Creating a Cut Flower Garden

5 Steps to Creating a Cut Flower Garden

Instead of cutting flowers from your existing perennial beds, which might leave holes in the landscape, consider having a cut garden bed just for cut flowers. Whereas garden beds and borders are designed for aesthetic appeal, you don’t have to worry about how a cutting garden looks. Its sole purpose is to produce blooms to beautify the indoors.

To create a cutting garden, just follow these five easy steps:

1. Select a location. The best site will be one that gets plenty of sun and has rich soil and drains well. Select a site that does not have a view from windows you view out of often. Small spaces can hold a lot of plants. As a general rule, a 3 by 6 foot bed will hold about 20 plants.

2. Plan the garden. Once you know the dimensions of the cutting garden and the sun angles of the new bed, you can draw a design based on plant heights, bloom times and environmental needs. Plan for dense plantings with a mixture of color, stem lengths and textures that will bloom in spring, summer and fall. Be sure to draw a plan that avoids gaps. Remember your goal: It’s to produce flowers to create great looks indoors, not in the cutting garden itself. Be creative in your design and be sure to include your favorite shrubs, annuals, perennials, herbs and bulbs.

3. Prepare the soil. The cutting garden should have the same rich soil as your other garden beds. Add humus in the form of compost, peat moss, or chopped leaves to a depth of eight-10 inches to improve clay or sandy soil. At planting time, amend the soil with granular, all purpose fertilizer, we suggest Go Green organic.

4. Plant the garden.Plant in rows according to your plan. This will provide for the easiest access and reduce the time and effort needed to weed, feed, thin, fertilize, deadhead and harvest. If you wind up with unintended gaps, fill in with annuals or herbs. Consider starting your own seedlings! Once a month apply a liquid fertilizer.

5. Cut the flowers.Finally the best part! Pick your flowers often, the more you pick, the more flowers the plants will produce. Use the colors, stem lengths, textures of the foliage and floral fragrances to create appealing arrangements to enjoy and to impress your guests.

Note: From midseason on, keep some bamboo stakes handy for propping up plants as needed.

If you don’t have gardening space to add a cutting garden or want to include more plants in a cutting garden than you have room for, don’t worry. Just plant your favorite flowers and shrubs throughout the space you do have. Just don’t cluster them. By spreading out the flowers you are growing specifically for cutting in your existing beds, you won’t create gaps when you remove the blooms.