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, …
With a greenhouse structurally finished with a new greenhouse table along with some cool hardy snapdragons, it was time for potting up snapdragons and taking them to the greenhouse. This started with testing to see if the snapdragons and other cool hardy plants would survive in the low tunnel in the greenhouse. Another trial was …
Potting Up Snapdragons and Moving to an Unheated Greenhouse Read More »
Snapdragons are started very early with tiny seeds. When I tried to grow these seeds my first year, I had no idea how successful they would be or not. After starting snapdragons, growing, and harvesting for my first season, I find them entirely easy to start and grow and they are my absolute favorite for …
My first cut flower garden was rows after rows of zinnias that, welp, I never ended up cutting. I saw a neighbor plant zinnia in their vegetable garden and wanted to do something similar. I used a large bag of zinnias with fertilizer from Tractor Supply. Besides hoeing rows for this zinnia mix, I did …