Blog - Green and Gorgeous, Seasonal British Flowers

Sweet Pea Grow Along

By greenandgorgeous on January 15, 2014 in Sweet Peas

A new year and lots of new ideas, I love January – so much time and headspace to day dream about the next season. Fuelled by glossy seed catalogues and home-baked cakes my imagination goes into overdrive. Most of my ideas will be shelved for another year, but a few filter through into reality…

One of these is to offer more training for new flower growers and encourage people to grow cut flowers in their own gardens. The Great British Garden Revival reinforced my resolve so I thought I would start the new year with a ‘Sweet Pea Grow Along’.

What is a Grow Along?

It is just a way to guide you through growing a particular flower with regular blog posts and/or tweets. Anyone can join in, share their experience and results with others. If this one is a success I might choose a few more favourites to grow along with everyone.

If you want to take it to the next level, have a look at our Sweet Pea masterclass.

How it will work?

I have decided that Sweet Peas are an ideal flower to start with: everyone loves them, they do not need loads of space or high tech equipment. They are easy to grow but need a bit of extra skill and knowledge to grow to cut flower quality.

Each month I will post a blog entitled Sweet Pea Grow Along, it will include a photographic tutorial of what to do next and I will encourage comments and feedback from everyone taking part. If you want to be reminded of when to check the blog, join us on Twitter @GandGorgeous

What will you need?

Firstly some seeds. We are going to grow Spencer varieties, which have lovely long stems, big frilly flowers and of course lots of scent. They come in an array of colours, I will recommend my favourites for cutting.

Buying your sweet peas from a reputable supplier is highly recommended, so no garden centre packs!

I always use Owl Acre, they are sweet pea specialists and have a great range. I am a big fan of single colour packets so you have full control over your colour mix. They come in packs of 20 which is enough for one teepee/wigwam.

I have been trialling sweet peas for 12 years now and these varieties are my favourites for vigour, stem length, abundance of flower, vibrant colour and fragrance.

Limelight (creamy green)

Oban Bay (ice blue)

Gwendoline (rose pink)

Our Harry (mid blue)

Dark Passion (deep purple)

White Frills (pure white and very frilly)

Valerie Harrod (coral)

Anniversary (pink picotee)

Sir Jimmy Shand (lilac ripple)

Next you will need some good deep pots or rootrainers. Sweet peas like a long root run and have a mass of roots, that is why people sometimes use loo rolls. I favour rootrainers which you can buy quite widely now, at Haxnicks for example.

I use a good quality seed compost with added vermiculite.

The next blog will be about sowing, ground preparation and supports, which I plan to do next month.

Rachel Siegfried

Want to be a Flower Farmer?

By greenandgorgeous on December 30, 2013 in Cut flowers, Floristry Courses, Foxgloves, Peonies, roses

It is a question I asked myself seven years ago. I was hundred percent sure that the answer was Yes, but the next question led to a lot more uncertainty – how can I actually make a living growing cut flowers?

Over the years many people have attended the growing course I run with that question in mind. So I thought it was high time I came up with a day which is geared solely towards all those people on the brink of starting a cut flower business.

The weather has finally driven me inside so writing a new course is just the thing to keep me busy and thinking of flowers.

Flower Farming for Beginners will run on Sunday 16^th March here at Green and Gorgeous, there are only six places available so contact me if you would like more information about the day.

Whilst mulling over the content, I found these pictures taken by photographer Shannon Robinson last summer, which I think illustrate the words ‘flower farm’ beautifully.

Sweet Pea ‘Winter Sunshine’ varieties jostling for space in the polytunnel, the best choice for an early crop.

Delphinium ‘Pagan Purple’ a New Zealand hybrid, much stronger than their English counterparts.

An overwhelming amount of Peonies, we grow early and late varieties but the late Spring made them all come at once this year. Breathtakingly beautiful but also slightly painful!

My favourite outdoor Alstroemeria called ‘Friendship’, think beyond ‘garage forecourt’, these are far superior and so productive.

More New Zealand Delphiniums, the smokey lilac one is called ‘Sweethearts’, great for pedestals.

You have to have roses, well I do anyway, this one is ‘Just Joey’, huge coppery apricot blooms.

And finally, the striking Digitalis ‘Pam’s Choice’ – you can’t have too many foxgloves. I love the new summer flowering varieties so we can have foxgloves from June till August.

Rachel Siegfried

2013 Seed Collection

By greenandgorgeous on December 9, 2013 in Seeds, Television

2013 has been a vintage year for seed collecting! The weather conditions have been perfect for producing fat, ripe seeds. By the end of the summer I had an office full of paper sacks of seed heads, I could hardly get in the door, let alone wade my way through to the desk.

It has been all ‘fiddly fingers’ on deck over the past few weeks to help turn this chaos into our first seed collection – twelve packets of fresh seed reflecting some of our favourite 2013 cut flowers.

I have concentrated on easy, productive flowers that can all be direct sown if a greenhouse is not on offer. There are cottage garden favourites like Sunflowers and Sweet Williams,

wild meadow-style flowers like Ammi, Scabious and Cornflowers,

scent from Sweet Peas and Dill,

novelty from pink Gypsophila and Larkspur ‘Blue Cloud’

and lots of white and green from Corncockle, Bupleurum and the amazing Panicum ‘Frosted Explosion’.

Sowing and growing instructions are included on the back of each packet.

With Christmas just around the corner we have one last task – drying off the dahlias for storage. Here are what I call my ‘mother tubers’ (for propagation next Spring) drying off on a heat mat, which my heat seeking whippets are taking full advantage of!

Rachel Siegfried

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