Improving Your Garden with Cut Flowers

Do you want some vibrant, eye-appealing crops in your vegetable garden? Interplanting flowers in your vegetable garden will leave you astonished by how it can attract more pollinators and beneficial insects, which will subsequently improve your garden production. When thinking of planting during the summer months, interplanting cut flowers are a great choice because they can survive the summer heat much better than most vegetable crops.

Cut Flower Varieties

All of the cut flower varieties we carry can be direct-seeded or transplanted. We prefer to grow most of them from transplants because it makes it a little easier and it conserves seed. The great thing about growing cut flowers in the summer season is that they absolutely love the heat and do not have hardly any insect issues. All of our cut flower varieties have really nice long stems which makes them very appealing to the eye. A purple colored flower variety such as Ageratum Blue Horizon is a great pelleted seed that grows in these beautiful purple clusters. A brightly colored Cosmos mix called Versailles is great for attracting pollinators such as butterflies, birds, and bees. An older variety of Celosia, which you may remember as a child, is Chief Mix, also known as Cockscomb. The ProCut line of sunflowers is popular in the garden providing very manageable flower height. Another great thing about the ProCut Sunflowers is that they are pollenless. So when you harvest them and place them in a vase, they will not drip pollen and leave a mess. Our ProCut Sunflower selection includes colors like red, lemon, orange, plum, and white nite.

Show and Tell Segment

On the show and tell segment, Travis brought a head of Skyphos Lettuce and shows how to make a healthy little snack using his lettuce and chicken salad. Greg calls it the Chicken Salad Lettuce Taco. The guys talk about a new variety of lettuce called Starfighter Lettuce, which is a pelleted seed that they have transplanted in a 162 cell seed starting tray. This Starfighter lettuce is ready to go in the ground and will get planted later in the week. Greg shows some of his Banana Shallots and was a little concerned on how well they were doing because he was late planting them. The ones he has pulled thus far were a little bit on the spicy side, but he thinks the taste is subject to change if he waits longer to harvest them.

Viewer Questions Segment

On the question and answer segment, the guys answer questions about side dressing potatoes and they discuss whitefly problems. Travis explains that his preferred way of side dressing is using chicken manure compost. If you do not have access to quality manure compost, you can use some granular fertilizer such as 10-10-10. According to Greg, whiteflies can be tough to manage in some years. If it is a wet year and we receive plenty of rain, the whiteflies are really no issue at all. If it is drier year, the whiteflies are much more of a problem. Whiteflies can be tough because they are nearly impossible to control when they come into your garden. Greg does note that he's had success using an insect growth-regulator called Knack, but that it can be hard to find.

Products Mentioned in the Show

Cut Flower Seeds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7P75afcTi8