Wedding Flowers: Planning and Seeding

It's time to get into the really nitty gritty! I'm about to seriously brain dump on you, so please fasten your seat belt. 

The first step in planning your wedding flowers starts months before in advance. Most plants need to be started sometime before the last frost date if you want to get timely blooms. If you want them to flower before their normal time, you'll need a greenhouse or cold frame to start them, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. 

Let's backpedal to step 1:You need to choose what you want, how many you'll need, order seeds, and figure out exactly when you need to start seeds. 

This is a great project for those rainy winter months. You get to dream of the big day, the colors you want to work with, and just get everything planned out (because you're not going to have ANY time once things really get rolling - January is the time to do this). 

You will want to choose flowers that are specific to cut flowers. These tend to be taller, sturdier, and longer lasting than their garden counterparts. 

Some seed sources include, but are definitely not limited to:

Johnny's

Floret Farm

Territorial

Renee's

Botanical Interests 

*Note* Do not go to the nursery or the store and just buy whatever annuals they have in six-packs. These will not be satisfactory for arranging at all. 

When choosing what to grow make sure that you include the following:

- feature flowers (this would be your roses, peonies, dahlias, etc.)

- 2nd fiddle or background support (bachelor buttons, zinnias, calendula, carnations, cosmos)

- spires or spikes (lavender, stock, celosia, butterfly bush)  

- spillers (amaranth, dusty miller, etc.)

- fillers (baby's breath, corn cockle, saponaria, ammi majus)

- whispies (grasses and seed heads)

- greens (bupleurum, bells of ireland, basil, scented geranium, oregano, lemon balm, grape vines, you name it!)

Now, understand that these are generalizations. You most definitely can have something that usually plays a supporting role be the main feature of your arrangement if you want. Also keep in mind that some things can play multiple roles in your arrangement. It just depends on how you use it and what it looks like. 

It can be EXTREMELY tempting to buy ALL the seeds because this is a very exciting part of the process. Keep in mind, though, how much space you have. If you only have a small plot, maybe you only grow one kind of flower for your wedding. Because I live on 6 acres, I was able to go all out. Remember, the larger the scale, the more work you sign yourself up for. 

Knowing exactly how many you need is kind of a guessing game because you don't really know what will cooperate with you and what won't. My advice would be to grow more than you think you need. Just to give you an idea of how many flowers I used for 25 table centerpieces, 6 bridesmaid bouquets, 1 bridal bouquet, 9 boutonnieres, 4-6 arrangements for buffet and drink tables, and using flowers wherever else I felt like (this doesn't include what's still in the field):

- 4 buckets of 80-100 stems that I grew or cut from shrubs around the house

- 5 buckets of 80-100 stems from a local flower farm

- 2 buckets of daisies, lavender, and hydrangea from my grandma's garden

This gave me a lot of creative space and allowed me to use nice blooms without settling on sad-looking ones. 

Now we get to the brain-wracking part. Figuring out when to start seeding all this craziness. Look at the date you've selected (I'm going to use July 7 as an example since that is what I was working with). Make yourself an excel spreadsheet because things are going to get messy here and my excel skills are embarrassing, so please bear with me. Because I'm a plant nerd, I have scientific names in there as well. :P 

Disregard the sowing and germination columns (those are for my own personal curiosity); the important part here is the plant name, days to maturity, and when to plant. You need to know when you want the flowers, count back 1 week, then add on the days to maturity (DtM). The DtM lets you know approximately how long it takes for that particular plant to come into its own. To give yourself wiggle room, add the extra week. Because I have to have flowers on July 7, I planned on having blooms a week before, then started counting backwards to find when I needed to seed. The times that I have on here are the latest possible points that I would want to get those seeds going. Even with all this counting, weather is going to be a huge influence on the growth rate of your plants. My stock were ready 2 weeks before the wedding, but that was just in time for the bridal shower. The carnations were just in the early stages of bud break the day before the wedding, so we couldn't use any of them for their intended purpose. C'est la vie. It's how things go. That is exactly why I planted so many different kinds of flowers. 

Also, because the wedding was in early July, I had to start everything from seed in the greenhouse to make sure that things were blooming when I wanted to. You don't want to seed directly into the ground unless the soil temps are around 80 which doesn't happen until May-ish in the Willamette Valley. You get to have some wiggle room when you have access to a greenhouse. Granted, a greenhouse is not without its problems. I had to deal with extreme temperature swings that either roasted tender starts or brought on damping off, and we had fungus gnats that liked to raise their root chomping brood in the potting soil. 

So, I printed out my spreadsheets and whipped out the highlighter because I'm extremely visual. I color coded the different times that I needed to start things (red = February, orange = March, pink = April, etc) so that I could quickly glance and know what needed seeding and when. Filled up flats with potting soil, made labels, and started seeding. I just make tiny trenches with a stick and seed inside that line. Mist the potting media, protect with a plastic cover and some shade, and then wait. Note: some things germinate much faster than others. Be patient. 

Your seedlings have multiple stages; the ones we want to focus on are the first obvious to the naked eye: cotyledon and first true leaves. The cotyledons are the leaves that were developing inside the seed to be the food source until the plant gets enough energy to create the first true leaves. These basically look like tiny versions of the mature size. You want to prick out the seedlings at this stage; if they get bigger than that, the transplanting process will be too stressful on the plant. I simply use a chopstick to gently dig around the babies to get them loosened from their media, and then, using the chopstick, poke a hole in a filled 6-pack to gently put the baby root into.

And you just keep doing that until you've pricked out all the baby plants. This gives them room to grow and develop without stunting them, over crowding them, or making them compete for nutrients. Eventually, you look like you have an addiction.

As the plants grow, you need to check to make sure that they aren't getting root bound. This WILL stunt your plants and stress them causing them to be much shorter than desired. What you're looking for is how much root to potting soil there is, you don't want the segment to be solid roots, poor plant. Before letting them get to that stage, you need to up-pot them into 4" pots. Guess how I spent my afternoons and evenings in April. ;)

Give your babies a chance to acclimate to their roomier pots, and then start to transition them outside; this is called hardening off. You don't want to shock the babies with the harshness of the outdoors since they're used to the comfortable greenhouse space. Start them off in the shade, then I just leave them there until I put them in the ground. Not the most ideal, but they survive. 

Next up will be all about the flower field!

Until next time! 

SG

So You Want to Grow Your Own Wedding Flowers?

Let me just tell you - it's not the easiest of feats. 

I wish I could just say that it was as easy as throwing some seed out and plunking starts in the ground. There is a lot of planning and work involved in order to pull it off on any scale. 

My sister's wedding was yesterday which is now leaving me breathing space to think and process everything after frantic pace and increasing pressure that has been building since the engagement was announced.  I'm exhausted and sore, but I want to get these thoughts down while it's fresh in my mind (and I really don't want to do much of anything at the moment, so there's that too). 

I ACTUALLY DID IT!!! 

So without anymore ado: 

"Observations and considerations from surviving the wedding flowers process 

or

Things I wish I knew before jumping into this thing"

(I was going to make that the title of the post, but that seemed too long)

1. Have some gardening/farming know-how and understand garden planning

Even if you just have a little bit of an idea of what you're signing up for is a huge help. ;) I'll do some how-to posts of what we did to maximize our chances of success in other posts. 

As for the planning side of things - it's hard to plan to have flowers for a specific day. It's easy to plunk plants in the ground and harvest when they're ready. It's another matter entirely to have requirements for a certain day. To do this requires much planning and forethought and spreadsheets. 

My recommendation? Know when local flowers are typically ready. Then plan your special day during the peak flower periods. You have the spring flush, mid-summer bounties, and early fall bloomers. Early July is the wonderful lull in flower times. You've missed the flowers of May/June, but the July/August bloomers haven't quite come into their own. Just another thing to consider for your big day.

2. Understand the costs

Seeds, potting soil, pots, growing space, site prep, fertilizer, irrigation, netting, TIME. 

Your time is money. Remember that. 

3. Have a back-up plan

I had several because I was scared that nothing would work - put more plants in the ground than you think you need, plant more varieties and species than you want or think you'll need, and know a cut flower source (be it Costco, a local farm, florist, or grocery store) just in case you need more flowers. Because I was so busy with other parts of the wedding, I missed the deadline to order flowers from Costco (2 weeks before pick up). It ended up being perfectly fine because I was able to get bulk flowers from a farm located an hour from the venue on a short notice for a much better price than Costco. :fist pump: 

4. Take some flower arranging classes

The more you know, the more you know, right? Then take what you learn and keep practicing! Give your neighbors bouquets, maybe your goat will appreciate a flower crown, fresh flowers on the kitchen window sill is always a bonus. 

Honestly though, I was looking up Youtube tutorials on how to arrange boutonnieres the morning I was going to do all the arrangements because I had never done those before. :face palm:

5. Be extremely flexible with the final product

Know the general look and colors that you're going for, but be okay if they aren't EXACTLY like those gorgeous pictures you adore on Instagram or Pinterest. The flowers coming in from your flower patch will not, I repeat, not be perfect. There will be bugs, discoloring, blooms with their own opinion on which way is up, and more. If you're one with perfectionist tendencies, growing your own might not be right for your big day. 

Also, be flexible with the flowers and the length of flowers that come in. You don't know exactly when the plants are going to bloom. Those seed packets have a general range of when to expect flowers. There are a lot of factors that go into getting a plant to bloom: start day, day length, pest pressures, accumulated heat units, water accessibility, fertilizing schedule, etc, etc, etc... 

6. The flowers might be more fragile

By growing you're own, you get the opportunity to play with flowers that you might not ever see at a grocery store because some flowers just don't ship well or last that long in the vase after going through the process of getting hacked off a plant in South America, stripped of its leaves, put into a box, and shipped across continents. 

So. All that said, understand that you will need to be careful with the flowers coming in from your patch. Keep them in water, use floral preservatives, storing them in a refrigerator would be ideal after you've made the arrangements, etc. 

7. Know how much time you need to dedicate to this

This was a huge thing for me. I spent most my April afternoons up-potting seedlings into 4" pots, and then in May, my brother and I spent most afternoons prepping the site and transplanting all those babies. Once that was done, we both had a huge sigh of relief. Come the preparations for the big day, you will need to be slowly harvesting to not damage the blooms, give them time to condition, etc. I spent the ENTIRE day before the wedding just arranging flowers. All. Day. Long.

8. Never stop learning

There are so many resources out there for slow flowers, local flowers, growing cut flowers, and arranging your own masterpieces! Hit up Instagram to find designers and growers, pour over books, scour websites for hints, tips, tricks, tutorials, and how they do things! Why try to reinvent the wheel when there is so much information at your fingertips? Here's a few of my favorites

https://www.floretflowers.com/

Floret Farm's Cut Flower Book

The Cut Flower Patch by Louise Curley

Debra Prinzing books  

And this is just the tip of the ice burg.  

And that's it for now! Like I said, I'll be posting more of the nitty-gritty how-to's to give you a better understanding of what you're considering jumping into. 

Apparently this smirk is exactly like my great-grandma's

Yes, I did catch the bride's bouquet. 

I had people ask me if I had planned that with my sister; no, I didn't. I just know how she throws. :P

I also had someone ask me if I had homing flowers. 

Nope. If I knew how to do that, I would be making big bucks selling these flowers to all the brides wanting to set up their single friends.

Until next time!

SG