The Cut Flower Handbook

The bouquet-growing bible gardeners have been waiting for! Learn the ins and outs of growing gorgeous blooms at home with professional flower farmer Lisa Mason Ziegler of @gardenersworkshopfarm. Whether you're cultivating fresh-cut bouquets for yourself, family, and friends or for others on a small commercial scale, you'll go from sowing seeds to cutting armloads of colorful, long-lasting blooms with ease. Lisa's unique approach and easy-to-follow advice on multi-season planting and harvesting uses the natural warm and cool weather cycles present in almost all growing regions to maximize cut flower production. This logical and nature-driven method is also a signature hallmark of her super-successful online flower-farming courses, and it's one that translates equally well to both small urban backyards and large rural flower farms. Growing your own cut flowers means you can avoid bouquets laden with pesticides (who wants that on their wedding day?) and you can skip the trips to your local flower shop or grocery store to pay big bucks for a bouquet that has racked up more airline miles than you could ever hope to. Included in this essential cut flower growing handbook are:

• 50 extensive flower profiles divided into their preferred season of growth. Cool-weather favorites include poppies, snapdragons, and bells of Ireland. Warm-season beauties include zinnias, sunflowers, and celosia.
• Planting tips for a succession of blooms that carry over from one growing season to the next without any additional work from you.
• Illustrations showing how to pinch plants for more blooms, how to make your cuts, how to erect support netting to keep your flowers straight and upright, how to dig a planting bed, and more.
• Over 200 photographs of the best cut flowers for home gardeners to grow, the most effective methods for their care, and the most productive ways to organize them in the garden.
• Advice on caring for a cutting garden, locating the best planting site, starting plants from seed, making the harvest, prolonging the life of your cut flowers, and so much more! The Cut Flower Handbook is the perfect balance of inspiration and education for anyone interested in bringing more beauty into their lives by growing cut flowers at home.

Auteur

Lisa Mason Ziegler is an accomplished speaker and the owner of the Gardener's Workshop, a thriving small cut-flower market farm. She began her career selling cut flowers to local florists and Colonial Williamsburg, a business that soon grew to include florists, supermarkets, farmer's markets, a garden-share program, and a subscription service and later expanded into selling the tools, supplies, and seeds that she uses in her own garden. At the same time, Lisa has steadily built a speaking career leading presentations and workshops for garden clubs, master gardeners, commercial growers, and other groups centering on her simplified organic gardening methods. She is the author of Cool Flowers, Vegetables Love Flowers, and The Cut Flower Handbook.