First things first – what is a cut flower?
The term cut flower refers to a flower that meets 2 important criteria.
1- Has a long, sturdy stem so it can be designed with and be manipulated to fit a wide range of floral work.
2- Has a good vase life, meaning how long the blooms stay fresh and beautiful in a vase or finished piece.
These two simple criteria are the foundation for all floral design and in turn define cut flowers for growers and designers alike. Regardless if you are a home gardener, professional grower or an aspiring flower farmer, expanding your cut flower garden should be on your to do list this season!
Advantages
- Professional grower? Cut flowers are a cash crop which means added revenue stream
- Amazing benefits to ecosystems in your garden and community
- Revitalizes the U.S. flower market, resulting in local and national economic independence
- Improved customer experience
- Helps reduce impacts of global crop failure or weather crisis
- Deeper connection, storytelling and educational opportunities with your community
- Positive impact on mental health
You don’t need a history in agriculture or decades of gardening to succeed with a cutting garden. Basic cut flowers are easy, accessible, prolific, gorgeous and good for pollinators! TLDR - get more cut flowers in your life, you won’t regret it!
Throughout cut flower history, many florists have grown a garden not just to supplement but to provide the bounty of their day-to-day work. So, the idea of a farmer florist and the cutting garden certainly aren’t new. When I daydreamed in my youth of having a flower farm and becoming a florist, the farm part was muddled, it often looked more like a cottage garden in my head than fields and prairie. The wonderful thing about growing cut flowers for yourself or business is that both work perfectly. It’s a choose your own adventure situation! And the possibilities are as limitless as your creativity!
Container gardens on a balcony, roof or other concrete jungle can be just as prolific as those suburban raised beds or rural fields. You just need to understand the basics, be consistent, patient, and don’t let a little failure get you down! Even the experts fail, make mistakes and kill plants!! Mistakes and missteps are how we learn and grow, don’t be disappointed in yourself if a plant dies or you kill off an entire tray of seedlings. Try to learn from the situation and keep moving!
Since we know that a cutting garden can be designed many ways depending on your space, intended use and scale of your plans – let’s jump into what we need to start.
What You Need to Start
- Good soil - look for a potting mix, or a raised bed mix if you’re a home gardener. Don’t use topsoil or mulch. Planting directly in ground in landscaping? Amend with a good potting mix.
- Full Sun - 6+ hours of direct sun per day
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Seed, plants, bulbs - obviously I have strong opinions on what you should grow and whom you should buy your products from! That said whether you pick up something from our curated list, the hardware store or your favorite garden center, look for quality products from trusted sources.
- Access to water
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Stakes, twine
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Markers, signs, a way to record what you grow
- The will to make it happen
- And plenty of patience
Looking for even more details on how to grow a cutting garden? Check out the amazing resources below:
Cut Flower Resources
Start out with the basics if you’re new to growing! Here are a few of the most reliable and hardy options for a cutting garden, they also happen to be some of the easiest to grow! Plus a few tips on general growing and caring for your plants.
Reliable Cut Flowers
Zinnias
Look for taller varieties, not short bedding zinnias. Oklahoma, Zinderella, Queeny, Benary’s Giants are some of the most beautiful zinnias available whether in your backyard or back field, grow some! Stunning color palettes that go far beyond the basic orange red yellow white mix you’re use to. Butterflies love nectar rich zinnias, if you want to support pollinators, attract beautiful beneficial insects to the garden or add in an attraction to your pick your own patch – add a lot of zinnias. Hands down one of the easiest plants to grow, and if you pinch, harvest and keep on harvesting you will have more blooms than you know what to do with.
Cosmos
Look for taller varieties, not short bedding cosmos. Double Click, Sensation, Versailles are gorgeous additions to any and every garden or cut flower bouquet. Cosmos really benefit from pinching benefit to that - the foliage makes a long lasting filler and greenery in design work. I harvest and pinch often using the cut stems as greens in mason jar or market bouquets so that by mid-season I have an enormous jungle of cosmos blooms and foliage with their thick strong stems to use in my design work. Plus the beautiful long lasting flowers of course! For blooms, harvest when the buds are just cracking open for longest vase life.
Sunflowers
So many sunflowers, so little time!!
Single stem – gives 1 single bloom on 1 tall stem. No regrowth.
Branching – branching habit, cut and come again varieties that produce multiple blooms and stems per season.
So many options when it comes to sunflowers so dive in and experiment! There are no wrong answers. Sunflowers are a staple across the board for every grower, everywhere, I think! Even if you aren’t a gardener, you’ve grown a sunflower, right? I have distinct elementary school memories of coming home with a sunflower that I germinated in science class in a dixie cup. And just about everyone who popped by my market stands or flower shop bought sunflower seeds and talked about them fondly. Grow sunflowers!
Rudbeckia
Commonly known as black eyed Susan, is THE cut flower perennial I swear by. I don’t have a favorite flower, it’s just not possible. However, I have favorites. And a lot of Rudbeckia fall into that category. There are so many different striking varieties available, they come back year after year, the more you cut the more you get, good vase life, wonderful dried and they are a customer favorite across the board from the farmers market to wedding parties.
Growing
Direct Sow
This means sowing your seeds directly in your prepared beds, containers or fields.
Transplant
This refers to starting your seeds indoors, and then transplanting out the seedlings you’ve cared for indoors over the last few weeks. This method requires hardening off, but that just means, letting your plants acclimate to the natural environment outside. You move them to a shaded place protected from sun, wind and animals, for an hour or two each day for a few days, increasing the time each day. This way they can adapt to the elements before moving to their forever home. It only takes a couple days before they are nice and hardy! It’s much easier than it sounds.
Pinch
A lot of different growing communities call it something different, but essentially, it’s all the same, you’re snipping out the center most growing point on a flower plant that falls into the cut and come again category. This promotes branching at the base, thicker, longer, stronger stems and more stems per plant. I live to pinch!
Care
Continue to water and check on your plants throughout their path to maturity. I walk in my small home garden, multiple times a day checking on my plants. I do the same while in the office at Harris Seeds, I schedule time to walk our fields, display beds, greenhouse and gardens at least twice a day. The more time you spend with your plants the more you will learn, the more successful you will be, and you’ll probably really enjoy it to!
Harvest
Each different flower has its own unique time when it’s ‘ready’ to be harvested. For zinnias, we all utilize the wiggle test to check if our zinnia is at just the right time for harvesting. Look for additional resources on when to harvest each different plant.
Post Harvest
Depending on your scale and intended use, your post-harvest routine will look very different. A professional grower will most likely have a cooler, and a process for cleaning, bunching and storing their flowers. The home gardener may have a vase on the mantel and a micro grower may not have more than a few vases or buckets in the fridge. But that’s ok too! Do your cut flowers need to go in a cooler? Not necessarily, but if you intend to use them in floral design work, sell them to a florist or similar, they will benefit from time resting in a cool room, without direct sunlight. If you’re bringing flowers into your home or sharing with your neighbors and family, you do not need to cool them first, hot out of the oven is just fine! But you should clean your stems! This means stripping off the lower foliage – you don’t want all that organic matter in the bucket or vase, it begins to decay, soils the water and impacts the overall vase life - plus if you plan to sell to a florist or at a market, clean stems are expected.
No matter what cutting garden you have planned, I hope you are inspired by the flowers I have grown over the years and the incredible flower journey I am still having! Whether you’re a veteran grower or your flower adventure started today, I am so happy you’re here!
Miya Sohoza
Ornamentals Product Manager
Miya is a Farmer Florist, and the Ornamentals Product Manager for Harris Seeds. She enjoys highlighting the grit of day-to-day farm life in her floral design and creative work. As a seed industry professional she is passionate about lifting the conversation on American Grown Flowers and the Slow Flowers Movement. The Flower Farmer Mission is a passion project for Miya and she is proud to build it with some of the cut flower industries most knowledgeable experts.
