Control Your Cutting Garden

Do you have a cutting garden? Do you want to learn some tips on how you can enhance its productivity? If so, here we have some great idea that will help your cutting garden flourish and bloom.

Once your cutting garden has been set up and is beginning to bloom, you need to do some preventive maintenance. This begins with the soil.

At the beginning of the growing season, make sure you add a slow-acting, granular fertilizer to the soil. This is very important and ignoring this early step can result in poor blooming later. A good granular fertilizer will provide consistent, balanced nutrition to your flowers and plants over many weeks. In addition to this first step, you also want to add diluted liquid fertilizer on a periodic basis. This can be sprayed on the plant foliage and it will give the plants a needed boost of during their peak production months.

Another good idea for cutting gardens is to group like flowers with like flowers. This is preferable over placing many different species together at random. This also makes harvesting the flowers much easier later on.

In order to get the most production, you should plant annuals in succession. This means planting the early season, mid-season and late season bloomers together during their planting seasons.

Whenever you can, try to keep plants that have similar requirements for water, sun, and drainage together in groups. This makes maintenance of those plants much easier. Likewise, you want to plant taller flowers together, keeping in mind that they can harm smaller flowers through excessive shading.

As soon as your plants are a few inches high, you want spread a layer of mulch onto the soil at a depth of about two or three inches. This will help to minimize watering as well as the need for weeding. The mulch you use for your cutting garden can be made of chopped leaves, straw, or even shredded newspaper.

Mulch will discourage the growth of weeds, as well as keep the soil moist longer. It also helps by adding important nutrients to the soil as it decomposes.

As the mulch layer of your cutting garden breaks down, add to it periodically. If you are growing plants that are self-seeders, such as cleome, you can remove the mulch at the end of the season and this will allow the seed to go to ground.

One trick to encourage new flower production of annuals is to pick blossoms regularly. You should make it a habit to deadhead those that remain and become faded. Doing this stops them from producing seeds which, in effect, slows flower production.

Keep in mind that you only need to water about one inch per week if rainfall is not reliable. Flower beds that do not have mulch on top will require more frequent watering, especially in the summer.

Once the blossoms from one stand of flowers have been cut, pull them and begin to cultivate the bed again. You can then plant new seedlings for new flowers.