From the idea of having a cut flower patch, I realised research was required. I bought a few books which quickly became my bibles.
They all have such good information on what makes a good cut flower, how to sow, grow and care for your flowers, through to the best time to cut each flower, how to condition them (this is a term for basically giving the cut stems a thorough drink, allowing them to quickly recover from being cut and return to their best before arranging with them) and how long you could roughly expect them to last in a vase.
By my nature, I love to digest as much information as I can get my hands on when it comes to starting out in something new.
I learnt about the different kind of flower styles to include in a bouquet, how studying each flower’s bloom season was so important in your planning stages and last but by no means least how actually planning the layout of your border / patch / allotment, in terms of how to space the plants and how many you can reasonably fit in the space you have.
This appealed to the logistical side of me no end! I did a planning your patch course with Helier, who is an Insta garden guru (@garden_goddess_uk), as up until that point I’d have to admit to a little bit of overwhelm.
I’m an avid perfectionist and after reading as much information as I could get my hands on, in books, on Instagram, on Google… I felt that there were a lot of boxes I had to try and tick to get things right.
Helier definitely helped with that and I came away from her course with a solid plan of what I wanted to achieve and how I was going to go about it. From that point on, I relaxed into the process a little more.
I plotted my patch out on graph paper to begin with, using recommended spacing as listed in the books I had. A lot of the flower packets give slightly more generous spacing when it comes to spread of flowers, however, when you’re growing them a little more intensively it seems that spacing things a little closer together is totally acceptable. Certain flowers like Cosmos, Malope are bushier varieties and so don’t like to be too crowded, whereas there are certain more upright stems like stocks and snapdragons that are happy to be a little bit snuggled up!
As all my little seedlings well under way, I started the process of Hardening Off (acclimatising the little seed babies that had until now been looked after in my zippy greenhouse, a little more each day to the outdoor elements). The idea being that going straight from being mollycoddled to being shoved in the ground and left to fend for themselves, would not be the nicest start out in life for them.
Now was the moment of putting my plan into action! I may have got a little bit Joey from Friends and had to ‘get inside the map’!!! But I’m a visual kind of person and this really helped me to understand the space I had a bit better and see how things would move from paper to reality.
Once my physical grid was in place using string and newspaper cut outs to show the extra space that my prized Dahlia's would need, I definitely felt like it was all do-able. The actual planting out felt like it was just the final piece of the plan and the pride and satisfaction I felt when all my little seed babies were 'out out' was unbelievable.
The planning phase was complete and now it was on to nurturing...
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