r/Cutflowers

My friend grew these in her garden. We don't know the variety but they are huge and beautiful. She's pregnant with her first baby girl 🩷

It’s almost time to start cleaning up my annuals, but I’m not ready😭

For those interested, varieties are: Southern Belle, Picasso, Karma Prospero, Terracotta, Sylvia/Maarn, Isabel, Cornel Bronze, Boom Boom White

This is my first year growing flowers and my first arrangement! So much fun!

L’ancresse dahlia, strawflower, first love lisianthus, bachelor’s buttons, dusty miller, snowball feverfew, Chinese forget me nots, zinnias

I want to start growing cut flowers. I am slowly starting to add dahlias, poppies, gerberas, delphiniums, snapdragons to my garden. They haven’t bloomed yet… but here is what I was able to get from some of my existing plants.

I tried to find long stems of Salvia and Delphiniums, I used Rosemary and Basil as some filler (haha that I have accidentally let go to seed)

I live in QLD Australia… any advice for my cut flowers? It gets really hot here and some of my plants struggle

Here’s the thing: ranunculus aren’t difficult… they’re just particular.

Ranunculus are best grown when the majority of their lifecycle can occur in cool, stable temps... either fall to spring in warm zones, or late winter to early summer in cooler zones. Most of the time when people fail with ranunculus, it’s because they are planting too late. These guys are tougher than most think!

I have several growing guides on my website if you’re needing help- and I’m happy to write more! If you’re still shopping, there’s corms, too.

How can I help you be successful with ranunculus?

Growing guides linked here!

My local flower shop does good arrangements but they just told me that I should be changing the water every day or 2 🤦🏻‍♂️ I knew to cut the stems and add plant food but now I'm learning about the water changing, recut stems and add more plant food.

Is there anything else I should know to keep the flowers looking their best as long as possible?

Thanks!

I definitely made some mistakes that I won’t be making next year. First, I’m gonna be much better about spacing my seeds. I did ok with my sunflowers and dahlias, everything else I just threw caution to the wind and sowed a ridiculous amount of seeds basically everywhere. I did a lot of thinning.

Second thing, I need to actually pay attention to how big each plant will get, and how fast they grow. I didn’t do this at all and some of my taller faster growers snuffed out some varieties that were shorter and took longer to establish. I also planted a sunflower seed right behind a dahlia tuber. That sunflower shaded out one of my dahlia sprouts and I didn’t realize it until it was too late. Goodbye Cornel Bronze, it’s a bummer that we weren’t able to meet.

Third thing, and this helps with the second thing too. I should probably give everyone their own individual space. I had areas where cosmos and zinnias were planted together. Same with strawflowers and zinnias. My zinnias got so big that it didn’t leave a lot of room for my strawflowers. My strawflowers are actually beginning to bloom now, but I only have maybe 15 plants out of over a hundred seeds that were able to grow amongst my monster zinnias.

And lastly. I’m not going to buy random cheap seeds next year, or ever again. I planted a row of zinnias, cosmos, and marigolds in a prime spot with random seeds from Amazon. No variety names on the seed packs. The zinnias were wimpy, tiny little things, and the cosmos grew into trees that barely bloomed. But, all of my Johnnys seeds grew into beautiful plants. My dahlia zinnias that I bought from Amazon also grew beautifully.

Still, it was so much fun and my whole small backyard was just covered in flowers all summer long. I’m very excited for spring blooms. I bought a ridiculous amount of ranunculus corms….