I’ve just popped the flowers I cut yesterday evening into vases.
Buckets full of flowers and a newly discovered treat, the mulberry
This evening I’ve cut my first bucket full of flowers from the cutting border and another bucket from the dahlia bed. Both are conditioning overnight in a cool dark place (helping to extend their life) before I pop them into vases tomorrow. This crop will be a drop in the ocean compared the number of bucketfuls I’ll be harvesting in a few weeks. It always amazes me how a few plants can produce such an abundant crop of flowers.
My first bucketful of flowers this year
My first bucket of Dahlias this year
My youngest and I have recently discovered how fabulous Mulberries taste. We’ve kept this our little secret as the tree (planted by the previous owner) is still young and the crop not huge. Just enough for a little treat as we pass by. Eventually we’re going to replace the existing garage, so the tree will need to be removed. Whilst the Mulberry is still young we plan to relocate it, offering it the best chance of survival. We’ll wait until autumn before we embark on what I suspect will be a tricky, heavy and exhausting caper which the husband will be recruited to assist with.
The Mulberry Tree
One of our delicious mulberries
Let me persuade you to pick a few flowers every week for your home
This posting will hopefully inspire you to join me picking weekly flowers. I cut flowers on a Friday evening, often accompanied by a glass of wine! The children are in bed and I spend half an hour pottering, snipping the odd stem, popping them in my bucket and savouring the peace that an evening in the garden brings, a perfect bridge from a hectic week into the weekend.
I fill the house with flowers, foliage, and hedgerow finds March through to December (January and February I make do with dried stems from the garden such as cardoons or nigella). To me cut flowers are as important to my home as pictures on the wall. Flowers lift a room giving colour, fragrance and a very special extra dimension to an interiors look and design. Weekly flowers from florists or farm shops are out of my budget and supermarket blooms are not to my taste, they tend to look a bit plastic and rarely have any scent. The solution is growing your own supply.
I have had a re-occurring conversation with many friends and family about cut flowers, they all love to have flowers in their homes, but most don’t have the time or inclination for a dedicated cutting garden. They all have lovely gardens full of blooms which they don’t dare pick for fear of ruining the display. It is my strong belief that taking one or two stems from a plant won’t in any way ruin a display; in fact it will probably improve it. There are three key facts to keep in mind:
- Many plants work on the basis of producing flowers to create seed, pick those flowers, the plant then has to produce more flowers to fulfil their purpose in life, reproduction by spreading seed. This is the case for most annuals and many herbaceous perennials. So picking flowers for the home means more beautiful blooms in your garden.
- Popping your gorgeous treasured bloom in vase on the kitchen window sill, means you’ll notice and appreciate them far more than when they were at the bottom of the garden.
- Keep it simple. Unless you have borders bursting with flowers forget huge bouquets and hand tied displays, they require a large quantity of blooms with long straight stems. Think single stems in a vase, or just a few blooms. Use small vases, I’ve collected mine over several years and they’re nearly always saved from going in the bin. Old room fragrance reed diffusers are great for single stems. Any small jar that doesn’t have the ridges for a screw top, spice jars are often good examples, you just need to snap the plastic lid off. Long shot glasses are also a favourite of mine for 3-5 stems.
Three old room fragrance bottles, an old sake bottle, a supermarket spice jar, and a long shot glass (from left to right)
Single stem rose
Mock Orange, a fabulous scent drifts through the house.
A few flowers in the old spice jar.
Small flowers displays look great by themselves dotted around the house or grouped together in a display.
A selection of vases as a central table display
Hopefully I’ve inspired you to pick a couple flowers a week to pop in vase and enjoy. Believe me, if you miss a week you’ll notice, your home will look bare.
A few June Flowers
I’ve just spent a lovely half hour pottering round the garden this evening cutting flowers for a dinner party with great friends tomorrow night. We’ve had a scorcher of a day for June (26°c), so I’ve waited for the temperature to cool before picking, if not the flowers would have wilted and their vase life significantly reduced.
Planting up the cutting garden
When I was building and then filling the cut flower border with top soil and compost, 14 metres felt like a very long and unnecessary way. Now that I’ve emptied the conservatory of plants I’ve decided it’s really not that long at all, a few more metres would have been great. I’ve been amazingly disciplined, keeping the number of plants I’ve put in the border to a minimum. Surplus plants have made their way to the children’s garden at school. With this restraint, I have just managed to fit all the cut flower varieties sown from seed in. I can’t wait to start filling the house with the flowers from this border.
The ciutting border, detailing the varieties I’ve just planted
On my initial design way back in December /January I’d planned on two 14 metre beds running either side of the path. When it came to building the beds, two felt excessive, in size, cost and my energy required to fill them. I now know that come late winter next year, I’m going to be building that additional bed. There are so many more plants I want to grow for cutting, and all those seductive seed catalogues will start coming through the post at the end of the year, they are just too tempting.
Dahlias
I love dahlias. I first came across them in the Dahlia Garden at Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, North California in 2005. My passion for them was instant, each flower a beautiful sculpture, the vast range of colour and shape just looked stunning en masse. It became the highlight of my California holiday, an enlightening moment. The Big Sur or El Capitan in Yosemite paled into insignificance. In the past I’d steered well clear of what I considered to be fuddy-duddy, complicated, troublesome, blowsy flowers. Now they are my slightly obsessive garden priority. How on earth can a girl live without dahlias!
With a little bit of love and attention a dahlia will pay you back 10 fold and more. I fill the house with them from June to the last frosts in November. I tend to leave my dahlia tubers in the ground over winter. After the first frost I cut them back and cover them with a 30cm mulch of leaf mould, compost, wood chip or whatever I’ve got to hand. At the end of March I’ll take off the mound of mulch, feed with fish, blood and bone, and allow the dahlias to shoot through in their own time. If you want to move dahlias or divide them, the tubers need to be dug up after the first frost, cleaned and left to dry for a couple of days in a greenhouse. Then cover with a dusting of compost and store in a dry shed or garage where they won’t freeze. Come March pot them up, and let them grow on in a greenhouse or conservatory, by May when there is no frost risk, plant them into the garden.
Most of the tubers I’ve dug up in the past have survived the winter, sadly my all time favourite ‘Thomas A Edison’ rotted to a mush when we moved. The husband, who must listen to some of my witterings, gave me replacement tubers for Christmas. A lovely friend who has a Brewery making the most amazing ale in South West France (www.brasserieduquercorb.com), treated me to Dahlia ‘Cafe au Lait’, a variety I’d coveted for some time. So I’ve been in my conservatory (home to all seed sowing and precious plants) potting up my new dahlias. I’m excited to see the blooms in a few months.
Cafe au Lait tuber ready to be potted up.
The plan and raised beds
The plan (sketch) from Jan ’15. This is the theory, it will be interesting to see how much I alter from it a year down the line!
Before.
Veg beds 1-5. Stage one complete!
I started mulling over plans for my kitchen garden between Christmas and New Year (a luxurious period where no jobs need to be done, just relaxing with the family, slowing down and having time to think!). I was keen to have raised beds for the vegtables and annual cut flowers. Past experience of weeds jumping from grass paths to veg beds, then replacing grass paths with wood chip, leaving me trying to keep the edges tidy, firmly steered my plans in the direction of raised beds. Keeping them them at a 1.4m width means they can be reached accross easily from each side, never needing to tread on and compact the soil. Raised beds are an easy contained area to give a quick hoe once a week preventing weeds, they look tidy and easily designate different growing zones, aiding crop rotation. The theory sounds fabulous, lets see how they work in practice over the next year. Stage one of the plan (building and filling veg beds 1-5) has been accomplished and I have already planted garlic and broadbeans in the first bed.
Stage two is digging out the existing soil in the greenhouse (just in case it carries blight) and replacing it with fresh enriched top soil from elsewhere in the garden. I plan to plant tomatoes and cucumbers in there this spring. More on this project soon.