I didn’t set out to start a flower farm. In fact, I didn’t really set out to become a flower farmer at all.

Thinking back on it now, it was likely grief processing that started me on the journey. My earliest memories of flowers come from spending time with my mom. She loved going to the garden centers in the spring and picking out the brightest, boldest flowers she could find. There were never many whites. She wanted color, and lots of it. I’ve carried that habit with me through every home we’ve lived in. After the long, gray months of winter, there is something about walking into a garden center and bringing home a carload of flowers that feels like a little reward for making it through. She died suddenly the year before we moved here, and now I can see how it became a connection to her. I think of her often when I’m in the flowers.

There were many big changes happening at the time and this idea of growing cut flowers took hold in my mind. It was all I wanted to think about. So I bought books, and courses, and watched many videos. I’ve learned an enormous amount since my first garden, lots of it by trial and error. I’ve also learned that some of the things I thought would be difficult weren’t (drip line irrigation) , while some of the things I never gave much thought to—hello, weeds—would become some of my biggest challenges. I’ve learned a ton along the way, but I remember when I first went to get started, there were still so many questions. I won’t be able to answer them all here, but I thought I’d share some of the things I wish I knew when starting a cut flower garden.

If I were starting a cut flower garden from scratch today, there are a few things I would think about differently.

1. Why do you Want a Cutting Garden?

Before you start looking at seed catalogs, it helps to think about what you actually want from the garden. A cutting garden is a little different from a traditional landscape garden because you’re growing flowers with the intention of harvesting them. You aren’t necessarily trying to create a perfect flower bed that looks good from the patio. You’re growing flowers to cut, bring inside and enjoy.

That was one of the things I came to love about growing flowers. Having a reason to leave my computer behind and go outside to check on the flowers became part of my routine. I could walk through the beds, see what germinated, notice what needed attention and eventually end up coming back inside with a handful of flowers. There is something about bringing flowers in from your own garden that just feels different than buying them.

A cutting garden can also be a way to connect with other people. Give flowers to a neighbor. Take a bouquet to a friend. Leave some on someone’s doorstep. You might eventually want to grow enough to sell a few bouquets at a roadside stand, or perhaps you’re thinking about growing flowers for your own wedding.

There really isn’t one right reason to grow a cutting garden. The important thing is knowing what you want the garden to do for you, because that will influence everything from where you put it to what you grow.

2. Where to start? Pick the Right Spot

Most of the flowers you’ll want to grow for cutting are going to need plenty of sun, so start there. Full sun is ideal, although there are always exceptions. Just as important, though, is access to water.

This is something I would tell anyone starting a cutting garden: figure out your water situation before you spend a lot of money on plants. If you have to drag a hose a long distance every time the garden needs water, eventually you’re going to dread doing it. If you can automate your irrigation, even better. If I had to choose where to spend money in a new cutting garden, I’d put it toward getting water where I need it before buying a lot of other garden infrastructure.

It’s also worth thinking about where the garden sits in relation to your daily life. If you walk past it every morning, you’re going to notice things much sooner. You’ll see when something needs water, when a pest is starting to move in or when a flower is ready to harvest. A garden that is tucked away somewhere you rarely visit is much easier to neglect.

Then there is the question of aesthetics, and this is something I didn’t really think about when I started. Do you want the cutting garden itself to be beautiful, or are you primarily interested in what comes out of it?

My first attempt at growing flowers for cutting was, to put it kindly, a complete mess. It was productive, but it wasn’t pretty. I was learning how much space plants actually needed, how quickly everything grows in the summer and how difficult it can be to keep a garden looking tidy while you’re constantly harvesting from it.

These are my rows from the first year.

This is what my spring field looked like this year.

It is considerably more organized than that first attempt, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a formal garden. And that’s okay. Right now, I care more about growing and abundance of good flowers than having beautiful boxed in flower beds with immaculately maintained grass pathways.

If you want both, that’s great. Just understand that you don’t have to have Pinterest worthy cutting garden to get a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

3. Choose Your Flowers

This is where it is very easy to get carried away. Especially in the middle of winter, when you’re sitting inside looking at seed catalogs and everything looks possible.

Before choosing your flowers, you need to know a few basic things about your growing situation. Start with your growing zone, then think about the length of your growing season and how you’re going to source your plants. Are you comfortable starting flowers from seed? Do you have seed starting equipment and space? Would you rather buy plugs or young plants? Are there flowers you’ll direct sow?

Those decisions will affect what makes sense for your garden, especially when you’re just getting started.

Once you have that figured out, it’s about creating bouquet ‘recipes’.

My mistake was : I selected the colors I liked the best in the offering without considering the other flowers that I was growing so I ended up with great flowers, but they didn’t really go together to make a beautiful bouquet.

I’d recommend choosing reliable, productive flowers rather than simply choosing every flower you happen to love. There is a difference between a flower that is beautiful and a flower that is useful in a cutting garden.

The most important distinction between your typical plants you find at your nursery for your landscape and a true cut flower is the stem length, and even more important is a straight stem. Ideally, you also want a combination of flower shapes, colors and textures that work together when you put them in a bouquet.

At Goldfinch Hill, some of my spring must-haves are feverfew, larkspur, peonies and orlaya. Summer brings sunflowers, tall phlox, agastache and sedum. By fall, I’m relying heavily on dahlias, Japanese anemone and ninebark.

That doesn’t mean you need to grow all of those. In fact, I would strongly recommend that you don’t try to start with everything at once. The summer season is the easiest, but the spring season is the one that will hooks you in.

4. Understand “Cut and Come Again” vs. “One and Done”

One of the more useful things to understand when you’re planning a cutting garden is that not all flowers produce the same way.

Some flowers are called “cut and come again.” You harvest them, and the plant continues producing more flowers. Those plants can give you weeks or months of production from the same space. Think zinnias.

Other flowers are more of a “one and done.” They give you one major flush of flowers and then they’re finished. Think sunflowers. If you’re growing on a small scale, that’s not necessarily a problem, but you do need to think about what you’re going to do with that space afterward. Plant more sunflowers?

Can you remove the finished crop and plant something else? Can you succession plant the same crop into the bed? Can you “flip” the bed for the next season’s crop?

That is one of the things that makes a cutting garden different from a traditional flower bed. You’re not just thinking about what looks good right now. You’re thinking about what that space is going to do for you throughout the season.

And you don’t need dozens and dozens of varieties to make that work. A few reliable, productive flowers can carry a surprisingly large portion of your cutting garden.

5. Harvest!

This may sound obvious, but one of the hardest things to get used to when you first start growing flowers is actually cutting them.

You spend months waiting for that first beautiful bloom, and then your instinct is to leave it right where it is so you can admire it. But the whole reason you grew the flower was to use it. Cut it and bring it inside.

Many flowers actually produce more when they’re harvested regularly, so don’t be afraid of the snips. Learning the right stage to cut each flower is important, too. Some should be harvested when they’re just beginning to open, while others need to be further along.

I also try to harvest in the cooler part of the day when possible. Once the flowers are cut, getting them into clean water and properly conditioning them can make a huge difference in vase life.

If you’re growing a cutting garden because you want to enjoy flowers inside your home, learning how to harvest and condition them is just as important as learning how to grow them.

6. Expect to Experiment

Something will fail. It just will.

A variety won’t perform the way you expected. Something will get eaten. A planting date won’t work. A crop will take up a ridiculous amount of space for the number of flowers it actually produces. And occasionally, something you weren’t expecting much from will turn out to be fantastic.

I’ve learned to think of those failures as part of the process rather than evidence that I did something wrong. That’s easier said than done when you’re standing in front of a crop that has completely flopped, but every season gives you more information.

I try to keep notes, although I’m much better at this at the beginning of the season than I am once things get busy. I start out with good intentions, recording planting dates and making notes about what worked and what didn’t, and then somewhere along the way the notebook gets abandoned.

Still, even imperfect notes are useful. If something works really well, grow more of it. If something doesn’t, figure out what you might change next time. Maybe the variety wasn’t right for your conditions. Maybe the planting date was off. Maybe it simply wasn’t worth the amount of space and effort it required.

Gardening is one long experiment. You don’t have to get everything right the first time.

7. What I Would Do If I Were Starting From Scratch

If I were starting over, I would keep the first cutting garden much more manageable in the beginning. I would grow fewer varieties and grow enough of each one to actually make a difference when it came time to cut flowers.

I would also think about weed management before I thought about flower selection.

That may not sound particularly exciting, but weeds and grass have probably been one of my biggest challenges. It is very easy to spend hours in the winter deciding which flowers you want to grow and almost no time thinking about how you’re going to keep the beds manageable once everything is planted. Then summer arrives, the weeds take off and you’re standing in 90-degree heat wondering why you thought growing flowers sounded like such a relaxing hobby.

This is when you want to throw your hands up and walk away!

Resist the temptation to order every beautiful seed packet you see over the winter. There will always be another flower to try. You don’t need all of them this year. Start small.

More importantly, I would build some kind of routine or ritual around taking care of the garden. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Maybe it’s walking through the garden with your morning coffee, spending fifteen minutes pulling weeds, or cutting a few flowers for the kitchen table.

The garden benefits from regular attention, just like you and I.

What Starting a Flower Farm has Taught Me so far

I started growing flowers without a farming background. I had never sat on a tractor until I bought one, and pretty much everything about farming was new to me. I learned as I went, and I still do.

One of the biggest surprises was realizing that growing the flowers and figuring out what to do with them are two completely different jobs. I came into flower farming thinking that if I grew beautiful flowers, the customers would somehow appear. It turns out that “if you grow it, they will come” isn’t really a business plan.

Building a sales channel takes time, relationships and a lot more work than I initially realized. I’m still working on that part of the business, and I’ve changed the direction of Goldfinch Hill several times as I’ve figured out what makes sense.

But the growing part is still what keeps me interested. There is always something to learn, something to experiment with and something that doesn’t quite work the way you expected.

That’s probably why I still love it.

I don’t think a cutting garden needs to be perfect. It doesn’t need to look like a magazine spread, and you don’t need to grow fifty different varieties of flowers to make it worthwhile. Start with a manageable space, figure out your water, choose a handful of productive flowers and give yourself permission to learn as you go.

The flowers are really only part of what you get from the garden. You get a reason to go outside, something to pay attention to, flowers to bring into the house and, if you’re lucky, a few extra bouquets to share with someone else.

That’s a pretty good return on a little patch of dirt.

Want to grow your own bouquet?
I’ve put together a simple planning guide to help you choose your flowers, build a bouquet recipe, and turn it into an actual cutting-garden plan.