Creating a raised bed cut flower garden 🌸
It’s been six months since our allotment lease came to an end and we moved our growing plot home. I have to say that I couldn’t have made a better decision and I’ve not regretted it once. It’s been hard work getting it to where it is today (and it’s still not finished!) but being able to wander outside at any time of day and potter round has been an absolute dream!
When we decided to move things back home, we just had an open lawn with no real structure to the garden and at first it seemed overwhelming, like where were we going to start, how did I know what to plant where. But thanks to them being moveable, we had brought all our raised beds back from the allotment and we decided we would have a completely raised or container based garden. As I mostly grow for cut flowers, it would mean I could still grow things separately but still keep it looking pretty as I wouldn’t need to use weed matting or have big rows of exposed soil which would mean my garden didn’t really look like a garden anymore.
Flash forward to today, and we’ve been through a couple of iterations of placing the beds but they are now in their final places and we’ve started filling them. The front two beds are going to be rose beds and my beautiful rusted arch is between them looking fabulous with an Ash Wednesday rose climbing up either side. I’m going to use four of the beds for my beloved dahlias, they are going to look spectacular raised off the ground, two for veggies and the rest for my other cut flowers I’ve got like snapdragons, scabious, statice and cosmos. With everything being at home, looking after all my seedlings has been so much easier and having the raised beds has made planting out so much more manageable as I can just do a bed at a time.
I obviously couldn’t grow all the sweet peas in a raised bed - not with the amount I’ve got this year! - so we lifted a section of turf and I’ve put my bean frame up there. I think it looks great and I can’t wait to see what 3m of double sides filled with sweet peas looks like in a few weeks. They do seem later this year, I was picking bunches of them at the start of June but it has been a strange season so far, very wet and the day temps are much lower than you would expect.
I am looking forward to coming back here in a couple of weeks and showing you photos of how beautiful everything is looking when it’s all blooming!
