This is a long one with lots of juicy top tips on cutting flowers so all your efforts shine in the vase rather than flop a day later! You might need to read this in the app in case it is truncated in your email.
And don’t forget to print off your download for a quick guide to read before grabbing your snips and a bucket.
Recently the mother of a bride came to my plot to practise arranging flowers for her daughter's wedding in a few weeks time. She’d be making up bud vases for the reception.
She said she wanted to use flowers from her garden but they never lasted. That session was more than just the opportunity to experiment with colours, combinations and structure. I shared when and how to cut flowers from her garden to ensure the vase life she expected from supermarket flowers that lasted for days and days but with the added satisfaction that her’s danced and developed in the vase and smelt amazing.
Along with how to cut from established plants, how to cut flowers proves to be the main barrier preventing them from looking floppy and sorry for themselves hours later. There is no joy in cutting precious stems to find them like this, so I understand why you don’t trust yourself or want to waste them when they are looking so great in the garden. It’s also a big problem for growers. It’s so frustrating getting a bucket of flowers cut at the wrong time so the petals are dropping or stems drooping before you even need to use them.
Thankfully, it’s much easier than you think and with these golden rules, you’ll have vibrant vases full of flowers around the year.
If you jump over the garden wall as a paid subscriber:
When to cut, and why timing matters more than anything else you’ll do
How to cut and strip stems so they actually take up water
What conditioning is, and how it’s the real secret to vase life, not flower food
When and how to sear stems, and which ones need it
A flower-by-flower guide to cutting at the right stage; dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, salvia and rudbeckia all behave differently, and getting it wrong is why they flop
A downloadable reference card for the potting bench; when to cut, how to condition, and the flower-by-flower notes, all on one page
This card’s one of a growing library of downloadable guides I make for paid subscribers; handbooks, planting calendars, and reference charts like this one, all designed to actually get pinned up and used rather than read once and forgotten. It works out at less than a bag of compost a month, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I wish I’d had starting out.
Come and join us.
Here are is the guide to cutting summer flowers:
When to cut.
Cut either first thing in the morning, or late in the evening.
Cutting early ensures stems are turgid with water from the cool of the night. For extra points, water well the night before.
Cutting at night is less certain since plants will be tired from a day in the sun.
Either way, cut and get into scrupulously clean buckets of deep water as quickly as possible.
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