Cutting Garden

With my veggie garden blooming and for the most part, maintaing itself, I needed something new to try and got my heart set on a cutting garden of sorts. I love, love, love fresh flowers around the house, but despise paying grocery store prices for such a temporary fix. Hence, the cutting garden.

I did a quick search of flowers meant for cutting and came away with a short list of options. I was able to find a few at Home Depot to work with, as well as some seeds to try.

I'm leery of planting anything in the ground for various reasons, the primary one being I don't exactly know where I want them, so they all went into large pots, which the internet assured me would be okay {I believe everything I read on the internet}. I suppose it is less of a 'cutting garden' and more of a 'flowers in pots for cutting' situation.

My 'flowers in pots for cutting' experiment includes:

{not my pictures - click them to link}

Bachelor's Button in the form of really cool seeds

Cosmos in the form of seeds

A Burpee mix of wildflower seeds, all preferred for cutting. 

I also purchased starter plants of the following:

Dahlia XXL

Shasta Daisies

Coreopsis (Tickseed)

I already have a few small gerbera daisies growing, which I replanted in a larger pot this weekend in hopes of encouraging growth. I have also been growing some zinnias from seed, which should start blooming any time now. 

My dad gave me a few Red Canna Lily bulbs back in April, which I promptly planted with no clue what would happen. They sat in the ground for quite some time with no apparent growth whatsoever, so imagine my surprise when I turned the corner yesterday to see GIANT stems with GIANT leaves growing in the bed on the side of our house! All I could do was start yelling, it surprised me so much. That area of the yard was possibly once a nice, bordered flower bed, but is now just a weedy, overgrown space where giant centipedes and spiders live {ask me how I know}. I'd like [Curt] to weed it soon, throw some new dirt down, and see if I can't grow some more flowers from seed among the Canna Lilies. I'm going to take the "scatter seeds, say a prayer, and see what happens" approach.

I can't wait to see what blooms from all this, and I hope to have a home full of colorful flowers for the next few months. What are your favorite cut flowers? Do you have any tips for cutting gardens?