A Beginner's Cut Flower Garden - First Steps

An ideal day for a cut flower article would have been Mother's Day, but I am running severely behind schedule (as usual) and  haven't gotten to it. I normally celebrate Mother's Day with a reprint of my favorite blog entry ever, known as Joyce's Mother's Day Heist. Alas, even that little bit of nostalgia got passed over this year in the May melee of summer garden prep.

You see, we last left off in the fall with the semi-completion of what I fondly call "The Great Wall of Tommy" (hereafter known as GWOT). All of the remaining grass inside our fence was tilled up and turned into a two-tiered vegetable garden with about 17 raised beds, plus the plantings all around the fence perimeter. In total it's about 3600 square feet of delicious full sun exposure resulting in (FINALLY!) enough room for a cut flower garden.

I've always wanted cut flowers but felt that every square inch of sun needed to be reserved for tomatoes and peppers. That would not have been a problem if only I lived in Vermont somewhere in the proximity of Waitsfield. If I did, I would just buy a share of Amy's Organic Cut Flowers and let her do all the work. A $100 share gets you 10 fresh bouquets - one per week for ten weeks. That is an amazing deal, considering you would pay about the same amount for non-organic, non-local, and not-long-for-this-world flowers from your grocery store. I really wish I lived closer and could do this, but without an expensive relocation on the horizon, I figured the next best thing would be too start digging and then check in with Amy Todisco herself for some advice.

The two beds I chose flank the GWOT, and will hopefully make a lovely first impression upon entry to the veggies. The bed on the left had been empty and mulched last fall, and was not too bad when April rolled around. However, the bed on the right had some token fall plantings and no mulch. The result? Well, let's see. Or let's talk about what you DON'T see here: some lovely varieties of stonecrop slowly choking to death , a series of unimpressed rose of sharon saplings, overwintered ornamental cabbages, depressed mums, buried lamb's ears, a high-maintenance diva rosebush crying into her martini, and my lonely little buddha (though enlightened and non-attached, still secretly wishing to be back safely on the shelf at the Christmas Tree Shoppe with his other identical buddha friends). What you DO see is an obnoxious little white flowered creeper called chickweed, which spreads by running along the ground and dropping seeds to come up next year. The bed on the left had a total of about four of these plants and took minutes to weed. But weeding that other bed resulted in scenes both dirty and graphic, involving filth, sweat, and various and sundry four letter words. Let's take this time to look away, and check in with Amy about some important first steps.

I asked Amy for advice about starting a cut flower garden for the first time. What follows is Amy's handy to-do list.


1. Choose a full sun location (at least 8 hours per day).
2. Soil should drain well.
3. I would recommend getting a soil test to see what kind of fertility it has and what it might need. Usually the agricultural extension office in each state can provide this for gardeners.
4. Choose flowers. Probably planting seedlings versus seeds is the easier route for the first garden. Seeds take a long time and it's more satisfying for the new gardener to see something already in the ground.
5. Ideally, grow organically (which means using compost as opposed to Miracle Gro, as well as liquid seaweed and/or fish emulsion for fertilizer, and no pesticides.)
6. Water, weed, and watch as the flowers grow, attracting butterflies and bees, and impressed onlookers.

Wonderful! Now here's the part where I admit that I asked Amy's advice after already choosing the site, buying plants, and digging. As luck would have it, I did pretty well except for the soil test part.  I always mean to get one of those! One of these days ...

Soon after I started, my beds looked more like this:

I managed to rescue the lamb's ears from the right and move them to the left bed, as seen above. The mums and rose of sharon trees were relocated, and the cabbages put in a pot until their inevitable death due to the heat of summer. Most of the stonecrop survived, and I transplanted some creeping thyme between the stones in the path. The diva rose stayed put, shooting me dirty looks and talking on her tiny cell phone the whole time  (she's named "Bella Donna" so I should've known she'd be a pain). The buddha breathed a sigh of relief and I gave him a nice wild portulacca plant to hold in his cupped hands. Done.

And now for the real fun. I had already done the shopping for plants, doing a lot of googling to find recommendations. I was planning on mixing perennials with annual plants, annual seeds and even vegetables, space permitting. Here's my current inventory:

Perennials - Foxglove, Delphinium, Liatris, Thrift, English Daisy, Sea Holly, Yarrow, Blanket Flower, Salvia, Peony, Lupine

Annuals - Zinnia, Osteospermum, Dahlia, Snapdragon, Cosmos

Seeds - Zinnia, Sunflowers, Sweet Peas

Veg - Malabar Spinach, Grapevine (to grow over the deck)

Of course, I had to ask Amy about her favorites as well: "Let's see, my favorite cut flowers at this point, and I may change my mind after this season growing some new ones, are zinnias, sweet peas and snapdragons. I also like the perennial peonies-the more fragrant the better. And, I love lavender-the flowers, the essential oil, you name it." That means Amy can jump off the turnpike the next time she's cutting through Jersey to get someplace else and will still be able to find her favorite flowers in my yard!

And there you have it. My cut flower garden is on it's way, but not completed. The plants are in, seeds are sprouting, soaker hoses are laid out, but the mulch isn't in place. I'd like to have my "after" picture with some big beautiful flowers in it, so give me another month for the fascinating conclusion of my cut flower adventure! Thanks again to Amy Todisco for indulging my requests for input, and best of luck to her and her cut flower garden CSA. Please check out her websites, especially the cool products she offers on her website www.greenlivingnow.com.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon!