Cut Flowers
Grow your own bouquets: these guides cover flowers that earn a place in the vase — long stems, long vase life, and ideally cut-and-come-again production where every harvest triggers more blooms. Zinnias, cosmos, sweet peas, snapdragons, sunflowers and dahlias lead the home cutting garden, and our guides include the harvest details florists know: cut in the cool of morning, at the right bloom stage (varies by flower — we tell you), straight into water. A two-metre cutting patch keeps a house in flowers from June to frost, for the cost of three supermarket bouquets.
Strip every leaf that would sit below the waterline before the stems go in the vase. Submerged foliage rots within a day and is the single most common reason a home-grown bunch dies faster than a shop-bought one.
