a redstone clock will trigger dispensers with water buckets, making water to harvest seed and flowers and taking them to you. As seen on the following video you stand at a central spot where you plant the bone meal, and water coming out from 4 dispensers take flowers and seeds to that central point.

Fully automatic design
This design adds an additional clock to power a dispenser full of bonemeal and a hopper to collect the drops, removing the need for manually placing and collecting the flowers.

Earthquake design
Another design, to make up for the absence of block updates caused by lighting, is to shift the ground with pistons.

Set up the design so that from the power source:

A dispenser dispenses bonemeal into the ground to produce flowers

A set of pistons pushes the ground one block in one direction

A set of pistons pushes the ground one block in the other direction, back to the original position.

The Block-Update Flower Farm
(Works in 14w17a or later [Works in 1.8, 1.9, and 1.10])

This chart shows how many pistons, the area and amount of flowers from different sized designs.
 * *The 2x2 design has no center, making it harder to use/build. The same goes for any even number design.
 * **The 13x13 design is does not work because it is too large, as pistons can only push 12 blocks.The Block-Update Switch Flower Farm uses a block update detector to detect when the flowers are grown. First, set up a 11x11 area of grass blocks. In the center (count 6 blocks), one block above the grass blocks, put a sticky piston facing up. Then, place a slime block above that, and a redstone block above that. This acts as a block-update detector switch. Place an obsidian (important) block next to the restone block, and redstone dust on the obsidian. Whichever direction your obsidian is in put a 11 regular pistons right next to the grass facing it on that side, and also 11 on the opposite side, one meter away from the grass blocks facing the grass blocks, (for example, if it is -x or +x, do it on both the -x and +x direction). Place a line of stonebricks with redstone dust over all 22 pistons. Place a line of stonebricks next to the grass and put a 2-tick repeater so the dust connects to both sides. The pistons on meter away from the grass should activate 2 ticks after the opposite side. Finally, wire the redstone on top of the obsidian to the pistons that have no delay. Now, your Block-Update Flower Farm is ready to go. Place bonemeal over the grass directly under the piston, and wait for it to reset to do it again. This design is almost lagproof, and great for SSPs and especially SMPs.

de::technik:Blumenfarm