By LYN DESMARAIS
Many who garden do so in order to have a ready source of beautiful flowers to cut. I’ve asked two local friends to contribute and comment on my advice because I feel they are experts, and I am not.
How do I grow a cut-flower garden and is it a lot of work? What’s involved? I feel that all gardening does involve a lot of work so, I say, start small. The goal is to have cut flowers throughout our growing season and to have them last for a week inside a house in a vase. Therefore earmark 4-6 large containers now for your Dahlias and earmark a sunny piece of your garden that is 2 feet by 5 feet for your cutting garden. Make sure you have a hose that can reach both. As soon as the ground is bare, even in winter, cover that 2-by-5 spot with cardboard or a tarp, weighed down so they stay put. This will, I say hopefully, kill any weeds or grasses or at least make the ground easier for you to work in May.
Look around your garden even now. What do you have for perennials? Write down their color, size, and when they bloom. For example, you may have lilacs, hydrangeas, peonies, and irises. You may also have wild flowers, such as daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, red clover, golden rod, chicory, and wild phlox. Your color palette would be mainly purple, white, and pink. Most of the flower blooms are large, other than the clover, but there’s a good variation of flat, round, and cone shapes. Your bloom times will be May, June, August, and September. Do you have greenery in your garden—grasses and hostas, for example? They add wonderful variation to a bouquet.
My “experts” agree that three easy flowers to grow your first time, which are reliable and will give you great summer into autumn color and size, are sunflowers, zinnias and dahlias. For the dahlias (bulbs), my first expert says it’s a great idea to have some of your smaller dahlias in pots, but the “dinner plate Dahlias” need to be planted directly into the ground. The experts also recommended that you read the seed and bulb packets carefully. Are you buying the flowers that grow 3-5 feet high or the 1-2-foot-high ones? Look at the days to germination. Choose colors you love. Dahlias and zinnias come in a riot of colors. Charlie Nardozzi was just on the radio extolling the virtues of zinnias. He talked about all of the following being good choices for Vermont.
“Most seeds here will be for zinnia elegans,” Nardozzi said. “The State Fair mix grow to five feet. The shorter varieties are called profusion series and grow 1-2 feet, and there’s a variety called Zahara, which online claims to be disease resistant.”
Charlie spoke of a variety called haageana (Persian carpet), which is very pretty, and another red spider, but I couldn’t locate seeds for it. The color choices online seem endless. Zinnias can have issues with fungi, powdery mildew, and botrytis. My experts said to pay attention to what the seed packets aren’t telling you, like disease resistance, and pay attention to size. Today you also have the option of googling varieties before you buy them. My experts said once you’ve bought the seeds and bulbs, follow the planting instructions to the letter. They also recommend cutting back and pinching the zinnias before flowering in June. Zinnias will send out more flowers on side stems. Once they are flowering keep cutting them. You’ll get more flowers that way. You may also want to stake your sunflowers if they aren’t up against a structure. Your large Dahlias may need staking too.
It’s hard to wait for May 31 to put your seeds in the ground, but as we saw last year, we got a killing frost in the last weeks of May. Seeds need warmth to germinate. Be patient. If you want to start seeds in your house, don’t start them too early. Try to wait until mid-April or the beginning of May, so they are just germinated and have two leaves by the time it is safe to put them in the ground. Transplanting tender plants is more difficult than it seems. You truly can wait. All three of these plants will grow when planted directly into the ground.
Now it’s mid to late summer and you have beautiful annual flowers to add to your perennials to cut and make bouquets. What next? Both experts recommend cutting flowers in late afternoon and putting them directly into cold water and a flower preservative, if you have it. When you cut your flowers, they recommend that you cut your flowers on the longest stems possible, strip them of most leaves, and cut the stems at an angle so that they can soak up the most water.
At the end of the day these are for you: grow what you want and cut what you want. Or plant them where you can see them from the house and don’t cut them at all and enjoy looking at them in your garden. The world is truly your oyster. Did Shakespeare really coin that phrase, and does it actually work when you parse it? The British show about Shakespeare, Upstart Crow, has me thinking about things like this.
