How Much Space Do You Need For A Cutting Garden
Musings
Using Close Spacing to Maximize Your Cutting Garden
Written by True Bloom Farm
Let's talk about plant spacing! Spacing is a really important piece of the puzzle when it comes to growing healthy, tall, abundant blooms in your cutting garden.
Information on recommended spacing is readily available on seed packets and supplier websites. Often that spacing is great for landscape gardens but less than optimal for cut flowers. I once read that the proper spacing for perennials depends on if you plan to prune them or not. If you intend for them to be a focal point in your garden, you should give them plenty of room to spread out. On the contrary, if it's a hedge you're trying to create, and plan to prune the plants every year, you should cut the recommended spacing in half. Aren't we essentially "pruning" our cut flower plants each week when we harvest their stems? So couldn't we also cut back on the recommended spacing?
Recommended peony spacing is often 2-4'. Here on our farm we plant at a tight spacing of 12" because plants will get "pruned" (stems harvested).
Peony "Coral Charm"
It takes time, possibly multiple seasons, to observe the growing habits of certain flowers to determine the spacing that works best for them. For instance, say you have a tray of "Dalmatian" foxgloves ready to go into the cutting garden. This is a hybrid variety that blooms the first year from seed and many growers will only ever grow it as an annual. Most foxglove varieties, however, are biennials, meaning they spend the first year of their lives growing foliage and absolutely no flowers. They have ample time to grow and therefore get quite big so they are often planted 12" apart. Because of this, you're packet will most likely recommend 12" spacing. You plant them 12" apart but notice as they mature and begin to flower, you can still see a lot of empty space between the plants and you're constantly battling weeds. Here's why! Empty space between plants= bare soil= optimal growing conditions for weeds. Where there is soil, sun and water, there are weeds! On top of spending extra time weeding, you now have to look at all of that empty space in the bed where there could be MORE flowers. If you had planted them at say 6" spacing, they would have eventually filled in and created a glorious canopy over the bed, thus creating a not so optimal place for weeds to grow. Canopy= more shade= less weeds. Also, you'll conserve more water this way. The canopy will help to protect the top layer of the soil by keeping it moist longer, thereby cutting down on watering each week.
Often these hybrid foxglove varieties will overwinter and begin blooming again in the spring. By that point, they could very well be twice as big as they were the year before. Something we're experimenting with this season is planting our foxgloves 6" apart, leaving them to overwinter, and thinning them out as we need to in the spring. Second year spring blooming plants always produce more stems per plant. So, even after thinning plants out, we're likely to be harvesting around the same amount stems per bed. With this method, we'll be able to maximize our blooms both this summer and next spring.
Annual foxgloves planted too far apart. Notice the bare soil in between the plants. We battled weeds constantly in this bed last season!
Zinnias creating a canopy to shade out the weeds. We only needed to weed these beds once all season.
Significantly decreasing weed pressure is not the only great thing about closer spacing! As I mentioned, closer spacing allows you to fit more plants into a single bed. More bang for your buck as they say! This is especially important if you don't have a ton of space to grow in. You'd be shocked by how many flowers you can fit into one 3x50' bed! Take ranunculus for example. Here on our farm we plant ranunculus 6" apart in both directions. So that's 6" between plants and 6" between rows, giving us 6 rows per bed. This close spacing allows us to squeeze 800 plants into one bed. 800 plants! "Real estate" on small farms is extremely valuable, so it's important to make the most of the space you're working with. On our flower farm, only 17,000 square feet of our 3 acre property is currently in production. That's just under half an acre. We're able to grow roughly 33,000 plants at a time largely because of close spacing.
With a dense planting of ranunculus we're able to squeeze roughly 800 plants into one 3x50' bed!
Stem length is often an important factor when it comes to cut flowers. If you're selling to florists they'll likely expect tall stems. Even if you're just selling flowers at your local farmers market, making bouquets will be significantly easier if you have tall stems to work with. For a lot of flower varieties, the closer the plants the taller the stems. This is particularly true for "spike" flowers such as snapdragons. Here are my theories on this subject (please note these are just theories!): Number one. All plants need sunlight, right? If they have to, they'll stretch and stretch until they find it. By planting at a closer spacing, you're decreasing the amount of sunlight that hits each plant therefore forcing them to stretch more and grow taller. Number two. It's a known fact that wind impacts the length of a flower stem. This is why almost all flowers grow taller and stronger undercover in a greenhouse or low tunnel. If plants have to battle wind day after day, they're unlikely to grow to their full potential, in terms of stem length. When flowers are planted closely together, it's almost as though they form a solid mass and it's difficult to spot an individual plant among them all. I fondly think of this as "the flower support system." Maybe they're thinking, "if one goes down, we all go down." It's highly likely that the weaker stems will go down first in the event of a wind spell. In order to support one another, they form a kind of solid mass because they know they'll be stronger together, and it's unlikely that the wind will take them all down at once (although it's still possible!). This solid mass acts as an exterior shield against the wind. Inside the shield, the stems are able to grow stronger and taller.
Ageratum stems stretch to produce taller stems when planted densely
Rudbeckia "flower support system."
Spacing can sometimes determine the size of a flower. This is especially true for single stem sunflowers and amaranth. If you're familiar with single stem sunflowers such as the "Procut Series" then you probably know they can be planted very closely. It seems sort of crazy to space such a large flower just 6" apart. If you've grown these before you've probably noticed that the plants produce the most perfectly sized flower heads at this close spacing. If you would have planted this single stem variety say 12" apart the flower heads would have been massive and made a less than ideal cut flower. I often hear from vegetable farmers at the farmers market, "I've never seen a sunflower so small, mine are four times that size." Well, size doesn't always matter! Imagine trying to fit a foot long sunflower head into a bouquet. It would be pure madness!
"Procut" sunflowers spaced 6" apart produce the most perfectly sized blooms for bouquets and design work.
With closer spacing, it's better to think about the number of plants you'll want vs the amount of space a certain plant will occupy when you're planning your flower rows. For instance, you might think you want an entire 3x50' bed of stock but realize 4" spacing will yield 1,200 plants and that's just too many. Instead, first decide how many plants you'll want blooming at a certain time, say 300, then you can determine the space that those plants will occupy in a single bed- 300 plants= 12.5'= ¼ of a 50' bed. Now you have 37.5' of space left to plant other flower varieties. This is especially helpful when crop planning for a wedding or even making weekly bouquets. Instead of growing rows and rows of single varieties and hoping you'll have a sales outlet for them when they all begin to bloom, you can be more intentional and in turn more efficient by growing the proper amount of flowers for their intended use. If of course you plan to sell wholesale, then you might want to plant rows and rows of single varieties. It all depends on what you plan to do with those flowers. Here on the farm, we mostly provide flowers for small events and weekly bouquets so having small amounts of "this and that" works best for us.
A small section of stock for a spring wedding planted in the same bed as sweet peas.
There are a few things to keep in mind when experimenting with closer spacing. As I mentioned earlier, closer spaced plants create a canopy that helps shade out weeds. Underneath of this canopy you'll find a dark, warm, often wet environment with little airflow. Fungus thrives in this type of environment. Once fungus such as powdery mildew sets in, it can spread very quickly. Because of this, we are extremely careful not to plant powdery mildew prone flowers such as phlox too closely. I would recommend doing some research on which flowers are prone to fungus and diseases and space accordingly.
We're careful not to plant phlox too closely in order to provide it with adequate airflow.
To keep up with the weed pressure, we plant phlox into landscape fabric.
Some flowers benefit from having a little more room to grow, and that's quite alright! Ultimately, we have to give our babies what they need. However, some of these bushier plants are what I like to call "delicate growers." They may have wispy foliage at the base that lets a lot of sunlight onto the bare soil or they might just grow slowly and have a hard time competing with the weeds. Or in the case of orlaya, both! Orlaya is one of those flowers that dislikes root disturbance and will grow to it's full potential if direct seeded. In order to keep up with the weeds while this "delicate grower" gets going, we direct seed it into landscape fabric. We usually only need to weed the holes a couple times before the plants fill out and create a canopy. Alternatively, you could use compost or straw mulch. They'll help to keep the soil covered and breakdown overtime providing a tasty treat for all the beneficial soil dwellers.
Orlaya taking it's sweet time to grow. Notice all the visible landscape fabric below. That would be bare soil if it wasn't covered!
Plants finally begin to fill in and create a beautiful canopy.
Here's our recommended spacing! Please keep in mind this is just the spacing that works for us here on our farm. I encourage you to do some experiments of your own to find out what works best for you in your space. Who knows, you might be able to get away with even closer spacing! Also remember that there are a lot of factors that determine spacing including pinching, overwintering and intended use. The list below is for first year flowering plants and ones that will not be pinched.
4"- Anemones, Chinese Forget Me Nots, Larkspur, Lisianthus, Stock, Cress
6"- Agrostemma, Amaranth, Snapdragons, Celosia, Dara, Didiscus, Foxgloves, Euphorbia "Snow on the Mountain", annual Gypsophila, Gomphrena, single stem Sunflowers, Mignonette, Rudbeckia, Saponaria, Dianthus, Sweetpeas, Broomcorn, Iceland Poppies, Ranunculus
9"- Ageratum, Ammi, Bupleurum, Coreopsis, Cerinthe, Orlaya, Phlox, Scabiosa, Zinnias, Strawflower, small Dahlia varieties
12"- Cosmos, Eucalyptus, branching Sunflowers, Marigolds, Nicotiana, Statice, large Dahlia varieties
Farming is just one big experiment after the other as most of us know. We've been experimenting with closer spacer for a couple years now. I have to say, if we knew then what we know now our fields would have probably been a lot more productive and easier to maintain. I truly hope you've learned something valuable in this post that will help make your cutting garden a little more successful this season!
Thanks for reading!
XOXO Christine at True Bloom Farm
How Much Space Do You Need For A Cutting Garden
Source: https://www.truebloomfarm.com/musings/2021/1/28/using-close-spacing-to-maximize-your-cutting-garden
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