Today, we are going all in on cut flowers, which is very exciting. I think it’s a topic that a lot of us are really passionate about, and it’s kind of the “it” thing in gardening these days. It’s really, really fun, and I can’t even describe how wonderful it is to have basically an unlimited supply of bouquets to give to your friends and loved ones.
So, All of you new beginners out there are ready to go and know everything that you need to know to get going.because everything with cut flowers starts from seed. So, knowing the basics is really important.
So, for a little background into my cut flower garden journey, my first cut flower garden I started last year. I have this little space on the side of my driveway. It’s a 10 foot by 20 foot space, so 200 square feet. It’s not very big. It had some landscaping in it that just, I just wasn’t excited about it. It was boring, and I didn’t know what I was gonna do with it. So, I thought, “Oh, cut flower garden would be absolutely perfect. It’s a full sun spot.” And I decided to go for it last year. So, I ripped everything out. I borrowed a tiller from my neighbor who’s a gardener as well. And I tilled a whole bunch of compost and good stuff into the soil. And then I added a drip system to prepare my cut flower garden. So, being that I’ve only done a cut flower garden for one full year, I want you guys to take this article more of what I’ve learned during my first year as an amateur gardener with first-hand experience and how it worked for me. I don’t sell my flowers. I give them away or I use them in my own home.
So, the first thing you want to do with your cut flower garden is you want to plan the space that you have. So, find an area in your yard, in your garden where it’s full sun because most of these flowers like full sun. There’s some flowers that you can get away with part sun. And actually, there’s a couple flowers that only did well in part sun locations for me. Usually, a cut flower garden is located in full sun and it doesn’t have to be big.
Categories:
After you’ve decided where you’re going to locate your cut flower garden, the next thing and the most fun thing is to decide what cut flowers you’re going to do. And there’s a lot of different ways to figure out what flowers are best for cut flower gardening. Not every seed that you buy from the seed store is going to be a good flower. You want one with a really long stem and it’s going to hold up in the vase really well. So, to make it simple, I think that you can divide the cut flowers up into three categories. And that would be your focal, your supporting flowers, and then also your filler flowers. So, a good example, a focal flower would be like a dahlia, or sometimes you can use those really big Benary’s Giant zinnias. Those are really good focal flowers. I think that last year, one of my mistakes was not having enough filler flowers, which is a really common mistake for new cut flower gardeners because you want the beautiful, colorful stuff and you don’t want to deal with the other green stuff. But I’m telling you, if you have filler flowers, if you have filler greenery that you can just add to your bouquet, you can take one focal flower and make it into something that’s so beautiful. So, don’t forget the fillers. Don’t forget the supporting flowers. They’re super, super important, and you’ll be happy that you planted them. So, some good examples of focal flowers, like I was saying, are dahlias, big zinnias, sunflowers are fantastic, but obviously, those are more in the summer, the deep summer. Peonies. And then some examples of filler flower are Ammi, I had that growing in my garden last year and it did so well, and I used a ton of it. So much of it. And I think it’s reseeding all over my cut flower garden again this year, so I might have a ton of it this year too. Bupleurum, which is, I’m seeding this year. I have it growing in my cut flower garden right now for my cool flower method. Bells of Ireland, which I did last year and I absolutely loved it, and I didn’t have enough. I think I’m gonna do it again this year, not in my cut flower garden, in my regular garden because it’s just so beautiful and it’s worth it. And then, like I said, ornamental basil. I’m gonna grow some of that this year as well.
An important thing to think about when you’re planning out your cut flower garden is whether you’re going to do a single planting of flowers or whether you’re going to do succession planting. And last year, I did a single planting and it was a lot easier for me to plan out. And basically, what that means is you don’t really pay attention to the blooming time. You kind of just plan, “Okay, this space is going to be dedicated to a sunflower, this space is dedicated to a snapdragon.” And a lot of flowers won’t bloom all season long, especially for me, in Northern California, has an extremely long growing season. And so, a lot of times, things weren’t blooming because it wasn’t the time of the year for them to bloom yet. A good example is my gomphrena. I used QIS Purple Gomphrena, and I loved it. But when I first put it in right around our last frost date, I thought I did something wrong because it just sat there and it was struggling, and it wasn’t doing well, and I had no idea what was going on. And then, once things started heating up in July and August, it just exploded and it just kind of took over. And so, I realized, you know, it just wasn’t ready to grow. It wasn’t ready to be planted in the early spring. It needed that warm soil temperature to grow. So, I had saved that whole row for gomphrena, and really, I didn’t need to because it wasn’t doing anything for the first two or three months that I had it in there. So, there’s the single planting method which I did last year, and then there’s succession sewing, which I’m actually going to do this year. And to me, succession sewing is a lot more complicated because you kind of have to think about the timing of everything that’s going to bloom, when you have to sow your seeds, you know, all that kind of stuff. And the idea is that you’re going to sew spring flowers and then take those out and in the exact same spot, you’re going to sew summer flowers or late fall flowers, right? And so, basically, you’re reusing the land, the space that you have to sew flowers that bloom at different times of the year. So, in my mind, that’s a little bit more advanced cut flower gardening.. But I have to say, even without doing succession sewing, even doing just a single planting last year in a 10 by 20 foot area, I had so many flowers. So many flowers. So, succession sewing is not necessary. It will definitely be helpful, I think, because I think I’ll have blooms earlier and blooms later and not just a massive amount of blooms right in the middle of the growing season when most things bloom. So, we’ll see how it goes. It’s kind of up to you what you want to start with with your cut flower garden, whether you want to go with the single sewing method or the succession sewing method.
Planning:
So, I will do a better shot of this, but this was my, I mean, I used this every single day last year. And what I did is I made a list of all the seeds that I had decided to grow over on this side. I made a list of when I was going to either direct sew them or when I was going to transplant them out. I made a list of how far apart I had to space each of these flowers, whether it was 6 inches, 9 inches, or 12 inches. And then the watering that I needed. In addition to that, on that list, I also noted what kind of support these plants needed so that they wouldn’t fall over. And then I also did it from shortest, from shortest plant all the way up to tallest plant because the area that I had for cut flower gardening was, you know, kind of a narrow long area and I wanted it to be, you know, kind of like a beautiful vista from the sidewalk and so I wanted to have the lowest plants in the front and then build up to the highest plants. And the way, the right way to do it, I was more focused on how it looked in my garden, you know, because this is in my front yard and everybody was walking by. The right way to do it is to make sure that, you know, where the sun is that a really tall plant is not going to shade out a shorter plant. So, really, I didn’t do, I should have done it the opposite way. I should have had, based on the location of my cut flower space, I should have had it backwards and I should have had the tallest plants in the back, you know, all the way up to the shortest plants. But that just didn’t work for me. It just would have looked totally weird. So, you know, planning it out, having a little map like this, you know, is really helpful.
So, then last year I decided to plant all of my cut flowers in rows. I thought that that would be a lot easier. I thought it’d be easier to harvest, each row across corresponded to each different flower. And then I colored it in based on what the bloom color would be. So, I could see what it would look like. And that was really pretty. It was beautiful. It looked really great. I really liked it. This year, I wanted to try something a little bit different. I really wanted to focus on succession sewing this year and then not having, um, a whole space, like a whole line that was empty, which did happen sometimes last year based on, you know, like that gomphrena, there was, you know, a whole line that didn’t bloom for a couple of months and there was just nothing there. So, this year, I’m succession sewing. But this is kind of the idea that I’m going for where each circle or, you know, oval shape, whatever, corresponds to a different flower. And then I have three of these papers and this is my winter spring plan and then I have a spring summer plan, which corresponds to the exact same space. It’s just a different flower. And then finally, I have a summer and fall plan.. This was very complicated. It took me a while to plan out, you know, all the timing of everything, and when I was, when I had to sew things indoors or outdoor direct sew or anything like that. So like I said, it’s a lot more complicated to do succession sewing, but, you know, I just want to grow and learn new things and, and so that’s what I’m trying this year. I very well might go back to my original rows because I really did enjoy it and I thought that the flowers grew really well, you know, kind of all in a straight line like that. This is an experiment. I’m not a professional. This is just something that I like to do as a hobby.
Cut and Come Again Flowers:
So, one more thing that you have to consider when you’re deciding which flowers that you’re going to pick and where you’re putting them is you have to know whether a flower is a single cut flower or a cut and come again flower. And a single cut flower, an example of that is like a single stem sunflower. Basically, when you grow it and you cut it, that’s it. The plant is done. It’s not going to bloom again. You’ve used it for the season and then you’re done with it. So that is using a large amount of space if you’re not going to succession sew. You’re using a large amount of space for one bloom, one flower. So, it must, it needs to be a really good flower. And sometimes those big sunflowers are really good flowers and it’s totally worth it. Another option or way to do it is to make sure you get cut and come again flowers. And there’s tons of cut and come again flowers. Probably the best one is zinnias, where the more you cut it, the more it’ll bloom. Basically, you cut down one flower and then two bloom. Um, two blooms will come from the spot that you cut it. There’s also sunflower options that are cut and come again flowers, snapdragons. You know, I’m blinking on all of them, but there’s tons of cut and come again flowers. I think that it’s just an important thing to know and to note of what seeds that you’re purchasing, what seeds that you’re planning on, whether it’s going to be a single cut flower or a cut and come again flower. I just don’t want you to be disappointed when you realize it’s a single cut flower.
Direct Sow or Transplant:
Once you’ve picked out all the seeds you want and you’ve ordered them from the supplier, then you need to know whether you’re going to direct sow them or whether you’re going to transplant them. I have so much better luck with transplanting. I’m not sure why. I think that I just, I don’t have enough green thumbs yet. Um, but I just do such a better job when I put them under grow lights. And a lot of cut flower farmers do the exact same thing. They, they like, uh, transplanting their seeds out. It’s just a little bit more controlled as opposed to just relying on the environment outdoors. So, if you look on the back of the seed packet, it will tell you what they recom But just, you know, take that with a grain of salt mend, whether it’s direct sew or whether it’s transplant. But just, you know, take that with a grain of salt.. As soon as I finally transplanted and just treated them like any other seed, they popped up right away and it was perfect and easy. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt, the recommendations that they have on the back of the seed packet. Every environment’s different and every gardener is different. And so, you just have to, you know, it’s a trial and error type thing, knowing whether or not you’re going to direct seed or whether you’re going to transplant. And then knowing when you need to sow those seeds. Obviously, if you’re going to direct seed, you can sew them a lot later. If you’re going to transplant, you’re going to have to do it a lot earlier. So, you have to know when your frost date is and you have to know when you have to start, you know, you count back and you have to know when you have to start sewing your seeds indoors so that they’re ready to be transplanted out around your last frost date time. So, another thing that they’re not going to tell you on the back of the seed packet that I think is very important, you need to know what the soil temperature needs to be at in order for these seeds to germinate. And it’s usually between 70 and 75 degrees for the soil temperature. . So, I know what the soil temperature needs to be. This isn’t all of them, but this is just a couple. So, dahlia, they need to be 70 degrees. Zinnias are 70 degrees. Snapdragons are 70 degrees. And then there’s some flowers that need 75 degrees. Gomphrena, 75 degrees. Ammi, 75 degrees. So, it’s just important to know because if you’re growing something that needs a soil temperature of 75 degrees and you’re putting it outside when it’s 60 degrees, it’s not going to germinate. It’s just, it’s just not going to work. So, that’s a very important thing to know. And once again, you have to be flexible with your seeds. You know, they say, 75 degrees. You might have to wait until it’s 80 degrees and then, you know, go ahead and sew your seeds. So, it’s just important to know, and to understand your environment and the area that you’re gardening in.
Conclusion:
In this way, we’ve chosen where we’re putting our cut bloom nursery, and we’ve concluded which blossoms we will place in it, and afterward we’ve chosen while we will place it in. And afterward the last step before you put it in the ground is you want to prepare your dirt. What’s more, I believe that there’s sort of two different ways to prepare your dirt. One way is like, simply taking out any sort of, you know, weeds or any such thing that is filling in there., And afterward, you know, perhaps, turning over your dirt. However, I, I generally feel that adding compost is truly significant. I believe that adding manure is only, it’s such an effective method for ensuring that your dirt is prolific and it will have the supplements that your blossoms need.And then in addition to adding compost, I, I went ahead and I added drip irrigation to my cut flower garden., I think that adding drip irrigation is a really good way to make sure that your flowers are getting water, especially in the summertime when it’s so hot. What’s more, I believe that as well as getting water, it’s a truly effective method for ensuring that you’re not getting your leaves wet, since when your leaves get wet and afterward the sun emerges, um, you can consume the leaves of your plants. In this way, you know, on the off chance that you, assuming you add water through dribble water system, you’re ensuring that the water’s going straightforwardly to the roots and not, you know, splashing all around your leaves. In this way, that is only two or three things, that I believe are truly significant when you’re preparing your dirt. And afterward at long last, while you’re establishing your plants, you need to ensure that they’re very much divided. Like I said, , a few plants should be 6 inches separated, a few plants should be 12 inches separated. Thus, you know, consider that while you’re planting. And afterward at last, ensure that they’re all around watered in. And afterward you need to ensure that you’re watering them consistently until they’re laid out. You know, this is only several things that I believe are truly significant while you’re establishing out your cut bloom garden.
I hope you liked my cut flower garden planning article. Thank you guys so much for reading. I’ll see you in the next one. Bye!
