Cut Flowers from Your Own Garden – Bringing the Garden Indoors

Cut flowers in your home always add little pops of color and a touch of nature to your living space. But cut flowers don't always have to come from a florist. Your garden holds a surprise or two!

With colorful and pretty flowers in your garden, you can quickly become a hobby florist yourself. After all, the most beautiful cut flowers come from your own garden from spring to autumn.

If you have beautiful blooms in your garden, you might often hesitate to cut these beauties and put them in a vase. However, this fear is completely unfounded! Cut flowers from your own garden bring joy not only inside your home but also to your garden itself. Especially in summer, flowers like cornflowers, cosmos, and marigolds actually benefit from having a few blooms regularly snipped. This prolongs their flowering period and encourages even more blossoms to appear. The same goes for perennials like roses, bellflowers, and delphiniums. Pruning makes these plants grow denser, larger, and bushier.

Cut flowers from your own garden not only have the advantage of being exactly the blooms you love, but also that they can go straight into the vase freshly cut, avoiding damage from transport or improper storage. When "harvesting" cut flowers from your garden, the gardener should consider the temperature and sun position. During prolonged heat, it's better to leave the blooms on the plants. The flowers are already under significant stress at this time and likely wouldn't last long in a vase.

The best time to harvest cut flowers is in the morning or evening. In the morning, the flower stems are full of water, and in the evening, the flowers' tissues are rich in nutrients from photosynthesis. All of this helps to extend their life in the vase.

With a few tips and tricks, you can harvest the most beautiful cut flowers from your garden. When harvesting, it's important to use a sharp knife or sharp shears. This minimizes injury to the plants, as not all flowers can be broken by hand. If you sow your summer flowers with an interval of 10 days, you can repeatedly harvest blooms over a longer period.

And even after flowering, it's not over! After the blooms fade, pretty leaves come into their own. Hostas, lady's mantle, or barrenwort are great for this. When harvesting fresh cut flowers, simply place them in a basket lined with a damp cloth. This keeps the cut flowers from wilting on their way to the vase.