Tips for Growing Cut Flowers
I drooled over cut flower gardens for a little over a year before I took the plunge and created my own cut flower garden. I had some failures and success over the first year but I enjoyed it so much that each year my goal is to make my garden better. Here are 5 tips on making the most of your cut flower garden. And make sure you read to the end for a bonus tip.
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
5 Tips for Your Cut Flower Garden
Location Location Location!!
Create a dedicated bed for your cutting garden. This allows you to group together plants with the same watering and feeding needs. Choose a site that receives the full sun that most cut flowers require for blooming and work in plenty of rich organic matter, such as compost, for providing lots of nutrients. Start seeds indoor in late winter for transplanting to the cutting garden in spring. Plant in rows rather than groups. This makes your garden easier to maintain when it comes to watering, weeding, fertilizing and cutting.
The More you Cut the More that will Grow
Pick Pick Pick! The whole idea around a cut flower garden is to have flowers you can pick! Trust me, I know how hard it is to cut off a flower from the plants you worked so hard to grow, but DO IT! You’ll enjoy them so much in bouquets around your home! Also, look at it this way, the more you cut, the more flowers will grow.
When harvesting cut flowers in the cool of early morning rather than the heat of the afternoon and evening. Keep plants healthy by using only sharp, clean tools for cutting. Make cuts at an angle for providing more surface for absorbing water and remove any foliage below the water line. Take a bucket of water out with you so that you can put the stems right into water.
Once in vases, change the water in the vase every day or so and recut stems, which seal as they sit in water.
Grow Cut Flowers
Get Started NOW Bundle
How to Plant Beautiful Bouquets eBook (what to plant to great stunning bouquets). Garden Planner & Journal (planning pages to help you stay organized in the garden).
Dead Head Your Flowers
When you are out harvesting flowers, make sure to cut off all the dead or dying blooms that you didn’t get to yet. The plant is wasting extra nutrients and water on a bloom that is already near the end of its life cycle, so relieve the plant of this burden by snipping off all the dead heads.
This will encourage the plant to focus its energy on creating and opening new blooms, instead of maintaining the old.
Fertilize!
Fertilize your plants for beautiful blooms! I use a complete fertilizer (N:P:K) of 15-30-15 like this Dr. Eath Bud & Bloom fertilizer. And I fertilize once every 2-3 weeks.
Succession Planting
If your growing season is long, you might want to consider succession planting. This means that if your blooms are spent, grow more! The growing season where I live is VERY short, like 2 months, so I don’t really have time to succession plant, especially directly from seed or bulbs. Succession Planting Tip! If a variety of flower either doesn’t grow, or is done blooming, sometimes I’ll add seedlings/plants from the garden centre.
BONUS!!! – Give Yourself Grace
Don’t stress if not all your flowers grow. It’s going to happen. I planted a number of ranunculus and freesia but none of the freesia came up and I only got a few spindly ranunculus. No big deal. Once I realized they weren’t going to sprout, I simply replaced them with more anemones.
So there you have it 5 tips to make your cut flower garden a success!! Plus an extra time to keep you going when you fail, because we all have our hiccups. Those that push through and learn from our mistakes are the ones that will succeed and find fulfillment in what they do.
Want to learn more? Check out Everything Cut Flowers.
