Jul
19
2008
I love having fresh flowers in vases scattered throughout the house, but many times it means hacking away all the flowers in my garden and not being able to enjoy them outside.
A good solution to this is a cutting garden. Many common varieties of flowers make excellent candidates for a cutting garden. Check out this list of 45 fantastic cut flowers at Organic Gardening. Simply plant extra of the flowers you wish to cut to avoid having bare spots when you do pick flowers, or separate the plants you have and place them into a separate garden designated as a cutting garden, and get cutting!
Jul
12
2008
I came across a packet of seeds for Cleome, or spider plant, when purchasing my seeds to plant veggies this year. Intrigued by the unusual flowers, I threw a few seeds into my greenhouse kit and waited to see what happened.
Here are the plants a few months later. As you can see they’ve grown big and bushy, and are thriving in the outdoor (and the recent heat).
It looks like soon there will be a big round of brightly colored flowers blooming. The flowers are a great attractant to butterflies and hummingbirds, and the plant is drought tolerant.
The plant is self seeding, grows three to five feet tall, and blossoms from early summer until frost.
Jul
02
2008
I love to put a new spin on a classic. So when I was planning my Fourth of July centerpiece, my mind wandered to all the flowers and plants growing in the flower beds around our house and in the garden. I was reluctant to simply pick a few flowers and put them in a vase - where was the creativity in that? - when I thought of something I had seen in a flower shop a while back. The florist had taken ordinary daisies and dyed the petals in pretty colors.
They’re super simple to make, and a fun project for both adults and kids. Simply pick some daisies and put them in a vase (a different vase for each color). Add fresh water to the vase, then a few drops of liquid food coloring in the desired color. Leave overnight, and by morning your daisies’ petals should have taken on the color of the dyes.
