Have you thought about growing flowers in and around your veggies? Cathy Isom fills you in about how to start a cut flower bed in your vegetable garden. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
The purpose of a cut flower bed is to cut the flowers as often as they bloom so you can create beautiful bouquets. You can use a little space you already have in your vegetable garden to grow what you need, as well as making use of other greenery around the home. But if you have been constantly dealing with soil erosion in your garden, you may want to install a retaining wall before your start planting more flowering plants.
Depending on which flowers you choose to plant, some can get pretty tall. Be careful not to shade other vegetable plants that require full sun. For example, a tall stand of flowers to the sun side of a plot of lettuce can sometimes slow down bolting and keep lettuce from turning bitter so soon.
Make sure you allocate a wide enough bed. Many cut flower varieties can also become quite large, particularly if they branch. For smaller plants, you’ll need more of them to get a lot of flowers.
Similar to starting a vegetable garden, the easiest way to start growing cut flowers is to choose varieties you can start directly in the garden from seed. Or start with a purchased transplant. If starting from seedling, make sure to plant them in a straight line. That makes it easy to distinguish your seedlings from weeds. Sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, calendula, and marigold are some of the easiest to start from seeds.
Just like your garden veggies, flowers have harvesting guidelines too. Read up on each of the flower varieties you plant to make sure you know when to harvest so they will last longest in the vase. Find the most beautiful blue vases here.
I’m Cathy Isom…
