Cutting flower gardens bring beauty and wildlife food sources together in one landscape feature, adding texture, color, and fragrance. Perennials like Larkspur, Cosmos and Sunflowers return each year for cutting gardens; annual blooming plants like Zinnias fill out gaps throughout the season with vibrant blossoms.
Draw out your beds on paper, noting varieties, heights and bloom times for each flower variety. To facilitate harvesting more easily, it is a good idea to consider creating wide rows for harvesting purposes.
Choose Your Location
When selecting the location for your cut flower garden, be sure to select an area free from turf and with access to water sources. Adjust the soil to improve drainage while encouraging roots to spread throughout. And incorporate several inches of organic material like compost or leaf mold.
Combine annual and perennial flowers, flowering shrubs, aromatic herbs and foliage plants for an eye-catching garden. Incorporate different colors, heights and shapes for successful bouquets.
Staggering the planting times helps ensure a steady supply of blooms throughout the season, and groups flowers by their cultural needs (soil type, sun exposure and mature height) makes maintaining them simpler and healthier.
Soil Preparation
Cut flower plants, in contrast to their regular counterparts, are specifically grown for cutting purposes. Their buds, full blooms and stems can then be used to make floral arrangements.
To extend the longevity of cut flowers, harvest them during cool outdoor temperatures in early morning or evening hours to prevent wilting and bacterial infections. When cutting stems with pruning shears or snips, always ensure they are sharp and clean as using dirty tools can spread diseases to future harvests. Submerge newly cut stems into water mixed with flower preservative so they may rehydrate after being cut.
An ideal garden for cut flowers should include both annual and perennial plants, so that blooms will appear from spring through to autumn. To boost productivity even further, fertilize and feed plants regularly using liquid organic flower fertilizer.
Planting
Though planting a cut flower garden may seem complicated, the process is actually relatively straightforward. Just follow the planting instructions on your seed packets and ensure your plants are evenly spaced. Keep in mind that these blooms will be harvested specifically for cut arrangements, rather than landscaping; so they should be spaced out evenly rather than clustered together – this makes accessing individual stems for arrangements easier as well as making beds simpler to weed and water. Many varieties such as zinnias and celosia benefit from pinching (removing their growing tip just above their second set of leaves) to promote branching and long, straight stems.
To make gardening simple, plant annual flowers together, perennials in blocks, and those requiring staking (such as dahlias and delphiniums) from those that benefit from grow-through netting (such as sweet peas and snapdragons). Plan wide rows so you don’t have to stretch or reach while picking!
Care
Keep the garden free of weeds and pests to make harvesting much simpler, while planting flowers that bloom at different times throughout the season will keep the cutting garden looking vibrant all season.
As an introduction, she recommends growing annual flowers as they’re relatively straightforward. When picking flowers, consider their color, height, fragrance, texture, drying abilities and fragrance when picking bouquets.
To maximize harvests, she recommends planting flowers closer together than what is recommended on their seed packet in order to promote longer stems and higher flower production. She suggests spacing snapdragons, zinnias, cosmos and sunflowers 6-7 inches apart while pinching young plants after reaching 10-12 inches of height to encourage branching and produce fuller flowers (zinnias/celosia can be pinched after reaching that height for additional blossoming).