Spring Fever–the Cutting Garden

Earlier this week we had an absolutely glorious day–70 degrees and sunny. So I was out in the garden beds trimming stuff back and pulling weeds. (The backs of my legs were complaining about it the next day!)

The next day, the weather was terrible, but I saw that Home Depot had their bareroot flowers out, and of course, I had to get some. They have liatris (looks like a purple cattail), peonies, elephant ears, cannas, and dahlias. (Other big box stores carry these same items.) Target has all their Burpee seeds out. If you tried to garden last year, you’ll remember that stores ran out of EVERYTHING garden related, so I recommend getting your stuff early.

Here are photos of my cutting garden from last year. I am planning to do something similar this year, but with more dahlias (of course).

I really like dahlias because they have a much longer bloom season than most perennials. If you want to try them, I would go ahead and get them now from whatever store you prefer. If you wait, they will start to sprout because of the light and warmth in the store. I keep them in my garage to keep them cool and relatively dark. I will plant mine in early March when the worst of the cold weather has passed. If you read up on dahlias, you will find that they recommend that you dig up the tubers in the fall and store them inside. I never do that and they have come up every year for me, but we don’t have super cold winters, and these are next to my house. The one thing that you can’t do is have poorly draining soil–the tubers will rot if they stay wet all the time.

Here are photos of what I was rewarded with last summer:

I pick them when the petals are showing, but the flower is still closed. If I wait until the flower is fully open, the bugs usually beat me to the flower.

As you can see in the photos above, the dahlias (against the wall) get very tall (4 to 5 feet) and need to be staked to keep them from falling over. I am going to get grow-through heads and legs from kinsmangarden.com. They have really nice quality and a variety of diameters and heights. For the dahlias, I am going to get the tallest ones. If you have peonies, these supports are great to keep the flowers off the ground when you get a big rain. They also sell nice hayrack baskets like these that I have by the herb garden. I have had these for 10 years at least, and they still look great.

Another one of my favorite garden resources is vanengelen.com for bulbs and bareroot plants. They appear to be sold out of most everything for the spring, but bookmark them for the fall. I have bought thousands of bulbs from them and have always been really pleased with the quality. (I have been giving their forced amaryllis bulbs as Christmas gifts for years.) For shrubs, trees, and ground covers, I have used musserforests.com extensively. They sell plants to commercial nurseries, so their plants are on the small side, but we have had great luck with them because they are dug for your order and are really healthy. I am thinking about some forsythia as a screen between our neighbors’ driveway and our yard. It’ll take at least 8 bushes, so we’ll see if I get that ambitious.

Happy Planting!!!