How to Start a Cut Flower Garden

Your step-by-step guide to starting your own backyard cut flower garden for endless seasonal, homegrown blooms.

Starting a Backyard Cut Flower Garden

A few years ago I decided to carry on my parent’s tradition of growing a backyard garden in the summer. Some of my best memories from growing up are from spending time in our backyard garden, growing cucumbers, munching on tomatoes, and harvesting flowers for the kitchen table.

If you’ve ever grown your own garden, you know that there is simply nothing like walking out to check on your plants every morning. You also know what it feels like to harvest the fruit of your own labor – and then use that fruit to feed your family (or in this case, give joy to your family through the beauty of cut flowers). 

It’s taken years of garden failures, successes, blood, sweat, tears (some happy and some sad), and just plain hard work to learn everything I have about growing cut flowers, and I’m so excited to share the things I’ve learned with you! Hopefully, this guide on how to grow cut flowers will help you to not make the same mistakes I did in my journey!

How to Start a Backyard Cut Flower Garden

Every great garden starts with a great garden plan. If you sit down before the season (which is why this is being published in December) and make decisions on which cut flowers you want to grow, where you want to put them, where you’re going to source them, and how you’re going to start them (seeds or plugs), you will be way ahead of the game come springtime! Here are a few decisions you need to make ahead of time to guarantee that your cut flower garden gets the best start!

Best Flowers for a Cutting Garden

To start, you’re going to want to choose simple, cut-and-come-again cut flowers. One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is starting with plants that are too fussy. Take it from me, I made this mistake! But the good news for all of us is that some of the best cut flowers are also the easiest to grow.

As I run through some of my favorite flowers from my cut flower garden, keep in mind that I am in Zone 8b, so flower options may be slightly different for you!

Dahlias

Dahlias are a cut flower favorite for a reason. They produce continuously all summer long once they get going and come in endless shapes and colors. To start out, you can either purchase dahlia seeds or dahlia tubers. If you’re purchasing tubers, I suggest buying from smaller growers to decrease your risk of purchasing tubers with disease. You can find dahlia tubers for sale in dahlia Facebook groups, or by searching online!

You’ll want to plant your tubers or sow your seeds after your last frost date (for me that is typically around March 15th, but it will be different for you, depending on your growing zone). If you do this, you’ll be cutting flowers all the way up until the first frost in the late fall.

Zinnias

If you only grow one flower in your cut flower garden, make it zinnias. They are heat-loving, fast-growing, and bloom nonstop. The more you cut, the more they produce—perfect for beginners.

I can’t say it enough that this is a flower-growing beginner’s secret sauce. For me, living in the Deep South, I can truly sow zinnia seeds after my last frost in April, ignore them completely, and they will bloom like crazy for me.

Zinnias like bad dirt and they don’t really care to be watered all that much (I don’t water mine at all!) – a flower growers’ best friend.

Cosmos

Cosmos are airy, whimsical flowers that thrive in poor soil and hot weather. Similar to zinnias, they add height and movement to bouquets and are incredibly forgiving when it comes to the ease of growing them. This is a must-grow for any cut flower garden beginner!

Ageratum

Ageratum is an underrated cut flower that adds soft texture and beautiful blue or purple tones to arrangements. Last summer was my first time growing this flower and I will never not grow it from here on out. Not many flowers come in a deep purple (or “blue”) color, so this adds a lot of interest to your bouquets. It also holds up well in arrangements!

I start these as seeds in seed trays indoors before planting them outside when the risk of frost has passed.

Lemon Basil

Yes—herbs belong in a cut flower garden too! Another huge mistakes beginners make is forgetting to grow foliage. I made this mistake my first season – it can be so tempting to only grow the beautiful flowers, but when you go to make an arrangement with your garden harvest, you’ll be amazed at the difference a few stems of foliage can make.

Lemon basil quickly became one of my favorites last summer because it smells better than you’d think, fills bouquets beautifully, and thrives in warm climates like mine. This is another plant I sow as seeds indoors and plant out after frost.

Choosing a location for your cutting garden

This is an extremely important part of your garden planning! Most cut flowers enjoy full sun. My cutting garden gets 8+ hours of sun in the height of summer. It gets sun and late afternoon shade, and it has worked so nicely for us!

Definitely look for an area in your yard that has a good deal of sun. If it gets some shade, don’t worry about it, just choose the sunniest spot you have!

Cut Flower Garden Layout

I decided to do raised beds in my cutting garden, mostly because we had a steep hillside that was perfect for building garden beds into. We used cedar boards and made beds that were 10′ x 3′ feet.

Because I had 6 raised beds to work with, I devoted 3 of my boxes to dahlias (I’m a little bit obsessed!), 2 to zinnias/cosmos/ageratum, and one to foliage (basil, dill, etc). For most flowers, I try to keep 9 to 12 inches in spacing at the time of planting. This is pretty standard for things like zinnias, cosmos, basil, and ageratum. For dahlias, I always plant them roughly 12 inches apart because they do get quite large.

Cutting Garden FAQs

How do you prepare your soil?

You certainly don’t need perfect soil to start growing cut flowers. Besides, it can take years to fully develop good soil!

If you plan on doing raised beds, purchase soil that has a good amount of organic matter in it (think compost), or buy bags of regular top soil and mix in a few bags of compost as well.

If you’re planning to plant directly in the ground, mix some good compost into the soil when you plant and fertilize throughout the growing season.

How to keep your flowers blooming all season long?

This is the main reason I suggest focusing on those cut-and-come-again flowers (dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, etc.)! The more you cut, the more they grow! You really can’t cut them *too* much, and they actually love and thrive when you cut them daily!

Dealing with pests in a cut flower garden

Pest pressure is one of the toughest things to deal with as a gardener. I’ve chosen to go down the route of *not* spraying pesticides in my garden. This approach is certainly not for everyone, but because I have small children running around the garden, smelling the flowers, digging in the dirt, its important to me that I know exactly what is in my soil and feel confident about the things I’m introducing to our little backyard ecosystem.

Yes, this also includes organic pesticides and things of that nature. I’ve found that introducing beneficial insects (I purchase from Nature’s Good Guys) into my garden is a much more productive way to control some of my common pests (things like aphids and thrips). Of course, like anything in mother nature, there are losses every year that I just have to get over, but the losses are worth it to me when the tradeoff is feeling great about my kids running around my garden!

In addition, some of you know that I am a beekeeper as well! I’ve never wanted to spray anything in my garden that could be potentially harmful to my bees.

If you do choose to spray pesticides:

Choose something organic like Neem oil. I’d suggest spraying at night to have your best shot at avoiding the honey bees and other pollinators as they’re usually more active during the day. My mom actually uses Neem oil in her garden and she swears by it!

Cut flower garden resources

I’ve consumed a lot of information on gardening in general, but also specifically about growing cut flowers!

Here are a few of my favorite cut flower garden resources:

1. Floret Farms Cut Flower Garden – This is a great resource for general flower and gardening knowledge. I had this thing out all the time when I was first starting out! Erin (the author) also has great resources on YouTube and Instagram (@floretflower).
2. Backyard Bouquet Podcast – I’ve learned so much from this podcast and it’s a great resource for a flower garden beginner!
3. For growing dahlias specifically, there is a dahlia group on Facebook called “Dahlia growers,” and I use this as a resource very often!