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The Gardener's Workshop

Easy Cut-Flower Gardening from Seed

Cut Flower Gardening

Why plant flowers?

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Our 3-by-10 foot cutting garden seed collection split in half to frame the front of our sweet farm building.  How are you feeling looking at this photo? Warm and fuzzy? You can have it right outside your backdoor. 

“Why plant flowers?” is a question I hear often. Over the years I have built a long list of reasons for how gardens and yards benefit from having a little flower garden. In fact, I wrote a whole book about it: Vegetables Love Flowers. But today I’m sharing a different reason to grow flowers: it’s because they make us feel better.

Now more than ever, we need a tension release and a little extra relief in our days. I’m not normally an anxious person, but even I have developed a little knot in my gut about the pandemic. Beyond the concern for my family, it’s the ever changing circumstances and disruption to everyday life that contributes to the difficulty for me as a creature of habit. 

Our Flower Caddy full of freshly cut flowers from our garden.

Thankfully, I have a pastime that my psyche instantly responds to without me even thinking about it: messing around in my garden. Sometimes, I just do a little garden gazing and other times some weeding or cutting. You know how one thing leads to another, right? First, my mind responds and then my body follows suit. I just fall in you might say. The effect? It’s like that boulder of anxiousness I’ve been carrying on my shoulders begins to roll right down my arms and then, plunk, anxiety is gone.

There are countless scientific facts explaining why being in a garden triggers good things to happen in our minds and bodies.  I’m not going to attempt to explain those processes because it’s really the end result that I want us to think about: we simply feel better when we fuss over plants.

While I do grow a fairly sizable vegetable garden here and there are countless benefits from growing your own food—- it’s growing a little patch of flowers I want to focus on. 

I find that most folks have never experienced the joy of growing a little patch of cut flowers. The power that is packed into a handful of homegrown flowers for your table or to share with a friend is nothing short of extraordinary. The benefits go on for days as that little handful of beauties continue to remind of time in a garden.

The 3-by-10 foot cutting garden planted, mulched and netted and waiting for the flowers to start.

In addition to all the benefits of making you feel better, cut flowers are really easy to grow and maintain. From a 3-by-10 foot bed you will harvest a handful of beautiful fresh flowers each week.  Planting cut-flower variety seeds or transplants and following a few ground rules will have you reaping abundance all summer and fall. It is hard to understand the feeling and to believe the abundance until you’ve lived with a cutting garden…

Another bonus, a cutting garden results in less work than a veggie garden, especially when it comes to the end result.

Let me tell you a little story:

When I married Steve some 24 years ago, he was a serious vegetable gardener. Living on his grandparents homestead, he had fallen right into his grandpa’s tradition of growing corn, beans, tomatoes and other vegetables for his extended family and for gifting friends. I eagerly joined in when we married. 

We began to grow even more vegetables as I wanted to preserve the bounty like his mom and others were doing. The memories of being in our kitchen surrounded by a sea of 5 gallon buckets overflowing with tomatoes and corn waiting for me to process are still vivid. I loved doing it, but it was a lot of work! 

In the meantime I had added a short row of zinnias in the vegetable garden. My first cut flowers ever. One day while working on canning tomatoes I took notice of those beautiful zinnias sitting on the counter in a vase just looking good, I smiled. And then it dawned on me, homegrown cut flowers offered instant gratification. They didn’t need to be canned, frozen, shucked, or cooked. Just dropped in a vase and let the show begin. Really.

Funny enough it was in the following weeks that I stumbled onto the book that changed the course of my life, The Flower Farmer by my now good friend Lynn Byczynski. I knew I had found my dream career.

A cutting garden can be so beneficial for you, your family, and friends. If you have memories of a labor intensive vegetable garden, put those thoughts aside and give a cutting garden a chance. I promise it will make you feel better in the process.

I have several resources to help you get started:

  • Cut-Flower Seed Collection I’ve included my favorite cutting variety flowers for an abundant summer and fall harvest that includes the seeds, instructions, and diagram for a 3-by-10 foot cutting garden.
  • The Easy Cut-Flower Garden online course is a 80 minute video from getting started to making a simple bouquet.
  • Vegetables Love Flowers is my book that shares the benefits flowers have on a vegetable garden by growing a small cutting garden in the patch. Includes my organic gardening practices, features my top 20 cutting garden flowers, harvesting details, how to succession plant with seasonal diagrams, and more! Be sure to claim the free companion video Book Study here.
  • Seed Starting Made Easy online course is a 90 minute video that teaches how to be successful planting seeds outdoors in the garden and indoors using soil blocking.
  • My Field & Garden Blog of articles and videos on cut flower gardening.

Find the relief you need right outside your backdoor. I hope this helps you to find and embrace some joy.

Fondly,

Lisa Z

Lisa Mason Ziegler is a cut-flower farmer, author, online course producer, and nationally recognized speaker on organic cut-flower farming and gardening.

Founder of The Gardener’s Workshop and Flower Farming School Online . Award-winning Author of Vegetables Love Flowers & Cool Flowers. Connect with Lisa on Facebook  and Instagram.

 

 

 

 

The Joy of the Tiny Cutting Garden

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Filed Under: Cut Flower Gardening Tagged With:

Beanry's Giant Zinnias and Basil
Zinnias are the all-time favorite summer cut flower.

Think you have no space for a cutting garden or it’s to late to plant? Think again. I’m sharing some facts about the home cutting garden. It is smaller than you think at 3’ x 10’ or smaller and depending on where you garden, you can plant a warm-season cutting garden up until mid-summer.

This time of year I’m hearing from folks that they don’t have space for a cutting garden or the most common, I never got my cutting garden planted. Here’s the good news– having a small, even tiny cutting garden is the road to success and depending on your first expected fall frost, it is most likely not to late to plant your cutting garden.

Sunflowers never seem to go out of style.
Beautiful Pro-Cut Orange Sunflowers make excellent cut flowers.

Actually having little space may just have you closer to success than those that have lots of space. Why? Because this garden, when treated like a cutting garden, produces so many more flowers than people expect, that they tend to make the garden to big. Bigger leads to more garden than needed, which means more chores and literally too many flowers. This life cycle starts the sad story of not cutting the garden as needed and the decline of the cutting garden begins.

Here’s the thing: the more you harvest cutting garden flowers the more they bloom. Add to that the flowers will last longer because they came fresh from your garden–right? So, as you begin harvesting, your home starts to fill up with flowers–a good thing. Until the flowers keep coming and coming and lasting a really long time.

Here’s the problem: All the sudden you start to consider skipping harvesting because you already have so many flowers. This is the beginning of the end of a cutting garden. When the garden is small–I know many that have a 3’ x 5’ garden–you harvest the stuffings out of it and that is exactly what it takes to keep the cutting garden healthy and producing non-stop.

When is it too late to plant? Here in southeastern Virginia our first expected fall frost is mid-November. We plant our last plantings of warm-season annuals 4 months or 16 weeks or 112 days before that date. For me the last planting date is mid-July. Find out the last expected frost date for your area on this link to the Farmer’s Almanac  count back 16 weeks and that is your last planting date for warm-season annuals. The really good news is if it is to late—then it is time to start cool-season hardy annuals for you!!

Here’s a bonus: Consider planting a small cutting garden this summer. This group of flowers, known as warm-season tender annuals thrive in hot conditions. You can start the seeds of these flowers indoors as I do or you can plant outdoors in the garden–if you keep them moist for good sprouting.  As the summer heats up, this garden pumps out the blooms.

Resources: I’ve put together my favorite warm season cutting garden flower seeds in a Collection that comes with a planting diagram and instructions for a 3′ x 10′ cutting garden. Want to learn more about planting a cutting garden? My online course The Easy Cut Flower Garden is a 80 minute course that includes all you need from building and preparing the bed to harvesting the flowers.

Hope you indulge in a cutting garden!

Lisa

Lisa Mason Ziegler. Founder of The Gardener’s Workshop and Flower Farming School Online . Author of Vegetables Love Flowers, Cool Flowers, and The Easy Cut-Flower Garden  . Connect with Lisa on Facebook  and Instagram !

 

How-to Grow Sunflowers, Big or Small Blooms?

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A load of ProCut Orange sunflowers heading to a commercial customer.

Did you know that you control the size of the flower heads on the sunflowers you grow? Interested in growing a gigantic sunflower for the birds to feast on or the perfect smaller head for a bouquet? You can and it is easy to boot.

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Our Sunflower Seed Collection can be grown for cut flowers or for the bees and birds. It includes 5 varieties, blooming in the photo are Sunbright and Moulin Rouge.

First, a quick lesson on the sunflower. There is no shortage of bloom color variations and petal shapes in sunflowers. Each year brings a new sunflower– some worthy, others not so much.

For our discussion there two different types of sunflower growth habits. The first is the most common and widely recognized single stem sunflower. A one-stem plant that produces one sunflower bloom and that’s it, done. The second type is the branching sunflower, it will grow into a plant with many branches. Each branch sporting a bloom with less stem strength as a cut flower and takes more growing space in the garden. However, these are the favorites of birds.

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Moulin Rouge is a branching sunflower that the bees enjoy–but the birds love because it produces black oil sunflower seeds.

Both types are equally as easy to grow and beautiful, but it’s the single stem that the bloom size can be manipulated and produces the best cut flowers. Planting a few every couple of weeks in your garden will supply blooms all season.

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Sunbrights covered in our neighbors honey bees.

Within the single-stemmed varieties I will take it one step further and call out another division. There are a few single-stemmed sunflowers that are known as garden “giants”, grown not for cut flowers but for ornamental and seed production reasons. The steps listed below for making blooms bigger or smaller are also true for this group–however they do not make suitable cut flowers. And they grow over 12 feet tall and with heads that are huge. Really fun to grow.

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A Mammoth Sunflower head mature with seeds shown next to a five gallon bucket for  the whopper effect!

So, after all this drilling down–we are still left with a boatload of sunflowers to choose from. All sunflowers enjoy the same growing conditions:

  • Full sun (at least 8 hours)
  • Organic rich soil (add compost generously at planting)
  • Plant 2 week old seedlings in garden or plant seeds in the garden
  • Add dry organic fertilizer at planting
  • Use liquid organic fertilizer weekly while watering
  • Water generously in dry conditions
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One of our weekly production beds planted 6″ apart in all directions to produce the perfect bouquet sunflower head.

The Determining Factor for Bloom Size: its how close or far apart you plant them. It’s all about the spacing once you give them the sun and food they need.  Remembering that sunflowers are like teenage boys; thinking about their next meal always and they’d like a little water to wash it down. They can’t help but grow big, strong and beautiful when you give them what they want.

  • If you are growing for the biggest sunflower you can possibly get, space plants 24” apart in all directions. Whopper blooms will be forthcoming.
  • If you want the perfect size bouquet sunflowers for the vase (3-5” blooms) than plant 6” apart in all directions.
  • Spacing plants in between these two extreme examples produces medium size blooms.
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A sea of our bouquet size ProCut Orange blooms waiting inline to be made into a bouquet–every flowers dream!

It’s really that simple. For the best cut flowers another note is to select a variety that is pollenless. This will greatly increase vase life and prevent the dropping of yellow pollen onto tabletops. As a bonus, these flowers still produce nectar for pollinators.

Single-stem pollenless varieties: ProCut Series- Orange, and Lemon, Sunbright, and Sunrich Gold.

Branching pollenless: Lemon Aura and Moulin Rouge.

Our little Sunflower Seed Collection makes a 3’ x 10’ garden perfect for cut flowers, the landscape, and for the birds, bees and butterflies!

Here’s to a sunnier garden! 

Lisa Z

This post How-to Grow Sunflowers first appeared on www.thegardenersworkshop.com.

Founder of The Gardener’s Workshop and Flower Farming School Online . Author of Vegetables Love Flowers, Cool Flowers, and The Easy Cut-Flower Garden  . Connect with Lisa on Facebook  and Instagram !

Growing Great Zinnias

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The first cuts of the season for the Benary’s Giants.

Growing great zinnias is easy. Hands down zinnias are the favorite garden flower for many. As a flower farmer, it is in our top 5 best selling cut flowers and as a retailer we sell more zinnia seeds than any other seed. No question we all love zinnias and with good reason I think!

Zinnias are so prolific that a very small patch will provide a handful of blooms a week if you harvest on a regular schedule and give them what they want.

Uproar Zinnias are very productive!

What Zinnias Want:

  • Full sun. At least 8 hours but more is better.
  • Give the soil a hefty dose of compost, 2-4 inches worked into the bed before planting.
  • Mix in a dry organic fertilizer according to directions at bed prep time.

Planting:

  • For a cutting patch, plant closer than as in a landscape. 3 rows to a 30” wide bed with 6” between plants in the row.
  • When to plant–zinnias love warmth. Rushing to plant in the spring while the soil is still cool to cold does not please them. My planting rule is to plant transplants out in the garden when nighttime temperatures are staying above 60 degrees. This is normally 2 weeks after the last expected spring frost. If planting seeds directly in the garden waiting another 1 to 2 weeks will make for stronger germination.
  • I prefer to start seeds indoors for an earlier start and to conserve seed and labor. We start in the small soil blocker 3 weeks before we are going to plant. Aiming for a 3-5” tall seedling. The seedlings grow in the small block until they are planted in the garden. We plant into biodegradable film that helps to warm the soil, retains moisture, and suppresses weeds. Weekly I add liquid organic fertilizer to my watering can per directions.
  • Planting transplants allows you to plant into mulched bed. Simply make a hole and plant. If planting seeds directly in the garden–no mulch yet, plant seeds and then mulch once the seedlings reach 3-5” tall.
  • Succession plant. How long your growing season is will dictate how many patches you might plant. I am in zone 7 with a 6-7 month potential frost free season. I plant zinnias late April, late May, late June, and late July. This makes for a continuous supply of good quality blooms all season. The April and May planting are surely the most productive and most years are still producing in fall.

Feeding and Supporting:

Benary’s Giant Salmon Rose.
  • We install flower support netting while the plants are under 20” tall so they can grow through it easily. The netting should rest at half of the mature height of the plants which for cutting zinnias would be 24” for the 48” tall plants.
  • Stop fertilization once plants are planted in the garden. The dry organic fertilizer added at soil prep will carry them through. Over fertilizing later in their life seems to fuel mildew.

Note on Mildew:

  • All zinnias are susceptible to mildew. Some varieties are more resistant than others.
  • The Benary’s Giants Zinnias that we grow almost exclusively are resistant, however they can all get mildew depending on the growing conditions.
  • Harvesting deep on the plant (see video) at each harvest helps to keep new foliage growing all the time.
  • If and when mildew comes, it is helpful to strip foliage and throw away in trash to help eliminate spores that can spread mildew in the garden.
  • We have not used any treatments for mildew. If it gets going strong on a planting we remove the crop because we have others to harvest from.

Harvesting:

  • Keep the blooms coming– harvesting all the blooms twice a week will keep the garden full of fresh blooms and more on the way. See where to make the cut video for the first cut.
  • After the first cut, harvest stems at the base of the stem being cut.
  • Take a clean container with water to the garden for harvesting. We add flower food to all of our buckets–it definitely makes a difference in homegrown garden flowers!

Shop our Zinnia seeds.

Be sure to read my blog: How to Make the Most of your Cut-Flower Bounty! for more on conditioning flowers for a long vase life.

If you are planting seeds directly in the garden be sure to watch how I prevent weeds in the seed bed.

Have a gorgeous zinnia season!

Benary’s Giant Mixed Colors

 

Lisa Mason Ziegler is a commercial cut-flower farmer in Newport News, Virginia; she lectures and writes about organic and sustainable gardening. You can email Lisa at lisa@shoptgw.com , call her at 757-877-7159 or visit her website www.shoptgw.com .

Like us on Facebook  and follow us on Instagram to keep up with the farm!

How to make the most of your cut-flower bounty!

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We are known on the local cut-flower scene for our near-perfect blossoms and how long they last in the vase. While this may have happened by chance in the beginning of my flower farming career— now days I work pretty hard at making my flowers as gorgeous and long lasting as possible. Certainly being “locally grown” gives my flowers the advantage on vase life over the South American shipped-in flowers (80% of flowers sold in USA by-the-way)– but there are steps I follow to ensure they last as long as possible.

This is a look at our general cut-flower harvesting and conditioning regimen. This is not rocket science–but when followed you will become the rock star among your flower-loving friends.

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Sunflowers are harvested just cracking while celosias are fully developed. 

When to Harvest: The timing of when in its life a flower stem is harvested makes or breaks how beautiful and how long the stem will last. You cannot make a worn-out flower look good or an immature bloom hold its head up in a vase. This is why it is best to learn what stage to harvest the flowers you are growing. To learn more on stage of harvest on some of the flowers we grow and where to make the cut on the plant for more stem growth, click here.

Some examples; zinnias and cockscomb should be fully developed at harvest; once cut, they do not open or develop anymore. On the other hand, sunflowers and snapdragons are harvested when they are just starting to open to prevent any pollination that shortens vase life or pest damage to those delicate petals. Both continue to open beautifully in the bucket indoors, safe from hot sun, wind and pest damage. So, knowing the stage of the flower at harvest time is a really big part of long vase life.

Foliage removal varies from flower-to-flower so it is key to become familiar with the requirements of the flowers you are growing. Leaving too much foliage shortens vase life and causes stress on the stems ability to hydrate–it simply cannot drink enough to keep all that foliage alive.

Conditioning Cut Flowers: Conditioning is what is done to the flower stem after harvest to make it last as long as possible in the vase.

Buckets and Containers: Let’s start with the buckets and containers used during the life of cut flowers, and I’ll cut to the chase: if you aren’t willing to drink water out of whatever you are putting the flowers in, then don’t put cut flowers in it. This step is so underrated. We have a bucket-washing station on our farm and everything is washed after each use. Using containers that have a scummy film, which is not always visible, takes days of vase life off the flowers. Bacteria is present in that scummy film. When you add water and then the debris that comes out of flower stems –bacteria  immediately springs into action. When buckets and containers are clean, it delays this cycle. Adding flower conditioning products to the water delays this process even more.

Wash your buckets and containers with any dish-washing liquid, using a little bleach if needed to remove the built-up scum. Containers and frogs can also go in the dishwasher.

Pre-treatments and Cut-Flower Foods: We use several products on our farm at an added expense and trouble. We do it because it makes a difference in the vase life of our flowers. Pre-treatment does not replace fresh cut-flower food. Food is the next step after pre-treatment.

  • Harvest buckets get a GerbTabs that is a pre-treatment. This chlorine-based tab kills all the bacteria that are a result of the cut stems dumping debris into the water. This debris immediately begins the cycle of bacteria growth. Some flowers are known to dump more debris than others and also are more sensitive to this polluted water. We call this group the dirty dozen. At the top of the list are gerbera daisies, zinnias, marigolds, and dahlias to name just a few. Pre-treating buys extra days of life in a vase. The flowers are treated for at least 4 hours and can sit in this treatment for up to 3 days. For store bought flowers: cut 2” of stems off and place into water with a Gerbtab for the instructed time.

    • Quick Dip is another pre-treatment. This ready-to-use liquid opens the waterways in stems of flowers that are clogged for a variety of different reasons. This is most often needed for store-bought flowers that have been shipped dry. There are a few home grown garden flowers that can benefit from this product, among them campanula, feverfew, rudbeckias and hydrangeas. Any flower that is still drooping 4-8 hours after harvesting can benefit from pre-treatment with Quick Dip.

    • Fresh Cut-Flower Food is what goes in the final vase after any necessary pre-treatments. Flower food does make a difference. If you have used it with no visible results, chances are good that the stems were clogged from dry shipping. When the stems are clogged, they do not drink and get the benefit of the food. Flower varieties that have gone the dry shipping route are chosen by importing growers because those flowers can survive without water for many days, so we don’t even realize they are not drinking. Flower food provides nutrition to keep flowers colored up and to continue opening, biocide to help prevent bacteria from developing and a ph balancer that helps to prevent air bubbles that causes clogged stems. Homegrown flowers drink lots of water and benefit from having food to live.

    • Bulb Fresh Cut-Flower Food is another flower food but is used in flowers that grow from a bulb such as lilies, tulips and dahlias. It does the same job as Fresh Cut-Flower Food with the additional ingredient of a hormone that aids even more in keeping foliage green and buds opening. If a mixed arrangement use bulb food–it cause no harm to non-bulb grown flowers.

Commercial Growers: In place of flower food I use what is called a holding solution during the time flowers are in waiting to go to market and commercial customers. This provides the necessary nutrition, bacteria protection and ph balance in water but yet doesn’t push the buds to open as quickly.

In a nutshell: harvest at the right time, into clean containers, pre-treated where indicated and then use flower food in the vase.

Don’t just grow great flowers; have near perfect blooms that last a long time in a vase.

Visit my online garden shop for the mentioned conditioning supplies.

Happy harvesting!

This post How to make the most of your cut-flower bounty! first appeared on www.thegardenersworkshop.com.

Lisa Mason Ziegler is a commercial cut-flower farmer in Newport News, Virginia; she lectures and writes about organic and sustainable gardening. You can email Lisa at lisa@shoptgw.com , call her at 757-877-7159 or visit her website www.shoptgw.com .

Like us on Facebook  and keep up with the farm!

Growing Great Dahlias

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1 Grow Great Dahlias

Some of the very first dahlias I grew.

After growing lots of dahlias over the past few years I’ve come to the conclusion that it is much easier than I ever dreamed. They are the beauties of fall for sure. They can become quite addictive if you aren’t careful–you’ve been warned! Once you provide what they want, they produce like crazy. I have listed below the steps we follow here on our flower farm in winter hardiness zone 7.

oct 2012 blogBucket of beauties!

Tips:

  • Plant tubers once the soil has warmed in spring for best rooting.
  • Dahlias need full sun.
  • We plant one single row in a 24” beds, 12” apart in the row. Dahlias are actually very robust growers and I’ve found when given room to stretch their wings keeps them in better health.
  • Excellent drainage is a must! Deeply prepared soil with compost and/or composted manures is excellent. I mix dry fertilizer in at this time.
  • We plant the tubers according to directions and lay strip of irrigation down the bed.
  • A 1”-2” layer of compost as a base for mulch, then top with 3”-5” of mulch (we use leaves).
  • We water at planting time and don’t water again until we see green coming.
  • Once growing, dahlias love water. Give a deep watering once a week- we run it slow and low overnight.
  • We cut the central stem out (the first stem) at ground level to encourage lots of branching with nice size stems.
  • We install flower support netting with serious stakes before they reach 20”. Stakes are closer than other beds- like every 6’-8’ feet.
  • In a perfect world I would foliar (spray on foliage) feed dahlias with Neptune’s Harvest each week. But ours get it more like monthly. We also run it through our irrigation monthly.
  • We harvest the stems when they are 1/3 to ½ open. We make the cut at ground level. Doing this encourages more sturdy stems to sprout and grow and it also helps to keep the plants from becoming overgrown and difficult to manage.
  • Our harvest buckets have a GerbPro tab in 1 gallon of water to kill bacteria, leave stems in at least for 4 hours and up to 72 hours. From the GerbPro tab water we move into Bulb Fresh Cut Flower Food.
  • Dahlias love refrigeration. We put in cooler for at least 12 hours before selling or using in arrangements. It seems to help with vase life.
  • While in zone 7 we can leave dahlia tubers in the ground over winter we usually dig them to save them from vole damage. The winter is the time the voles really go after them.
  • Digging and storing tubers: resist hosing off the soil- it can lead to rotting. We shake off the soil, do any dividing needed and store in peat moss in a cool dry spot for winter.

Shop our dahlias now!

Dahlias will make fall feel like spring all over!

Lisa Z

Lisa Mason Ziegler is a commercial cut-flower farmer in Newport News, Virginia; she lectures and writes about organic and sustainable gardening. You can email Lisa at lisa@shoptgw.com,  call her at 757-877-7159 or visit her website www.shoptgw.com .

Like us on Facebook  and keep up with the farm!