Cutting Garden Bring The Beauty Of Fresh Flowers Indoors

Flower & Garden Magazine, Sept, 2000 by Liz Ball

Everyone loves to give and receive flowers. So great is their appeal, that fresh cut flowers play a role in the celebration of holidays and milestones of family and personal life throughout much of the world. It's a particular luxury to have fresh flowers on display at home on a daily basis. What a delight it is to be surrounded indoors by bouquets and arrangements of fragrant, colorful blossoms --to have a bit of the garden in the house. * For gardeners, the ultimate pleasure is to be able to cut flowers from their own garden to bring indoors and to give away to friends and family. Many also love to have homegrown blossoms, foliage, and seedheads handy for fresh or dried floral crafts and cooking. However, the problem is always that picking flowers from the garden reduces the floral show in the yard. It's always a tough decision whether to cut flowers for indoors or leave them on display outdoors. The perfect solution to this problem is to establish a separate cultivated area specifically as a cutting garden. Then you can have your flowers and pick them too!

Fill your cutting garden with plants that produce the flowers and foliage you love and use it as an area to experiment with new plants and colors. Place it where it is not on public display, and indulge your fancy, or consider making it part of your vegetable garden. This is a production garden, created to be cut down, so do not worry about design correctness.

* CREATING A CUTTING GARDEN

Create a cutting garden much the same way you initially establish a flower garden. Choose a site that receives generous sun and prepare the soil so that it drains well. Add humus in the form of compost, peat moss or chopped leaves to improve clay or sandy soil. Create one or more beds of whatever size and shape accommodate the available space. They can be tucked into sunny spots along the back boundary, in a neglected corner or behind the garage. By their very nature, they are transient, so they are easily changed or reconfigured next season if necessary.

While cutting gardens often look beautiful at the peak of the season, this is incidental. So, because they are not intended for display, a purely utilitarian layout makes the most sense. Then once they are established, they are easier to maintain and require much less attention than ornamental beds. For this reason, cutting gardens usually resemble traditional vegetable gardens. They are typically planted in widely-spaced rows that are easy to move through and between while planting, thinning, fertilizing, deadheading and, of course, harvesting.

* MANAGING A CUTTING GARDEN

Be sure to mix into the soil a granular, slow-acting fertilizer at the beginning of the season. This will provide consistent, balanced nutrition to the plants over many, many weeks. Periodic doses of diluted liquid fertilizer sprayed on plant foliage will boost the energy of certain heavy-blooming plants during peak flower production.

Rather than interplant seeds or young transplants of many different kinds of flowers, group the species of plants for efficient use of space and easy harvest. To get maximum production, plant annuals in succession--early season, midseason and late season bloomers grouped together. Cluster plants with similar requirements for sun, water and drainage for easier maintenance. Plant tall types together, away from where they might shade smaller ones.

To minimize watering and weeding maintenance, spread a 2- or 3-inch layer of some organic mulch on the soil around the plants in the cutting garden as soon as they are a few inches tall. It does not have to be attractive, so use whatever is inexpensive and at hand, such as chopped leaves, shredded newspaper or straw. The mulch will discourage weeds, keep the soil moist longer and contribute nutrients to the soil as it decomposes in the heat of summer. Add to the mulch layer if it breaks down to less than an inch. If you grow plants that are notorious self-seeders, such as spider flower (cleome), removing the mulch at the end of the season will help to clear away most of the seeds as well.

To spur and maintain flower production of annuals, pick blossoms regularly. Deadhead those that remain and become faded. This prevents them from forming seeds, which slows flower production. Water about an inch per week if rainfall is unreliable. Unmulched beds will need more frequent waterings, especially in the summer. Keep a look out for aphids on tender young growth or on plants that are stressed and unhappy. Pinch infested tips off or wash the foliage with a strong stream of water from the hose. Insecticidal soap spray will take care of stubborn infestations.

As soon as the blossoms from one strand of flowers have been cut and/or the plants begin to weaken, pull them, cultivate the bed and plant new seedlings to provide cut flowers for the weeks to come. For instance, plant only pansies in an area for an early season supply of flowers. Then, when summer heat arrives, replace them in that area with American marigolds or zinnias.