Spring Garden Update

Photo by Stacy Bostrom

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Spring around here, so I thought it would be a fun time to talk a little bit about what’s going on in the garden. I’m just finishing up the Floret Flower Workshop and learned so much - from soil health to seed starting to harvesting to caring for the flowers afterwards.

A few great tips I learned:

• If you only plant annual flowers, you’ll end up with flowers only a few months of the year. To have flowers for a good chunk of the year, it’s good to also focus on perennials, bulbs, vines, etc.

• Always buy 50% more seeds than you need because you don’t know how many from the batch are going to germinate.

• Cut and come again flowers are amazing! That means that they produce a lot of flowers over a long period of time. The more you cut, the more they come back. Those flowers include zinnias, cosmos, dahlias, ranunculus, sweet peas, carnations, and many more.

• When you’re cutting your flowers, cut deep into the stem. It’s not intuitive, but it’s the best way to encourage the plant to send out more branches which result in longer stems and more of blooms.

Last year was major trial and error and I ended up killing almost all of my plant babies after I’d grown them from seed and transplanted them into the garden beds because I hadn’t been watering them enough. I didn’t have irrigation and I was doing it all by hand, so I was thrilled when we got irrigation put into the beds a few months ago!

This year, I decided to grow a mix of different kinds of cut flowers and see what I like most. I decided to discontinue growing amaranth, which I find hard to arrange with, and bachelor’s buttons, which were a little tricky to harvest.

As far as spring flowers go, I’m growing:

• Sweet Peas (these grow on a trellis, so Billy was nice enough to quickly make one for the occasion). Next year I’ll paint it white, but it will do for now!

• Ranunculus

• Anenomes

• Snapdragons

• Pincushion flower (these popped up on their own from last year and I was happy I had the space for them to grow!)

The summer flowers I’m planning on growing include:

• Dahlias

• Zinnias

• Cosmos

• Bells of Ireland

• Celosia

• Sunflowers

We just took out a good chunk of grass to put in 4 more garden beds (thanks, Wellness Landscape!). I went a little crazy on buying dahlia tubers, but I think I’m going to put all of the dahlias in the 4 new beds to have a big dahlia garden!

I set a goal for myself to give away 50 bouquets from my garden this year and I’m crossing my fingers that I can hit it! Here are a few garden bouquets I’ve given away so far this year:

Flowers for a Neighbor

I posted this bouquet in my local “Buy Nothing” Facebook group. I requested that it be given to someone going through a hard time and ended up giving it to a woman who recently lost her brother.

Bouquet for My Father-in-Law

I gave this bouquet to my father-in-law when he helped us out by feeding Peaches (our cat) while we were away.

Paintings by my talented husband, Billy Pease.

Flowers for Mom

I brought my mom these flowers on her birthday. I was so excited because they were the first anenomes of the season!

Thanks so much for stopping by!