Besides sunflowers, my number one crop of summer and early fall cut flowers are zinnias, but the best way to plant them is in landscape fabric from seed. Floret will plant her zinnia seeds with a one-row seeder. For how many she is planting, that totally makes sense. For my large-scale gardening, I only need …
My first year growing cut flowers for my home, I did not have high quality landscape fabric. For my small 3’ x 10’ beds of zinnias, marigolds, and gladioli, I applied mulch between the closely planted flowers. 2021 was just a crazy, busy summer to where I fell behind on applying mulch to suppress weeds. …
It’s my favorite flower season- peonies are in bloom. With peonies needing at least three years to become established, my own peonies are all Sarah Bernhardt variety. They have a medium, soft pink with some specks of a darker pink. Thanks to this unusual weather for late May, these peonies are blooming earlier, just in …
With my first season of starting cool flowers indoors and planting them in the ground in the books, I discovered my favorite way to plant cool flowers with mulch. Although it is similar to how I’ve planted my summer cut flowers with spacing, fertilizer, and design, the weed preventive strategies are different. For the most …
With one and half beds of cool flowers planted in early spring, I needed to put down some sort of a mulch. After their planting, we had at least four days of warm weather with highs in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Summertime weather in spring. The soil was drying out around these new …
Plant hardy annuals. Plant cool flowers. Uhh, I loved reading all sorts of resources on planting cut flowers early in the season that could handle the cooler temperatures. Floret has a chapter in her book “Cut Flower Garden” on hardy annuals. She suggests planting these about a month before your average last frost. Gardener’s Workshop …
Spring is my favorite season with all the flowers. Absolutely the best. It starts off with a taste of winter, but with a change of the quality of the air. There’s more humidity. And the rain hits. It rains, and rains, and rains, until the garden is flooded, the ducks have an unnatural puddle to …
Flower shopping with my mom and grandmother, petunias were a must to have in our gardens every year. Flower centers start these from plugs to then continue growing for their customers. Most petunias from the store are started from cuttings, which use an asexual method of reproducing the plant. With Baker Creek offering heirloom seeds, …
I shared in a previous post about my top five gardening fails and growing from them. I’m going to continue sharing my fails to help you not make the same, encourage you to keep going even if you fail with something, and to always keep learning from gardening. The only way you will fail with …
When gardening, it is not going to be perfect. Plants are living things, and they can die. A lot of hard work, time, and energy goes into gardening, but things happen where the plants do end up dying. Sometimes it is the cause of our own hands. Other times, the weather, bugs, rodents, or whatever …