Spacing Between Plants in Your Cut Flower Garden

As we continue in our Garden Planning for Success series, today we’re talking about spacing between plants in a growing area.

Within your flower beds, spacing for your plants varies, but keep in mind that you can usually crowd cut flowers a bit more than you’d expect. It often helps them grow taller, too, since you’re giving them no option other than to grow up. Be careful however: if you tighten up your plant spacing, don’t also crowd your rows. Your plants need plenty of air circulation to avoid being overwhelmed by powdery mildew and other diseases. (We use 4’ aisles for annuals, 6’ aisles for dahlias.)

I mentioned yesterday that anemone, sunflowers, and dahlias are great starter focals. 

We plant anemone corms in deep bulb crates (20 per crate) in February for blooms in June.

A good rule of thumb for sunflowers is that their heads will be the same size as the distance between the seeds you plant. Sunflowers are allelopathic. They prevent many other plants (including each other!) from taking up nitrogen, so planting them closely is a great tool for limiting head size. It’s really hard to use huge, glorious sunflowers in bouquets anyway, so we plant our seeds four to five inches apart in all directions to get heads that are that same, useful size.

We grow our dahlias 12 inches apart in a double row for healthiest growth. They could be nine inches apart if you were not too worried about keeping your Dahlia tubers distinctly separated and identifiable in the fall. We are very concerned with that, so we plant a bit wider. 

We plant almost all our annual disc filler flowers (cosmos, zinnia, marigold, calendula) as well as celosia spicata/plumosa, and snapdragons at about 8”x9”, and we pinch all these flowers when they’re about 8”-12” tall. 

Many filler “spike” or “line” flowers can be grown super close. We space tulips at one inch, gladiolas at two inches, and stock matthiola at four inches in every direction.

Next time, we’ll dig into harmonizing all the aspects of our Planning for Success series. Happy weekend, friends!

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