How to Support Your Cut Flowers in the Garden to Prevent Ruined Blooms

Maybe you’ve been there…

Your cut flowers are at their peak production and looking AMAZING!!! The stems are tall and straight and you’re days away from harvesting buckets and buckets of blooms!

And then… a summer storm whips through with 50+ mph winds. In just 30 seconds, your MONTHS of hard work is ruined as the plants topple over and smash into the mud.

*Sigh*

Can you tell this has happened to us more than a few times on the farm? ;)

Ok, here are a few things I know for sure:

There WILL be summer storms with damaging winds. This is not a surprise or a shocking event. In fact, it is to be EXPECTED.
Cut flowers plants that are not supported WILL crash during these storms… unless they are supported.

Thank goodness there are ways to prevent this from happening.

Today, I will discuss a few different methods you can use in your garden to support your cut flower plants.

If I’m being honest, I will tell you that I don’t like supporting my cut flower plants. No matter what type of support you use, it will slow you down when you’re harvesting… and quite frankly, some plants are a nightmare to harvest through supports and can become a tangled mess (I’m lookin’ at you, Scabiosa and Cosmos…). But it’s better than losing entire beds of plants to a storm.

Netting

Hortonova Trellis netting is a popular option for many growers. The netting can be used vertically for climbing plants or horizontally stretched over planting beds.

Pro Tip: Place the netting over the beds when you direct sow the seeds or plant the seedlings. I usually stretch the netting so it’s hovering about 18” over the ground. As the plants get bigger, they will grow up through the netting.

I recommend securing the netting with sturdy rebar stakes or t-posts. When we started the farm, we couldn’t afford t-posts and instead used plastic stakes… and they simply are not sturdy enough and the netted plants topple over.

Cattle Panel Support

While Hortonova netting has saved my butt many times, I’ve got no love for it. At the end of the season, it’s a tangled mess. We reuse it for as many years as possible, but eventually it will have to go in the trash.

One day, I saw a photo on Instagram posted by Cathy of “Miss Effie’s Flower Farm” in Iowa. Cathy’s husband, Cliff, created a brilliant solution for supporting her plants using metal cattle panel fencing from the farm store.

My husband thought Cliff was a genius and he started fashioning our own version of cattle panel plant supports.

The supports can be customized to fit your beds/growing area. Below is a video of how my husband bent the panels.

These supports are MUCH sturdier than Hortonova netting and I don’t find myself cursing as much when I’m harvesting Cosmos and Scabiosa. Ha!

But the real beauty of these supports is that they can “live” in the garden forever and don’t have to be “put away” at the end of the season. When I’m ready to clear out the beds, I just lift up the panel, remove the plants and put the panel back in place.

They are also very useful for early spring plantings. If you see that frost is coming, you can simply throw a sheet over the panel and protect your tender seedlings.

The only downside is the cost of the panels. We eventually want to phase out Hortonova netting completely and only use the cattle panel supports, but it will take us a few year to achieve that goal. In the meantime, we make more supports each year as our budget allows.

Corralling

For our Dahlias, we use a support method called “Corralling”.

There are lots of different ways to grow and support Dahlias, but this is what works for us.

We grow the plants in single rows that are about 12” wide. We then place t-posts at the corners of the long bed and then about every 12 feet down the length of the bed. We use polypropylene string stretched tightly around the t-posts to effectively “corral” the plants into the 12” wide bed. The string keeps the plants from toppling over into the aisle.

Most of the Dahlias we grow reach 3-4 feet tall, so we run a string line at about 12-18” and another at about 30-36”. Some Dahlias will reach over 6 feet tall, so those plants get a third string line to help them behave.

We plant over 1,000 Dahlias each season and find this to be the most efficient method for us. You can certainly use Hortonova netting for Dahlias, but I hated harvesting through the netting so much (it was very time consuming!) that we switched to corralling.

Tomato Cages

If you are growing a smaller number of plants and want to support them individually, tomato cages are an excellent option!

Here’s a photo of a Dahlia I’m growing in my vegetable garden. Eventually, the plants will hide the tomato cage, but the cage will keep doing it job.

Be sure to set up the tomato cage right away when you plant the tuber/seedling, so that you don’t damage roots/tubers installing it later in the season.

To support or not to support….

Many people ask me ”Do I HAVE to support all my plants? Is there anything I can skip netting?

Well, it really depends on where you live. If you’re growing in an open field, yes, you will likely need to net/support everything. Nearly all cut flower plants need support of some kind. Just do it. You’ll be so glad you did when those storm roll through.

However, if you are growing in a protected area that is sheltered from wind, you might be able to get away with only netting some of your plants.

On our farm, we net/support pretty much everything except:

Sunflowers
Statice
Zinnias
Most perennials