How To Grow Your Own Cut Flowers: A Beginner's Guide (Part 3)
You’ve planned your cut flower garden, sown your seeds, and watched them grow into beautiful blooms. Now is the part you’ve been waiting for – picking and arranging your own flowers is the reward for all your hard work.
For the best results from your cutting garden, it’s important to know which of your plants and seedlings are cut and come again varieties. This means that the more you pick them, the more flowers they will produce. Cutting these flowers encourages them to branch out with more blooms instead of producing seeds.
Some of the most popular cut and come again annuals include sweet peas, zinnias, calendula, cosmos, cornflowers, strawflowers, and snapdragons. Multi-headed sunflowers will also produce more flowers if you cut them. Roses, scabious, and ranunculus are all excellent perennials for a cut flower garden, but the top performer has to be dahlias. These are the stars of the late-summer garden – you can keep picking your dahlias for weeks and they won’t disappoint, producing bucketfuls of brightly coloured flowers.
How to Pick Your Cut Flowers
Whatever flowers you’ve chosen to grow this year, the best time to pick them is first thing in the morning as this is when the stems are filled with water.
Grab two buckets and fill one with water before heading out, keeping the other for snippings.
When cutting your flowers, make sure to keep the stem as long as possible. Trim the lower leaves so that the stems are clean and place your flowers straight into your water bucket. The discarded leaves can go into the other bucket and you can continue in this way until you have the flowers that you need.
You might need some different sized buckets if you are picking different length flowers like sweet peas and sunflowers.
When you’ve finished picking, empty your snippings bucket onto the compost heap or into your green bin. Take the flowers and put them somewhere cool indoors and away from direct sunlight. This way, they can have a good drink and be ready to be arranged later in the day, or even better, the next morning.
How to Arrange Your Cut Flowers
There are so many different ways to arrange flowers that it can all get a bit overwhelming and it can be hard to know where to start, but it’s all a matter of doing what you think looks good. Some people prefer massed jugs and vases of one type of flower, some like to add in foliage for interest, and others like to use different flower varieties for some variation. Some people like neat, orderly displays, whilst others like a wilder, more natural look. Follow your own style – this is where you get to be creative.
One of our top tips for floral arrangements is to make sure that your flowers are no higher than two times the height of the vase or jug that you are arranging into. If the flowers are too high, then your arrangement will look top heavy. Aim for just under double the height for a display that looks beautifully balanced.
When it comes to colours, it’s all down to you. Use bold contrasting colours to pack an impressive punch, choose flowers that are different shades of the same colours for a more subtle approach, or mix the two ideas with complimentary colours that lift the whole display.
You can also take a look at other people’s arrangements and what they like to do for inspiration if it still feels a bit too much.
The most important thing when it comes to arranging flowers is to have fun!
