Posts tagged cutting garden
The 10 Cut Flowers All Flower Farmers Should be Growing for Spring

While you may have read my previous post on fall perennials to start from seed, I wanted to go a little bit more in depth about our favorite flowers to grow for spring blooms - and flowers that should be in your repertoire as a flower farmer.

There are a lot of flowers to grow for spring - many delightful and beautiful and delicate blooms explode into color in the late spring/early summer time period, many of which are beloved by brides, floral designers and customers alike.

A solid spring of cut flower material and sales is important to flower farmers - after a long and cold and dark winter without much to cut and sell, you want to be ready to hit the ground running when spring comes around. Customers are ravenously hungry for flowers and color and anything fresh and alive, and if you can supply that demand you will start off the season with a good flush of flower sales.

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Growing Pineapple Lilies (Eucomis) in the Garden and for Floral Design

Pineapple lilies sound like some sort of bizarre made-up flower until you see them in person.

But once you see them, you’ll never forget them. Big, strappy, tropical foliage in a large rosette with large flower stalks erupting from the center that beg for you to look at them. They look unreal - as if they were some sort of alien species that had invaded earth.

Best of all? They are actually pretty hardy plants. With good drainage and either mild winters or excellent insulation (through either mulch or snow cover) they will come back year after year, bigger and better and with more stems and flowers.

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How to Root Cuttings

One of the fastest and frankly, easiest ways to expand your garden is to start plants from cuttings.

Most of us are familiar with starting plants from seeds as well as dividing plants. Plants such as swiss chard and sunflowers grow easily and quickly from seed, while plants such as irises and daylilies can be divided in the fall and spring to create new divisions of plants.

But there are some plants, such as mint or oregano or ivy that don’t really grow from seed and can’t really be divided into new plants. How exactly can you propagate them?

The answer is with rooting cuttings from your plants.

Not all plants root easily from cuttings, but there are a few common plants that are incredibly easy to root, including:

  • Catmint (Nepeta)

  • Sedum (Sedum/Hypotelephium)

  • Mint (Mentha)

  • Rosemary (Rosemarinus)

  • Sage (Salvia)

  • Wormwood/Sage (Artemisia)

  • Pachysandra

  • Vinca

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Flower Farming: 8 Easy Perennials to Take Cuttings From (And Grow On for Next Year)

As the season winds down, we’re getting ready for next year.

The funny thing about flower farming is that good flowers can be planted the same season - but great flowers need to be planned out 6-12 months ahead of time.

One of the things we are doing this year is expanding our perennial offerings for florists and wedding design, so we are in the midst of propagating a lot of hardy perennials for production next year.

It might be easier to just buy in plugs, but of course as you know flower farmers aren’t necessarily the most logical people. I actually prefer to propagate our perennials myself because I get a thrill out of seeds starting and cuttings rooting, and it’s cool to be able to say that I propagated hundreds of plants from one original “mother” plant.

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How to Grow Cafe au Lait Dahlias

Inevitably every gardener is going to try growing dahlias at some point in their career. Whether it’s for showing in the local Dahlia society exhibition, cutting for arrangements or enjoying in the garden, dahlias are invaluable for their vigor and of course their amazing flowers.

And if you’re growing dahlias, no doubt you’ll be interested in growing the famous (or infamous depending on your personal opinion!) Cafe au Lait dahlia.

The one dahlia that everyone seems to love - retail customers, floral designers, gardeners, dahlia enthusiasts and casual observers all agree that its a spectacular dahlia. In fact, the only people that seem to dislike Cafe au Lait dahlias are flower farmers for a few very specific reasons - but we’ll get into that later on.

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Planting Fall Perennials for Next Year's Blooms

You see, there are a lot of flowering plants that not only can survive the cold weather, but in fact love it. Peonies for example, need a very cold and wet winter in order to grow big and lush blooms (which can be a problem in our growing zone that tends to be warm and dry during the winter)

Yes, right now is the perfect time to plant these lesser-known flowers. Some, such as delphinium only actually will germinate in cool weather, preferring to sprout during periods of freezes and thaws since the swings in temperature helps to trigger sprouting.

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How to Grow Broomcorn in the Garden (and for Floral Design)

Broomcorn is one of our favorite floral materials to grow in the garden and in arrangements, especially in the fall and is also one of our annual favorite grasses to grow!

Broomcorn is not actually a corn but is an ornamental sorghum - distantly related to sugarcane and big bluestem grass interestingly enough.

It usually grows as a single corn-like stalk, soaring upwards above our heads and growing quickly into a towering stalk of strappy foliage and bamboo-like stems, creating a jungle-like effect in the garden.

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Mad About Geums

In the past couple years, we’ve noticed a fairly unknown plant has come into fashion in a very dark horse manner - the geums.

Loved by flower farmers and gardeners alike, it seems to be the IT plant this year, and the interest shows no signs of abating.

Known also by their common name “avens”, geums are in the Rosacea family - subfamily Rosoideae - and are closely related to potentillas as well as fragaria (the former illustrated by its form and fuzzy leaves - the latter by its sepals and foliage).

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Growing Salvias in the Garden (And for Floral Design)

Sages are one of our favorite plants to grow in the garden. They are vigorous, quick-growing, handle extreme heat and cold without flinching, ad have brightly colored blooms on long stems that make for great displays in the garden as well as in floral design.

I think that sage has always had a place in our garden, but it wasn’t until recently that we started appreciating it so readily. Living in New Mexico where salvias get large and shrubby certainly has something to do with it, but I think an awareness of the fondness of salvias in the UK has really helped them to grow on us.

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