Cut flower garden tour - June 2022 🌻🌺 GroundedHavenHomestead

Hi everyone, today I'm going to be giving you a tour of our cut flower garden. It is late June now, we're located in Virginia, zone 7A, and things are finally starting to really explode out here. We have a lot of things blooming, a lot more than last month when everything was still kind of in its early stages, so I have a lot to show you today. I'll start with the row on the left today. In the very front we have some grass that is growing. I have bunny tails and frosted explosion. Later on those will have some really cool seed heads. And this next section I have a bunch of different colorful zinnias which have finally started to open, but unfortunately this year the Japanese beetles have found where my zinnias are. You can see there are a bunch of them right there. So we usually come out in the mornings and evenings and handpick those off. It's a little bit annoying, but it's not the hugest deal because I do strip off a lot of the leaves for the zinnias anyway when I use them for bouquets and arrangements. But I definitely don't want them to lay their eggs in the ground and multiply, so we make sure to pick those off. I've got some colorful blends here, like Benuri's Giant. And then I also have some single color varieties. This big red one is probably from the Meteor pack. And then these white ones are polar bear zinnias. So these are just getting started and they will produce tons of blooms throughout the season. And then I have some lime green Envy's zinnias in the back. The next section I have is a few kinds of amaranth. And you can see even from pretty far away, I am not sure what is eating these, but any time I grow amaranth, they just get a ton of holes in the leaves. So that's kind of a bummer. More Japanese beetles. Unfortunately it's the season they've just started coming out. And you can see that this one here is starting to form a seed head. I think this is the coral fountain variety or Love Lies Bleeding. So soon it will have a really long droopy seed head in that beautiful hot pink color. I also have some other colors. Here's another one that's starting to develop its seed head. So yeah, unfortunately I don't really use these for arrangements just because the leaves always look so bad. But I will save the seed heads which will eventually produce amaranth grain and I will feed that to the chickens. Next I have some cosmos. These ones here in the front are getting pretty tall and no blooms on those yet. I do have a few of these yellow cosmos that have started blooming. This is the xanthos variety and last year they kind of did the same thing as this where they stayed super small and short. So last year I thought it was just because I stunted the plants but now since it's two years in a row, I think it's just the variety. So I'm not sure if I will grow this again, at least not in our cut flower garden because you can see it's just not a very tall stem at all compared to how tall the other varieties are which are seashells and rubenza cosmos. I've got a few sunflowers tucked in here. They're kind of smaller because this is my second succession and I do have my first succession a little farther down that are blooming now which I'll show you in a bit. But here I have feverfew which is just past its prime at the moment. It still looks pretty nice but we had a heavy rain last night so they're a little bit droopy now but there are still some really beautiful buds on here. I absolutely love this plant. I've been cutting it just to have on its own in a vase. I just think it's so pretty and I love the leaves too. They're kind of like lacy and frilly. And this plant actually overwintered from last year and this is just a single plant and it just has a ton of stems on it. So I'm really happy that it came back because I didn't plant any this year and just this one plant just looks so amazing. So I'm definitely going to have to make sure I plant more of this next year. So here are more of my second succession of sunflowers and then coming up here we have our first succession. So you can see these are much farther along, much taller. I have a bunch of different varieties here but the ones that are blooming now, which just opened up the other day, I have orange crow-cut sunflowers. And all of these varieties by the way are either pollen-less or low pollen varieties so they're great for cut flowers. And then this beautiful white one with the dark center I believe is white night. Really gorgeous. And we are officially in summer now and I feel like sunflowers just mark the change of the season so well. Next we have some dahlias. These few that I have in this section were tubers that I dug up from last year from plants that I grew from seed. So I do recognize a lot of these flowers. They're the same ones that I grew last year. I have a lot of different kinds of colors and shapes. They are so fun. I really like single-layered dahlias. I know that those huge, fluffy, decorative dahlias are really popular and I think those are really pretty too but I still think the single ones are very pretty. And I love how they come in all different kinds of colors. In the next section I have a bunch of gladiolas that are starting to open up. Just a whole mix of colors and I just love how long those spikes are. Honestly they're a little difficult to work into bouquets just because they are so large. You have to have like a nice hefty vase to be able to hold such a large spike of flowers but I do also just think they're really pretty in the garden. I really like this more orangey color here. Then I have a bunch more that are going to bloom later. I've got another section of dahlias that haven't started opening yet. These are ones that I started from seed this year so they're just a little bit behind the ones that I planted from tubers. Then I have some bupleurum which is all flowering now. You can see those pretty bright yellow flowers. On camera it looks kind of like chartreuse but it's a little bit more like of a mellow yellow in real life. They're really pretty. I love the leaves and the structure of these plants. And then my foxgloves are pretty much all done at this point. You can see just a few straggler flowers but mostly they are developing their seed pods right now and I'm leaving these here because I want them to re-sow themselves because I love these so much. Next we have some hyssop here that has just started blooming and I can't believe how tall this plant is. I did not know that it got this tall. It's pretty majestic. Those flowers are so pretty. They kind of look like bee balm to me but they're more like elongated than a circle and as you can tell the bees love them. Absolutely beautiful. It's also an edible plant. You can use it for tea. So so pretty. I have a feeling I'm going to be cutting a lot of the seeds as fillers because it's just such a pretty purple color. They look so fluffy too. In this last section I pulled out all of my poppies. I harvested all of the seed pods so that I could harvest the poppy seeds to use for baking and in their place I've put in some straw flower seedlings and I only just did that last week so they're still kind of small right now. I'm on the other side of the garden and this whole big area in the back here is basically all yarrow and I absolutely love it. You can tell I can't even walk in my pathway anymore back here because it's kind of just taken over but in the back here I have these gorgeous gorgeous pastel yarrow colors. I absolutely love them. There's a few really bright ones and I've been picking those and hanging them upside down to dry because those keep their color the nicest when they're really bright. I just love these pastel shades. They are so pretty. These are from a Colorado mix of yarrow and all of these plants came back from last year so that's pretty great because this is a huge patch of my flower garden that I didn't have to do anything to this year which is really great. So so pretty. I absolutely love these and these are another one where I know it's usually used as a filler flower but I'll just pick a whole bunch of these in all the different shades and I'll just stick them in a vase and they're so pretty all on their own. So again these are kind of all flattened because we had that big rain yesterday but hopefully these will kind of come back up in a few days and I have a big patch back here of a bunch of white yarrow mostly and those ones are really pretty as well and very useful because white goes with everything. In the next section we have a whole bunch of snapdragons that have just started opening up which I'm so excited about. I believe these are all from a rocket mix of snapdragons because I did try and grow other varieties but I think they died or something happened I don't remember but this mix has a whole bunch of colors so that's fine by me I think just this one mix will be perfect. Lots of pinks and whites and then some yellows as well. I really like this one it kind of reminds me of like a sunset because it has like the pink and the orange and yellow. It's really pretty. Next I have a patch of silene which was blooming so much a couple of weeks ago now it has kind of died and I'm going to leave this here for now because I can't remember if it blooms again later in the season but also these perennialized for me from last year so I don't really want to like pull the plants out because I do want them to come back next year as well so for now I'm just going to leave that as is. And then I have a few Nekotiana plants that have bloomed and they are just the most interesting flowers they're just like these really long droopy tubular flowers and you can see I have them in a white color really really interesting and I'm curious to see if these plants will have more stems because I've never grown these before and I thought they would be taller we do have some in our vegetable garden that are a little bit taller than this but yeah really fun and interesting flowers. Then I have a patch of Larkspur that I direct seeded in very early spring and I'm kind of disappointed because they still for the most part have not opened up they are very early on in their growth stage you can see that there are buds on there but these plants are also just so tiny so I wouldn't really consider this a win this year you can see this one is kind of starting to open but it's pretty much the only one I was really hoping for like a really full stand of Larkspur with those flowers on those spikes that would be like really gracefully swaying in the wind and that's just not really what I got this year. Next the mystery plant that I guess I correctly identified from last time this is Bells of Ireland and you can see it's formed I don't know if these are flowers technically but you can see they have these little like bell shapes on the stalk and I was really intrigued when I first planted these seeds which was two years ago and they only just came up this year but on the packet it says they smell like green apple and I thought that was really interesting and they really do it is the coolest thing very beautiful unique and fragrant so I just have a small patch of those but I'm happy to have them and I'm happy that some of them actually grew because this is my first time successfully growing them and it's just really cool to see them in person because I've never seen a flower like this before. I kind of have like a whole bunch of things in this section because I direct seeded some stuff and it was a little bit patchy so I have filled in some spaces so I have some Dara that hasn't flowered yet and then in a lot of those empty spaces I didn't want to waste that space so I plugged in some celosia seedlings and then I also have more bupleurum that I direct seeded in the spring that's a little bit farther behind the ones in the back of my garden. Next I have this beautiful group of galardia which has been blooming so much and this bright red color you can see from so far away so it's a really cheery little bush of flowers. The flowers are so pretty and after the petals fall off these are really interesting too I think that these little like pom pom balls would be fun to have in an arrangement they're kind of like fluffy and soft it's pretty interesting. Next we have some asters which are still just trucking along and no flowers yet we will see how they do. Then we have our strawberry fields gomphrena which still looks pretty small at the moment I am patiently waiting for it to branch out and really fill out this space. You can see that they're kind of starting to branch out they're a little bit bigger than they were last month but not a ton of blooms on them yet. And then lastly we have our basils I have lemon basil and Thai basil starting to get a little bit bigger now you can see that there are some flower stalks but I'm probably not even going to use these until the plants get a lot bigger just because the stems aren't super long yet. So that is it for June's cut flower garden tour I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see you again in the next one.