Cutting Garden Books
A selection of books about growing flowers for the flower market or home grower.
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A Garden for Cutting:
Gardening for Flower Arrangements
The beautiful photographs will attract you to this book but the content will keep you coming back. This is practical advice about harvesting and growing plants for the vase. From grasses to delphiniums and everything in between.
Cutting Gardens
A very practical guide to cutting gardens. From growing them to cutting and conditioning them for the vase. With photography by Derek Fell the photographs are superb.
The Cutting Garden
Few things are more beautiful than a bouquet of flowers, and growing and cutting your own adds immeasureably to the pleasure a bouquet brings. In this book, illustrated with 50 inspiring color photographs, the gardener's cut-flower season extends from late winter, with shrubs and trees to force indoors, through the spring and summer flowers -- bulbs, annuals, perennials -- the "everlastings" you can grow for winter's dried flower bouquets. Especially valuable are the sections on when and how to cut flowers, how to condition them, and suggestions on combining different flowers into carefree arrangements. The basic mechanics of flower arranging and photos of home-grown bouquets will encourage novice gardeners.
The Cutting Garden:
Growing and Arranging Garden Flowers
This book gives examples of the author's own beautiful cutting garden in Sussex, England as well as tips for laying out the garden for a full year of cutting not just the normal growing season. She also shows conditioning and arranging flowers along with cultivation of the various plants she recommends. Cutting garden for all seasons in England translates well to all seasons for us in the PNW.
The Flower Farmer -- Revised & Expanded Edition
An Organic Grower's Guide to Growing and Selling Cut Flowers
Book Description: Acre-for-acre, flowers are the most profitable-as well as the most beautiful—crop on the farm. In The Flower Farmer expert flower grower Lynn Byczynski provides a complete introduction to raising a cornucopia of cut flowers for home use and for sale to retail customers, florists, and other markets.
The book offers detailed, manageable plans for flower growing on a scale ranging from a backyard border to a half-acre commercial garden. It will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers, including:
- Home gardeners who want growing tips from professionals, so that they can enjoy an abundance of flowers year-round in fresh and dried bouquets;
- Passionate gardeners and small-scale growers who want to raise and sell cut flowers in season for additional income;
- Small commercial farmers who want to increase farm revenue or even make a living from selling field-grown, specialty cut flowers.
The Flower Farmer provides a clear, realistic look at both the benefits and the challenges of growing flowers organically for local markets. Chapters include information on:
- The best varieties of cut flowers—an A-Z list of more than one hundred recommended annuals and perennials, spotlighting the cultivars that are grown by professional flower farmers
- How to cut, store, and preserve flowers for long-lasting beauty
- How to dry flowers for crafting or for a dried-flower business
- Flower-arranging basics from a designer's perspective
- Extending the season with woody shrubs and trees
- Marketing options for commercial growers, including sales at farmer's markets, supermarkets, florists, and wholesalers.
Sprinkled throughout are profiles of successful flower farmers—from Vermont to California, Texas to Wisconsin—each of them providing a unique perspective proving that growing flowers can be as profitable as it is satisfying.
The domestic cut flower business has experienced a renaissance in the past decade, thanks in large part to the first edition of The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower’s Guide to Raising and Selling Cut Flowers, which helped thousands of small growers start successful businesses. This newly expanded and thoroughly revised edition will be equally as influential for novices and experienced growers alike.With the cut flower business growing at record rates, demand is at all time highs, challenging growers to take advantage of new techniques to prolong the harvest. New sections on utilizing greenhouses, recommendations for flower cultivars, and post harvest handling growers throughout all of North America will help improve their bottomline. Also updated is the acclaimed resource directory, complete with sources of seeds, plants and supplies, and expert information on organic production under the National Organic Program.
For the beginner and backyard gardener, there is an extensive section on the basics—variety selection, soil preparation, planting, cultivation, harvest, and floral design. For the commercial grower, The Flower Farmer includes information about larger-scale production, plus advice about selling to florists, wholesalers, supermarkets, brides, at farmers markets, and more. Also includes revised profiles of successful growers offering behind-the-scenes insight into the operation of some of the cutting edge flower farmers in the country.
Because of the extensive revisions and enhanced content, this new edition of The Flower Farmer is essential reading for those already in the flower business, as well as those who dream of growing flowers for enjoyment or profit.
About the Author: Lynn Byczynski is publisher and editor of a monthly news letter Growing for Market. She also operates Wild Onion Farm in Lawrence, Kansas, where she resides with her husband and two children. For more information, please visit the website of Growing for Market www.growingformarket.com
Flowers for Sale:
Growing and Marketing Cut Flowers: Backyard to Small Acreage
Whether you are growing cut flowers for your own home or selling cut flowers this book will give you many guidelines for growing your own cut flowers.
Garden to Vase:
Growing and Using Your Own Cut Flowers
Book Description: As an accomplished gardener and professional florist, Linda Beutler offers unique insights into creating inspired floral arrangements and growing the plants that go into them. Among the topics that Beutler discusses are the philosophy of floral design; making creative use of plants you're already growing; techniques of harvesting and preparing cut flowers; "bouquet basics"; and creating arrangements for special occasions. The book culminates in "Plants for the Cutting Garden: Flowers, Foliage, and Fruit," which contains detailed descriptions of more than 200 outstanding plants. Adding greatly to the book's appeal and usefulness are Allan Mandell's breathtaking photographs of flowers in every stage from the garden to finished arrangement.
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