Growing a Cut Flower Garden
THE FARMHOUSE
This summer we grew our first cut flower garden. And goodness, it brought so much joy to our home! A reader told me, “vegetables nourish the body and flowers nourish the soul” and I so agree! Today I wanted to share our experience growing a large cut flower garden. I’ll be talking about what we grew, our layout/setup/irrigation, how much it all cost, the resources I found invaluable, tools of the trade, and lots and lots of pretty flower photos.
Also, I grew these (!!!)…
homegrown flowers (dahlias, cosmos, zinnias, wild roses, and foraged greens) in our Farmhouse kitchen (kitchen sources here)
I’m FAR from an expert when it comes to growing flowers (like SO far) - so consider this post a ‘how year one went’ rather than expert advice. You can find the actual experts - the books I read, online resources, and farmers I follow - at the bottom of this post.
Why grow a cut flower garden?
You can’t eat flowers, it’s true (for the most part). So why grow a flower garden? It’s definitely a privilege to have the time, space, and money to dedicate to growing something that’s just pretty to look at. But flowers bring SO much joy to life. They make people smile and that’s something to be valued, especially in a year like this one. Flowers make great homegrown gifts for neighbors, family, friends, passerbys (and we had plenty to give away!). Flowers also attract bees and other pollinators, a plus for your food garden and the earth in general. And lastly, I understand that flowers are a relatively valuable crop and can be farmed on a couple of acres or less if you want to sell them.
Another thing I loved about growing flowers is the sense of accomplishment and joy of learning a new skill. I can’t tell you how proud and happy I was to create my first bouquet of homegrown flowers, sewn, watered, and lovingly tended with my own two hands!
What we grew this year
We’re in hardiness zone 6b and we picked flowers appropriate to our area. If you don’t know your zone, you can look it up here. Plant zones are designated by the USDA and give you an average first frost and last frost timeline for your area, which will help you decide which flowers will grow and when to plant them.
So what did we grow at the Farmhouse? I tried to stick with mostly cut-and-come-again varieties, which keep producing even after you cut the blooms off). I’m all about keeping things as low-maintenance as possible in life and these flowers give you more bang for your time, money, and effort. We started a few of our flowers under grow lights in our bathroom just because we had it all set up to start some vegetables for our garden, but seeded most of them directly in the earth. Starting them indoors gives you a jumpstart on the plants since you can start them months before your last frost. But seeding them directly works great and is less work.
In the end, I’d guess we ended up with 70% success rate on our plants, with some seeds not coming up (I got only one poppy plant) and some plants getting mowed down by the deer (we have to chase them out of the flower garden almost every day). But the flowers we did get were awesome! Let’s talk about them, especially our 3 best growers…
Dahlias
Dahlias are a special flower! They are planted by tuber in the Spring and the blooms come in so many colors, shapes, and styles. The flowers are glorious, vibrant, and keep on producing! In colder climates like our’s, the tubers get dug up after the first frost, divided, and stored until next Spring. And everything I read said these beauties are popular slug snacks, so lots of people put down slug bate (one reader even mentioned keeping ducks for this purpose).
Dahlias are standouts in arraignments and definitely a favorite in our cut flower garden! I’ll be honest, I didn’t document the type of dahlias we planted as well as I thought I did (I should have marked it by the plant instead of just in a journal) so I’m not 100% sure which varieties are which.
Cosmos
All hail the cosmos. They’re easy to grow, prolific producers, and survived many deer encounters. My favorite variety was the white ‘purity’ cosmos which looked a lot like a daisy. These are great fillers for arrangements and how pretty would they be in a stand-alone bridal bouquet (like what I’m holding below)?!
Zinnias
Zinnias might have been our most successful plant. They just grew and grew! These hardy flowers come in vibrant array of colors and are great additions to arrangements. Zinnias aren’t my favorite blooms ever, but I appreciate how easy they are to grow and their range of colors. Ours came from an ’Oklahoma Salmon’ mix from Floret.
Other plants we grew…
Annual Babys Breath - the blooms on these are a little bigger than the baby’s breath you’ve seen at the grocery store, and perfect for large stand-alone arrangements.
Chinese Forget-Me-Not - these tiny pink flowers are beautiful and make for great filler.
Buplereum - this was one of the few ‘greens’ we grew and I LOVED it! It’s a really fun, whimsical plant that’s a lovely addition to arraignments.
Soapwort - I loved these early-blooming tiny pink flowers! They feel old fashioned and I’d love to grow them again!
What didn’t bloom: Breadseed Poppy (I literally got one flower from hundreds of seeds), California Poppy, and Larkspur.
Our garden layout
We decided to grow flowers in a dedicated field (outside of our fruit/veggie garden) behind our house. We converted a section of semi-wild/semi-maintained grass yard that never got used for this project. It’s a large space (about 40’x50’) and we arranged 6 long ‘raised beds’ in the space. You definitely don’t need this much space to grow flowers, but we decided to go all out.
Each ‘raised beds’ is a row of mounded dirt and compost. We bought a truck-load of local garden soil and picked up a trailer full of compost from our local dump. With a tractor, a rake, and some serious elbow grease, we arranged the dirt in six 4’x50’ parallel rows, topping each with compost which we raked into the top of the dirt. That single sentence took the better part of 2 days (3?), with Papa on the tractor, me on the rake, and two tired adults at the end of each day!
Next we laid 3 lengths of drip tape down each row (we’ll do 4 per row next time) and attached them all to a timer. We then covered all but one of the rows with landscape fabric (it’s reusable from year to year and keeps weeds to a minimum), which we burned holes in at the correct spacing for the type of plants we were growing. Everything was staked down with long landscape staples and we threw a few bricks on for good measure. It gets really, really windy in Ellensburg.
Lastly we sowed the seeds, following the package instructions for each type of seeds. Here’s what the garden looked like after sowing the seeds…
And here’s what it looked like later in the season (we had two rows remain bare because the seeds didn’t come up or deer ate the plants). A row of zinnias is on the right side and a row of cosmos is on the left.
We actually only covered 5 of our 6 rows, opting to leave the dahlias uncovered. We placed the dahlia tubers at the top of the slightly-sloping hill because they need well-drained soil to keep from rotting. We had a lot of success with the dahlias but the lack of plastic in that row meant more weeding.
Here’s a close up of the irrigation. We used two timers so the dahlias could be watered separately (the tubers don’t get any water at all until the plants are about 12” tall).
Basically our whole setup is based on Floret’s blog posts and books. And I highly recommended heading to their blog to learn more as they’ve been doing this for over a decade and have their process really dialed in. They also offer courses. This is definitely stop #1 if you’re interested in growing flowers.
How many flowers do we get?
Even with only 4 of the 6 rows growing, we have a ton of flowers, at least once we hit August we did. I could harvest a bucket like this every single day and there would still be plenty of flowers left on the stem for the bees to enjoy. We’ve been giving away flowers as fast as we can and deadheading anything that stays on the stem past it’s prime.
Where we bought seeds
We got seeds and tubers from the following places and recommend all of them:
Dan’s Dahlias (dahlia tubers)
New York Farm (dahlia tubers)
Twig and Vine (dahlia tubers)
Tools, products, and books
Here are the basics we used to grow our cut flower garden.
*this post includes affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase from one of my links, I may get a teeny tiny commission at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting the Grit and Polish!
1 Floral scissors / 2 Floral wire and tape / 3 Flower Harvest Scissors / 4 Bypass pruning shears / 5 Boots (I’ve had these muck boots for 10+ years now) / 6 Drip tape irrigation (you can download our entire irrigation parts list from DripDepot here) / 7 Irrigation timer (we use the same one in our veggie garden) / 8 Landscape staples (to hold down the fabric) / 9 18” wooden field stakes / 10 Metal buckets (love the US-made ones from Behrens!) / 11 Weatherproof garden marker / 12 A good crock for arrangements / 13 Cut Flower Garden / 14 Floret Farm’s A Year in Flowers / 15 Landscape fabric / 16 16 Overalls (I bought these Dovetail overalls this year and wore the heck out of them)
Other things: Gloves (we got to try a few pairs from Digz this summer and are big fans!)Chicken wire for arrangements (see this post for more on arranging)
Lessons learned
Greens. Greens/fillers are an essential part of flower arrangements and worth adding to a cut flower garden. But since we have 3 wild acres to forage from, I’ll probably skip adding greens to our future flower gardens.
Take better notes! I kept a journal and tracked what I planted and how they grew. But I wish I had been even more diligent, especially with the Dahlias.. Once plants like dahlias are tall, it’s more difficult than you’d think to figure out which flower belongs to which stock belongs to which tuber. Labeling them at the plant would help!
Pinch. Certain plants can be pinched (cut off at the top, usually right above the leaves) in order to produce more flowers with nice, long stems.
Deer. Deer like flowers it turns out and sometimes they even like to bed down in them : ( A deer fence is ideal for growing flowers in areas with a lot of deer.
Irrigation. It’s a little complicated to get an irrigation system up and running (you can download our entire irrigation parts list from DripDepot here) but so worth it. Having enough drip lines on an irrigation timer is key to successfully growing flowers!
Picking. Each flower has a different stage when it should be picked - unopened, partly open, fully open - and is handled separately after harvesting. Knowing how to handle each flower is important to maximize it’s vase life.
Weed control. Holy moly, weeds are a pain, aren’t they?! We had lots of weeds pop up around the garden and between rows. The landscape fabric worked miracles.
Resources
Books
Cut Flower Garden, Erin Benzakein, Julie Chai
Floret Farm’s A Year in Flowers, Erin Benzakein, Julie Chai, Jill Jorgensen
Grow Your Own Cut Flowers, Sarah Raven
The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower's Guide to Raising and Selling Cut Flowers, 2nd Edition, Lynn Byczynski
Flower Farmers
Flowers farmers have been a great resource in learning about growing a cut flower garden. You can even watch them in action on Instagram. Many of the flower farmers listed here offer a wealth of information on their website, have shops where you can but seeds/tubers/etc, and some of them even offer courses.
Floret Flowers, Washington state, @floretflower, www.floretflowers.com.
Tiny Hearts Farm, New York, @tinyheartsfarm, www.tinyheartsfarm.com
Twig and Vine, Washington, @twigandvine, www.twigandvine.com
Farmhouse Flowers, Washington, @Farmhouseflowerfarm
What our cut flower garden cost
Our total cost for the initial setup: dirt, compost, irrigation, landscape fabric, and seeds was just over $2,000. Surprised? I sure was! I thought it would be a fraction of that. But of course most of what we bought (everything except the seeds, really) will be reused year after year, so next year should only cost us the price of seeds give or take. And we have a fair amount of irrigation parts and fabric left over.
Here’s a breakdown of expenses:
Books for research $100
Soil, 1 truck load $485
Compost and Fertilizer $225
Irrigation $533 (you can download our entire irrigation parts list from DripDepot here)
Landscape Fabric $125
Staples $25
Seeds and Tubers $475 (dahlia tubers are significantly more than seeds, but can be replanted)
Stakes, pen, labels, $200
Misc $100
Total = $2,268
Next Year’s Plans
We’re still thinking on this one, but we’d like grow cut flowers again and do better. Assuming we have the time and bandwidth (i.e. we’re not knee deep in a renovation) and can figure out the deer situation (a fence?), we’re all in. We’ve considered trading our ‘production’ layout for more of a ‘stroll through the garden’ layout. So we’d space the rows farther apart and grow grass between them (or maybe just add mulch). We’re still learning and experimenting and this garden will surely evolve. We don’t want to make it too high-maintenance (that’s a sure fire way for us to abandon it all together) but I really, really enjoy the flowers!
That’s all I can think to share today. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll try to answer them in the comments.
