Creating a Cut Flower Garden

We dreamed of rows and rows of beautiful flowers that we could cut and bring inside. Today I’m sharing all our tips for Creating a Cut Flower Garden.

As you guys know, I LOVE flowers. I love filling our home with them. I love painting them. I always feel so bad cutting them because I also enjoy seeing them whilst we’re sitting by the pool or while we’re outside. It’s been a dream for some time to create a dedicated area in our yard just for cut flowers. I’m so excited to share tips for creating your own cut flower garden!

Our oldest, John, also enjoys flowers and nature so together we sowed seeds in March. I haven’t shared an update but we’ve been enjoying many beautiful flowers inside from our cut flower garden. So I thought I’d share our process and answer your questions.

Creating a Cut Flower Garden

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Seeds and Plants

We decided to growing our plants from seeds. Last August I ordered many varieties from Floret Flower Farm. I ordered all my favorites:

• Dahlias (Mixed variety)
• Sweet Peas (four varieties)
• Corn Cockle
• Bread Seed Poppy
• Icelandic Poppy
• Queen Anne’s Place

We planted these in trays and put them in the sunroom. If I was to do this again we would use all self draining trays and maybe use some grow lights as suggested by Floret. We thought the sunlight would be bright enough in the sunroom but I think our plants looked a bit leggy when we planted them.

We also bought the following plants from Holly Hill Farm in May:

• Snapdragons (two varieties)
• Zinnias (three varieites)

We already have many other flower plants I use in arrangments – Limelight hydrangeas, mountain hydrangeas, roses etc. You can see more about flowering plants I love here.

Building Raised Beds

We decided to create raised beds behind our pool house. We decided on this location as it gets full sun. We opted for raised beds because we thought it would deter our dogs from running on the growing flowers.

In the past we have designed and built our own raised beds, click here for plans. This time we opted to buy kits as we thought it would be quicker and easier. These are the kits we got. We bought two of each and stacked them on top of each other.

Luke built them in an afteroon and filled them with compost.

Planting our Seedlings

Around the first week of May our seedlings were ready for planting.

We added this trellising for the Sweet Peas:

It took a little while for our plants to thrive. Some of our Sweet Peas died off because there was too much heat radiating off the siding of our pool house.

Growing a garden is all a learning experience.

Here’s how the plants were looking in May:

At this point bunnies or squirrels had eaten most of the dahlias so we replaced them with snapdragons from Holly Hill Farm. I was very worried our garden wouldn’t thrive.

Here’s how the plants looked in June:

Now in August, the Corn Cockles are dying back and so is the Queen Anne’s Lace. We’re still getting lots of lovely Sweet Peas:

I took these photos yesterday morning.

Incidentally, Sweet Peas remind me of our wedding in England. We had little bud vases on each table filled with these pretty flowers. All the ushers had them for their boutonnière too. Such a happy memory!

It’s been wonderful to have pretty flowers to clip and bring inside:

It makes me so happy to have flowers in the house.

By growing our own it means we can have varieties they don’t carry in stores.

I made this little video if you’d like to see more:

Resources

It’s a great time to think about creating a garden for next year. You may want to do some research and order seedlings.

• Floret Flower Farm offers great advice for home gardeners – Erin has wonderful tutorials and online courses (some that are free) to share her wealth of information. I also find her books very helpful.
• Holly Hill Farm (which is in Cohasset, if you’re local) has an amazing plants sale in May and also offers classes and speakers on a variety of farming.
• Local garden clubs also have wonderful information.

What We’d Do Differently Next Year

Of course everything is a learning experience, here are some things we’d do differently next year.

• Use a grow light and use the two tiered tray that Erin recommends. I had some others and the water didn’t drain properly so each plug got waterlogged and mouldy.
• Perhaps try more variety of flowers.
• Plant more plants and mix in seedlings
• Add fencing to prevent bunnies and / or squirrels from eating seedlings.
• Add crushed gravel around our garden beds – we didn’t get to this but wanted to add it to the garden area.
• Start using a drip hose earlier.

I hope this post was helpful! Please let me know if you have any questions!