Making a cutting garden

If you love to add fresh flowers to your Michigan home or bring bouquets to friends why not start a cutting garden? You can just cut flowers from your regular flower beds if you have an abundance of flowers but you are often torn between cutting blooms for inside or leaving them to make the best display in the garden. If you have a cutting garden, a garden solely designed to take flowers from, you won’t have those hard decisions.

Cutting gardens can include plants that look good in the vase, but may be hard to integrate in landscape beds and borders. Gladiolus are an example, they don’t blend well in most mixed beds. And when you cut the glad flower there is little left to lend interest in the garden. Plants that have a straggly growth habit, plants that require extra care like tea roses, plants that don’t suit your landscape theme, and plants with flower colors that clash with flowers in your landscape beds are good choices for growing in a cutting garden.

Location for a cutting garden

In order to grow the largest variety of flowers choose a location in full sun. The soil should be tested if there has never been a garden there and amended if necessary. Most flowers want a well drained area.

Your cutting garden is best in a spot where it is out of public view. If you use a lot of flowers from it, which is the point of a cutting bed, it won’t always look as nice as a bed designed to be seen. A spot behind the garage or by the vegetable garden may work or you may want to plant behind a screen of some sort. Give yourself room to plant generous quantities of your favorite plants.

You may want to have separate areas within your cutting garden for perennial plants and annual plants and tender bulbs. That way when you are digging dahlias out for winter storage or planting zinnias in the spring, you won’t disturb the perennial plants.

Plant selection for cutting gardens

Think of the plants that you like to use in flower arrangements and choose those varieties, but don’t limit yourself. It’s always fun to try different things. Plants that bloom prolifically, plants that have sturdy stems for cutting, and plants that are quick and easy to grow make great cutting plants. Always try to plant a good selection of fragrant plants, for bouquets that smell as good as they look.

Summer or tender bulbs have some good candidates for cutting gardens. Gladiolus and dahlias are two common ones that come in a wide range of colors and flower forms. They can be dug up and stored after frost in the fall or treated like annuals and discarded. Other bulbs to try are tuberose, and calla lilies.

Perennial bulbs make great cutting garden candidates. You don’t have to worry about the dying foliage making the garden look bad or clashing colors. Go wild with tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, alliums, Asiatic, trumpet, and oriental lilies. Bearded and Siberian iris are also great. Try to choose several varieties that bloom at different times to extend your harvest.

Daisy-like perennials are cutting garden and bouquet favorites. These include Shasta daisies, heliopsis, gaillardia, coreopsis and echinacea. Chrysanthemums will extend the harvest into fall.

Other good cutting garden perennials include lavender, Russian sage, phlox, ornamental oreganos, Cupids dart, hardy asters, Bee Balm, hydrangea and goldenrod. Don’t forget tiny flowers for tiny nosegay bouquets like lily of the valley, pansies and violets.

Annual flowers, those that live just one year, offer many great choices for cutting gardens. Be picky about varieties; look for ones with sturdy stems and disease resistance. Good choices are zinnias, marigolds, sunflowers, cosmos, annual asters, cornflowers, snapdragons, salvia, statice, cleome, celosia and calendula.

If you love cut roses you may want to use tea roses as annuals in the cutting garden. Start with top size potted or bare root tea type roses, plant and care for them well all summer and you will be rewarded with tons of blooms. If they come back next year it’s a bonus. Hardy shrub or landscape roses have a different type of flower shape but still can look nice in arrangements and will be more likely to over winter without extensive care.

Cutting garden care

Just because it’s out of sight doesn’t mean it should be out of mind. Make sure you can get water to the cutting garden if it’s dry. Fertilize perennial flowers in the spring when they first begin growing with a slow release fertilizer formulated for flowers. Annuals in the cutting garden require fertilization when planting and about every 6 weeks until frost.

Keep your garden weeded, weeds encourage disease and insect problems and compete for food and water with your desired cutting garden plants. If you aren’t using all of the flowers for cutting, keep flowers picked off the plants as they fade. This encourages the plant to keep blooming. Keep track of what varieties did well for you and what didn’t so you’ll know what to buy next year.

When you have a cutting garden it’s easy to be generous with its bounty. Almost everyone likes flowers and keeping the flowers cut is good for the plants. Bees and butterflies can enjoy the flowers until you pick them. And you won’t feel like you are leaving a big bare spot like you do might when cutting from your landscape beds. No more indecision- cut away!