Blog - Green and Gorgeous, Seasonal British Flowers

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

Handy Harvester

By greenandgorgeous on July 29, 2013 in Blog, conditioning

Harvesting flowers is one of the most
important parts of the whole growing process. Cutting for quality,
colour scheme, an eye to continuity and the customer’s needs are all
constantly being juggled in the picker’s brain, alongside the
quantity of stems required. That’s why I try my hardest not to get
too involved myself…

As we have grown, the flowers have got further and further away! It is certainly not always practical to pick into water and so armfuls of flowers are often carried back, especially tall stems. Dreams of expensive quad bikes, utility vehicles and Piaggio ‘cafe’ style scooter trucks have remained just extravagant whimsy. We do manage with a ride-on and trailer but it’s often doing other duties.

IMG_1428 web In your dreams…..

And so, Arjen came to the rescue with
his plans for a harvesting trolley in his flower handbook. In the end
I didn’t fancy his two small-wheeled version, although the narrow
profile is necessary to squeeze along picking paths (that never seem
big enough!). And so I cannibalized an old wheelbarrow that was
falling apart in the winter, to save me some time and to make the
trolley more manoeuvrable.

Add a few old bits of greenhouse, some windbreak netting and we have a very light trolley, ready for piles and piles of stems. Still a work in progress though I
admit…..