Annual flowers like cosmos and larkspur offer continuous color throughout the season, while perennials like yarrow and garden phlox bloom season after season with minimal maintenance requirements.
Selecting varieties specifically developed for cut flowers is essential to their successful performance, with these typically possessing longer stems and producing abundant blossoms. Consider raising garden beds to maximize sunlight exposure while controlling soil quality more effectively.
Planting Instructions
Begin planning your cut flower garden with careful consideration by sketching an outline on paper of its beds. This ensures the design meets both your space requirements and management ease once the plants have been planted; for instance, making sure the bed is long and thin enough so you can reach plants easily for cutting purposes; you should also take into account any special considerations such as supporting height-sensitive flowers if applicable.
Assess the growing conditions for each plant in your cut flower garden, grouping together those that share similar requirements and excluding those that differ in terms of needs. This will enable you to avoid accidentally overwatering or underwatering them and promote more vigorous blooms and growth.
As an example, you could separate zinnias, hydrangeas and sweet peas into different sections to ensure they each can reach their full potential, and make harvesting simpler.
Soil Preparation
Cut flower gardens require special consideration. Before planning out the plot on paper, ensure each plant has enough room and care requirements. Many gardeners also opt for raised beds as cutting gardens give them complete control of soil quality.
Make sure the flowers you plant receive enough sunlight; check the back of each seed packet to determine how much lighting each variety requires. You should also think about whether tall annual flowers such as sunflowers and zinnias require stakes or other supports to stay upright.
Keep in mind that perennials only bloom once every two years while biennials last only one. Mix flowers, herbs and vegetables together for maximum cross pollination benefits as well as to add variety in terms of aesthetics and cross pollination. Some plants may need deadheading (removing spent flowers to promote further blooming).
Planting the Seeds
Beginning a seed-starting journey can be both magical and inspiring. Watching seemingly inanimate seeds grow into healthy plants producing fragranced blooms is truly amazing – an act of nature at its finest!
Cutting gardens require full sun and well-draining soil with rich, fertile conditions. Before planting, it’s recommended that the soil be amended with compost and slow release flower fertilizer for best results. Raised beds are popular choices; regular garden beds or even potted planters will work just fine.
When planting seeds, be sure to follow the guidelines on your seed packet for proper spacing of each variety. A standard grid system is often recommended for annual cut flowers while perennial varieties like foxgloves and peonies need more room to establish themselves.
Start by planting annuals that are easy to grow; these will provide an ongoing source of cutting material. Although perennials can make beautiful additions to a cutting garden, their blooming cycles take two seasons so may quickly fill out your space and require additional maintenance than annuals.
Watering
An ideal cut flower garden requires lots of care. While regular garden flowers usually don’t need much attention once established, cutting flowers must be regularly trimmed, deadheaded and refreshed with fresh tepid water to maximize vase life.
Successful garden design depends on selecting the appropriate plants for your space and growing them correctly. Many flowers sold at garden centers are grown as landscape plants and not suitable for cutting (they produce lots of foliage without many blooms), however breeders have recently been working on creating varieties with long stems that make cutting easy.
When choosing what to plant, consult the back of the seed packet for information regarding optimal planting times based on your area’s average last frost date. Additionally, sketch out your garden layout so that you can visualize how all of its elements fit together before you begin sowing.