Growing Your Own Cut Flowers: A Beginner's Guide

Growing your own cut flowers can be a fun and rewarding way to add some colour to your home, while also reducing your environmental footprint. With a little bit of sunshine, good soil, and some basic care, you can enjoy a constant supply of fresh flowers.

Royal Botanic Garden Sydney horticulturalist Madeline Ward grows flowers at work and at home, where she usually has something in bloom. "For beginners … if you start with one or two species [of flowers] and you really get to know them as friends … then you can expand from there," she says.

Step one: Choosing the best spot

To grow flowers, the first thing you need is sunshine. Madeline says ideally, you want an area with full sun that's close to a tap or hose for watering and in a spot with easy access so you can actually enjoy the garden once it gets going.

Bec Shelley owns a family-run seed company outside Hobart/Nipaluna and also grows her own flowers. She says you don't need to make a formal garden bed. "I think you can incorporate little patches of cut flowers in between your landscaped bits … it can still be pretty," Bec says.

Step two: Prep your soil

Once you've chosen your spot, you want the soil to be loose and free of weeds, Madeline says. She recommends getting into the soil and weeding by hand to make it easy for your seedlings to send down roots. "Once you've cleared the bed … and you've turned it over a little bit, you want to give it a nice healthy dose of compost over the top," she says.

Madeline recommends hand-weeding your the area to familiarise yourself with the soil. Madeline says store-bought compost is good for beginners, and homemade compost is also fine, as long as it's "well rotted and well turned".

Step three: Choosing and planting your flower seeds

With so many beautiful cut flower varieties available, choosing which to grow first can feel overwhelming. But there are a few easy-to-grow exotic and native varieties that are ideal for beginners, depending on your climate zone.

Madeline recommends sowing seeds for flowers directly into the soil. "I think it's so much fun to cast seed out into a garden and see what and where it pops up," she says. Distributing your seeds in a carrier mix of vermiculite or sand will help distribute them more evenly, she says.

Bec Shelley from Veggie & Flower Garden Seeds in Tasmania prefers to sow in punnets first. "You let them spend a few hours outside [each day], building up to a whole day over a week's time," she says. "Then plant the seedling into your garden at about six weeks of growth, which is generally when they have two sets of leaves."

Step four: Growing responsibly and harvesting

Once your plants are established, give them a daily drink. Your seed packet should tell you roughly how long your flowers will take to bloom. "Once they're in the ground [and no longer in the seedling stage], they're pretty low maintenance … you'd want to mulch around the base of the plant and watch out for any pests and disease," Bec says.

Madeline's final advice for new flower growers is to have fun and "be prepared to fail". "Plants will die … do weird things … get disease," she says. "The best way to learn how to be a better gardener is … just get into it."