Planning for the 2018 cutting garden

The weather may still be wintery but I’m already starting to think about summer and plan the 2018 cutting garden.

I launched it last spring having been inspired by the British growers’ display at the RHS Malvern Spring Festival. For years, I’ve resisted cutting flowers from my garden – after all, they last so much longer outdoors – but a designated bed would give me flowers for the house without diminishing the borders. So, I took some advice from Karen Hughes of The Somerset Cut Flower Garden and got started. You can read what she told me here.

What did I grow?

Among the best value things were the Sweet Williams and some white cosmos. Both flowered for months with the cosmos finally felled only by the first really hard frost.

In fact, they produced so many flowers, I couldn’t really keep up but it did mean that corner of the Kitchen Garden looked colourful all summer.

Alongside these I grew some tiny zinnias that were part of my seed trials (you can read more about that here). I also bought Euphorbia oblongata and Nicotiana langsdorffii for some acid green contrast, Ammi majus, and Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’, something that used to be very popular some years ago in gardens that I visited but which seems to have fallen out of favour (these seeds were from Sarah Raven). One end of the bed also had tulips from the previous years’ containers. Most flowered but I never quite got around to cutting them!

Dahlias ended up sharing a bed with the brassicas and, along with sweet peas, were probably the most successful cut flower last year. A full report is here.

Mistakes, I made a few . . .

Apart from failing to cut the tulips, probably the biggest mistake was not giving things enough space and failing to appreciate that the cosmos would grow quite so tall. It towered over the ammi, euphorbia and the cerinthe, shading them from the light and probably contributing to the fact that, although they produced flowers, it wasn’t in the quantities I would have liked.

I also had no idea zinnias were quite so tasty to slugs and snails and the resident molluscs dined well on the plants.

This year, I’m going to swap things around a bit and may well enlarge the cutting garden into another bed, as I several new things to try.

Looking ahead to this year

Several of this year’s seed trials are going to be part of the 2018 cutting garden. Unwins have sent me a selection from their ‘Beautiful Bouquets’ collection, a range of seeds chosen for the cutting garden. I’m going to be growing the pink and white, semi-double Cosmos ‘Razzmatazz’, Lupin ‘Pink Fairy’, Eryngium ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ and Delphinium ‘Blue Donna’ – though an armed guard might be needed for that given the snail population.

I’m trialling a bigger zinnia, ‘Molotov Mix’ from Suttons and am also going to try raising my first dahlias from seed with their ‘Dwarf Cactus Mix’.

Dobies have sent me Verbascum ‘Velvet Mixed’, Aquilegia ‘Lime Sorbet’ and Tithonia ‘Goldfinger’ from their Rob Smith range.

There will more white cosmos in this year’s cutting garden, ‘Double Dutch White’ from Mr Fothergill’s, and ‘Cupcakes White’ from Thompson & Morgan. Mr Fothergills have also supplied Verbena ‘Scentsation’ and Calendula ‘Orange Flash’.

The Sweet Williams from last year are still in place, although I did sow some new seed. Those plants will need spacing out in their flowering position once the weather warms up a little. And there are more dahlias on the way, this time in shades of pink and purple, that will join last year’s tubers, currently seeing out the winter in my greenhouse.

Seed-sowing is about to start in earnest now the sweet peas are beginning to vacate the heated propagators. I will be using Dalefoot Wool Compost for Seeds, something I trialled last year and which is the best peat-free seed compost I’ve found.

The growing bed is also going to be given a boost with some homemade compost and a good helping of SoilFixer’s ‘SF60 Super Soil Improver’, which should help to combat my poor, sandy soil. It’s going to be a busy few weeks.

Limited edition flower jug giveaway

This giveaway has not closed. Full details on the Facebook page.

Flowers from a cutting garden always look better with something pretty to put them in. Unwins have teamed up with leading pottery designer Emma Bridgewater to offer a limited-edition flower jug.

I have one of the jugs to giveaway via Facebook. See here for details of how to enter.

Alternatively, Unwins are offering customers the chance to get one of the 950 limited-edition flower jugs free while stocks last.

To qualify, customers must buy three packets of seed from the Unwins Beautiful Bouquets range between February 1 and February 28, 2018. Seed must be bought from a participating retailer (a list is available via the Westland Horticulture website) and claims must be made before March 14 via the Unwins Beautiful Bouquets page. This offer is open to UK residents only. To find out more visit the Westland Horticulture website.