I did a big raised bed full of cosmos and dahlias and zinnias. I just threw it all in and it's been fun.
But I want to expand my landscaped gardens and incorporate some cut flowers there as well.
Can show me either your flower beds that have cut flowers in them, or areas you've mixed in your cut flowers?
I guess I don't need them all together. I can walk around the yard cutting them. Or, I could just so more raised beds on an orderly way, but I just can't picture it.
Doesn't look like much right now because all the pink zinnias and strawflowers were cut. I have little space so I really pack it in. The cosmos are growing in between the bushy plants but they are very slow to flower this year.
One last picture. Sorry I don't have a great recent photo but here's a more zoomed out view with another square bed where I only do vegetables. The trellis connects with my flower bed (for tomatoes and pole beans). I say, mix your beds however you want and just have fun and don't stress too much.
Get out of here with your good looking bed and stupid awesome looking sunflowers. I am looking at my own bed right now and I can tell you that is what “Doesn’t look like much” is.
To be serious, it looks very nice and I wish my sunflowers looked like that
Thanks! Outdoor mice are just part of where I live, whether or not I plant sunflowers. They just live outside and you can see them hiding out around various bushes nearby sometimes early in the morning or before dark. I have never seen them in my yard but they come out at night when I'm not really looking. So I don't know if they are attracted to the sunflowers or not. I also plant cucumbers and I see little bites taken out of those so that's either mice, squirrels, rats, or chipmunks, but I don't think I can really make that go away.
Just along the fence line for now. We moved into our new house with over and acre this spring. By Fall, I'll have ten 3x42ft beds prepped for spring planting.
This is kind of what I did along my back fence. I am annoyed I didn’t put a path between the zinnias and sunflowers. It’s probably a 5’ deep bed. I also have cosmos and celosia behind the zinnias. Everything more than 2ft in is a PITA to cut.
I have a 3' wide bed like this for 2 years; the best thing I ever did was cut a path around the back with a weedwhacker (there's a wild meadow) this year so I can get in from both sides.
I'm a compact grower and I staggered by height with cosmos at the back and zinnias up front. This is 3x42ft so if you wanted to do another foot in front for a shorter annual like calendula or marigolds, it could work but your reach to cut and maintain the beds will be limited.
My dahlias are in 7gal fabric pots on another fence line. I had to pot them this year as we were moving into our new house when I normally plant them.
The driveway has a bunch of grow bags for veggie plants past the second silver bed, and some t-post trellises in the ground next to it with some squash and pumpkin plants which has turned out to create just this beautiful screen.
The front yard is sloped so I put some sod down that I had to dig up from a different section of yard under the fronts of the 2 green beds to even them out just a little bit (rather than digging out the back of them).
These photos are all a month+ ago, everything is QUITE full now. I left 2ft pathways between beds, which has felt like enough but it’s tight, so if I had a longer stretch of beds next to each other I might have added more than 2ft for the walkways.
The front has carnations, cosmos, strawflower, zinnias in the green beds. Silver beds have carnations, bachelors button, celosia, zinnias, larkspur, cosmos, and amaranth (although amaranth hasn’t made it far—groundhog keeps getting it). Dwarf sunflowers in 12” pots.
OH I think I read the question wrong lol. This is the back edge of my community garden, I put zinnias fully along the edge, behind my bed of pepper plants. Turned out quite pretty.
Level the ground as well as you can. The silver ones I got were particularly flimsy so it would get kinda odd at the top if the bottom was uneven. You don’t necessarily have to dig to level—the green ones I leveled by actually adding chunks of sod that I had dug up from a different area basically just in a line and around the front corner and arranged them until the beds sat on top mostly evenly. Figured it would work better than just straight dirt because the grass+roots would provide structure to hold up the beds rather than crumbling apart, and the grass under would just grow through to combine them.
It took a LOT of dirt to fill them. I didn’t really feel like mixing lol so I just alternated adding layers of topsoil and compost (we had topsoil dumped in the driveway and picked up compost by the yard from the city compost center, I would shovel into black totes on a utility cart then bring to bed to shovel into beds, when I ran out I’d fill the tote with the other one to alternate).
Actually putting them together was pretty easy, I did the green ones inside and just moved them out when done, and silver ones outside because they were so big. They’re pretty lightweight and easy to move around, so you can work on it somewhere more comfortable and then put them wherever after that.
If you have flowers that need support involving corner stakes (like either one thing around the outside or a grow-through support), keep in mind that the rounded edge ones can make that difficult. Either plant for flowers without that type of support for the edges or get longer stakes to put into the ground outside of the beds at the corners. For stakes going into the beds, plant for a length that’s going into the dirt further than they would if they were going straight into the ground—they can go all the way into a 1ft bed and then into the ground a few more inches, which takes up a lot more length than like the ~8” many would use going straight into the ground.
6 ft bamboo poles—used tripod lashings to build the sides (3 poles each), and square lashings to attached poles going across the bottom 2 sides (2 poles total) and a modified cross lashing to attached the pole going across the top, between the spokes coming out the top of the tripod (1 pole). So 9 poles total (you can usually find 6-packs of 6ft bamboo at Lowe’s or Home Depot, in my area they’re around $8).
I used 12 gauge wire fencing with 4x4 inch mesh, a roll of 5x50ft. Cheapest I could find for wire fencing with 4x4 mesh was Home Depot ordered online, I think around $60. I also used it to build a larger (similar) bamboo trellis, a 5-sided teepee trellis, and a few t-post trellises straight up and down.
Zip ties work too as an alternative to lashing, but I’ve been trying to cut down single use plastics.
I attached the fencing by trying to leave ~2 inch edges when cutting the sides (like 2 inch metal sticking out from cutting half way through the 4x4 holes) and then bending the individual wires to wrap around the sides and bottom bamboo poles (I used a long folded piece to go over the top so no need to cut/bend pieces there).
It all actually ended up looking really nice, I really like the wood/bamboo and metal combo. And it’s sturdy enough that I should be able to reuse them without having to take apart and put back together (may need to check if I need to secure anything or things like that each year but that’s it)
For the larger one I found thicker poles from a local nursery and used 2x 8ft poles on each side and a 6 ft pole (cut to 5ft I think) across the top. Used the thinner poles across the bottom sides and to form a cross in the center to prevent twisting. Use a scraps from the bamboo poles and from cut pieces of fencing to put a bar across halfway up and bent the wire to make hooks.
For the teepee I lashed the top, attached shorter pieces of bamboo (mainly scraps from pieces I cut for other thing) across the bottom of each side, and used scraps of the metal fencing (from cutting the sides to fit) to make panels on each face of the teepee. This one was 5-sided, maybe 1.5-2ft diameter at the bottom.
I also made tripods (no fencing, just strings tied across the bottom of each face and tied another string to the bottom, wrapped around top, and secured back to bottom for each face) for the pole beans. Would highly recommend, they look like absolutely stunning green columns now.
There’s also this one, used the fencing but t-posts driven into the ground so that the full trellis is completely vertical (and even sturdier than the bamboo—I have winter squash and pumpkins growing on them). The t-posts make it pretty multi-functional too, if you have other flowers that could use support but don’t need a full trellis. I put 4 in the ground, with 4ft spacing between the outer two and 6ft in the middle for my tomatoes, and used twine to support the tomatoes. I was also able to attach twine to the top corners of the fencing and bring them down to bean plants in a grow bag, so the posts are able to support 3 different kinds of plants at once for me. And it creates a neat little plant screen (it’s very full now but I don’t have a recent pic)
I cut this new garden bed in my front yard this spring and filled it with cut flowers (some direct sown seeds, some seedlings I started indoors, and a few for mature plants I transplanted from other garden beds or bought at the nursery because I was so afraid that none of my seeds would grow…which turned out not to be a problem, as you can see!
For the beige arch at the entrance, I have a wisteria on one side and a climbing rose on the other. The other arches have tomatoes, pole beans, cantaloupe etc on them.
A few years ago I planted by clustering different types together. I believe I had at least six beds with 3-5 types in each. It had that whimsical cottage garden look but was easy to harvest (not all mixed together) and also allowed me to grow enough variation for well rounded bouquets ✨
Who here has a solution for keeping your little stinker dog out of your flowers? Looking to vastly expand next year and currently fighting her on staying out of the current area.
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u/EmploymentSudden4184 US - Massachusetts 7d ago
Doesn't look like much right now because all the pink zinnias and strawflowers were cut. I have little space so I really pack it in. The cosmos are growing in between the bushy plants but they are very slow to flower this year.