10 tips on growing your own cutting garden

Want to enjoy homegrown bouquets throughout the season? Learn how to create a thriving cutting garden with our 10 essential tips. Get started today!

Top 10 tips on growing your own cutting garden

1. To ensure your cutting garden thrives, select a location that receives plenty of sunshine and is protected from strong winds. The soil should be fertile and well-drained. Before planting, enrich the soil with compost or well-rotted manure. Remember to provide stakes for taller plants to prevent them from flopping over.

2. Organise your cutting garden for efficiency and beauty. Plant in rows, grouping plants of the same type together. This makes maintenance and harvesting easier. Plant closely, but allow enough space for each plant to grow. Dense planting also helps to shade out weeds, reducing the need for weeding.

3. When planning your cutting garden, remember that long-stemmed flowers are key for creating beautiful arrangements. Include a variety of options, such as cornflowers, dahlias, and lilies, to ensure you always have the perfect blooms for your bouquets.  

4. When selecting plants for your cutting garden, consider those that offer repeat blooms. Shasta daisies, cosmos, and repeat-flowering roses are excellent choices, providing multiple harvests of beautiful flowers from a single plant.  

5. If space is limited, maximize the impact of your cutting garden by choosing a color scheme. This coordinated approach ensures that your flower arrangements always look harmonious, regardless of what's in bloom.

6. Enhance the visual appeal of your bouquets by selecting flowers with contrasting shapes. For example, pair the round flowerheads of ball dahlias with the upright, spear-like blooms of gladioli for a dynamic and eye-catching display.

7. Complete your cutting garden with a selection of filler plants. These airy blooms, such as gypsophila, Ammi majus (Bishop's flower), and asters, add depth and dimension to your bouquets and arrangements.

8. Enhance your flower arrangements with a variety of foliage plants. Artemisia, Bupleurum, Euphorbia, Alchemilla (lady's mantle), sage, and lavender offer unique textures and colors that complement and accentuate your blooms.

9. Extend the beauty of your cutting garden with regular deadheading. Removing faded flowers prevents seed formation, encouraging your plants to produce more blooms.

10. Annuals are a fantastic choice for cutting gardens due to their long flowering season and affordability. While they need to be replanted each year, this allows for flexibility and experimentation. Consider these top performers: Nigella, cosmos, cornflowers, scabious, sunflowers, and sweet peas.

Spring is the perfect time to plant a cutting garden! Visit us today for a fantastic selection of seeds and plants to get you started.