My gardens…….from seed to bouquet

There’s something about growing flowers and sharing them with others that brings a feeling of joy and pride that is hard to describe. When you take a tiny seed and care for it until it becomes a gorgeous flower, the flowers become personal. I can show you their baby pictures…..when they were little seedlings!

Every year is different, every season is different, every month is different, and every flower is different. It’s a never ending lesson about what works for me in my area and what doesn’t.

My garden consists of two main growing areas - one is the raised bed area behind our old barn, the other is a row bed made of landscape fabric. I also have several perennial beds around our property that I harvest from.

Raised beds…

The raised bed area started as one 4’ x 8’ bed where we grew vegetables. The following year we added five more 4’ x 8’ vegetable beds. The year after that we added more beds - mostly flowers, very few veggies. The year after that…..you guessed it, we added more beds. Now they are all flowers. Every year we add more. Yes, I’m obsessed!

The raised beds are mostly full of my early season ‘cool flowers’, which are flowers that prefer the cooler weather of early spring, flowers like snapdragons, bachelor buttons, sweet William, ranunculus, feverfew, strawflower, and Canterbury bells to name a few.

raised beds behind our barn

Row bed…

The row bed consists of 4 rows that are 50 feet long with 3 foot walkways between the rows. In this bed I grow flowers such as celosia, asters, marigolds, gomphrena, ageratum, amaranth, statice, zinnias, craspedia, jewels of opar, and fillers like cinnamon basil, lemon basil, and honeywort.

row bed

Perennial beds…

My perennial beds are great because they come up on their own, I don’t have to start them from seed every year. These are plants that are hardy in our growing zone of 6B and can survive our harsh winters. Some of the perennials I grow are daffodils, peonies, bleeding hearts, hellebores, allium, bee balm, scabiosa (pincushion flower), iris, salvia, and several different varieties of echinacea (coneflower), rudbeckia (black eyed Susan), and crysanthemum..