How To Start A Colorful Flower Cutting Garden — With Or Without A Backyard

Starting your own cut flower garden can give you a near-endless supply of colorful plants to admire and cultivate on the cheap, and it's easier to do than you think (no matter where you live).

Fresh cut flowers from the garden make for the most stunning homegrown bouquets. Simply snip, arrange, and display them in your home for a pop of color, or give them away as special seasonal gifts.

Another nice thing about growing your own flowers is that it gives you practice arranging displays of different sizes. Make small accent clusters on days when the picking is light and larger arrangements after heavier harvests.

Beyond bouquets, there are plenty of other ways to bring cut flowers into your home and life. "You can look at them, you can eat them, you can drink them. [Growing them] is a great way of catching season," Marie Viljoen, the urban gardener, author, and chef behind 66 Square Feet (Plus), tells mbg.

The first step of starting your garden is choosing a spot that gets plenty of sunlight. Most popular flowers for cutting gardens require bright light, at least six hours in direct sunlight per day. Prepare your patch by digging up weeds and covering it with well-draining soil. Beginners will want to start slow, with a small patch that feels manageable.

Plants that are in the same plot should have similar water and sunlight needs. Prolific growers like mint (also a flowering plant!) should be placed away from the group in their own containers so their roots don't overtake the rest of the plot.

Once germinated, most of the flowers on this list can be planted close together, with 6 to 9 inches between each pair of varieties. "The closer you have them together, the less room there is for weeds to grow," Irving previously told mbg.

For an aesthetically pleasing garden that's easy to snip from, city garden designer and founder of The Balcony Gardener Isabelle Palmer recommends arranging your flowers by height.

Regular pruning will help your plants be more productive, leaving more flowers for you. Pinching is one pruning technique that encourages most annual plants to become bushier. When your seedling grows to be about 12 inches tall, snip off the top 3 to 4 inches using clean garden shears. This one cut will send the signal that the plant should start growing outward and not just upward, leading to more blooms for the taking.

Once your plant begins blooming, it's ready to be cultivated. Typically, the more flowers you cut from your plant, the more productive it will be, but you should always leave some flowers and leaves on your plant to continue to grow. Cut the older growth first, allowing newer growth to keep developing.

"The best time to cut them is in the morning," says Palmer. "Failing that, cut them in late evening—never in the height of the heat of the day."

City dwellers or those lacking green space can start their cut flower gardens in containers. Before you decide which florals to place on your balcony, roof, or patio, consider how much light your space gets and what direction that light comes from.

Palmer recommends using your compass (or, more realistically, the compass app on your phone) to measure what direction your outdoor area faces. North-facing spaces will likely get the least amount of summer sun and will only be suitable for low-light varieties, while south-, west-, and east-facing ones are typically more conducive to light-loving plants.

In addition to choosing plants that are appropriate to your lighting, urban growers also might want to go with varieties that do double-duty in a small space. Edible plants and herbs that flower would be great options for the container gardener.

Again, choose flowers that bloom more than once a year at different times to ensure that there's always something to see.

Once you have your germinated seeds or small plants, it's time to place them in containers with well-draining soil and at least one drainage hole so water can escape. "You have to make sure your plant is never, ever standing in water," Viljoen stresses, as soaked roots can develop root rot and die.

For this reason, delicate decorative planters that don't have drainage holes aren't the best pick for an outdoor garden. Instead, go with strong and sturdy but portable materials like terra-cotta, fiberglass, or aluminum for easy maneuvering.

Palmer recommends using as large of a container as you can comfortably put in your space: It will fit more soil (and therefore need to be watered less frequently) and leave more room for different varieties of plants to grow side by side. "I tend to mix lots of different varieties so that I'm not going to be left with a patch," she says.

She suggests placing four or five plants in a 25- to 30-centimeter planter (approximately 9 to 11 inches), six or seven plants in a 30- to 40-centimeter planter (approximately 11 to 15 inches), and eight or nine plants in a 40- to 50-centimeter planter (approximately 15 to 19 inches).

Though she loves the visual contrast of putting multiple plants in the same container, Palmer does think it's possible to go overboard. To keep your containers from looking unruly, limit the number of colors in them to three, placing complementary tones together.