Designing your cut flower bed: Choosing the right soil and aspect for your patch

Designing Your Cut Flower Bed: Choosing the Right Soil and Aspect for Your Patch

Designing your garden in the winter makes things much easier when the warmer months roll around. From your design you can then create a sowing plan, which will help you to see what you should be doing each month. A sowing plan will also help you to get the most out of your plot and use your space as efficiently as possible.

In order to make the most of your cut flower patch, you also need to put it in the right part of your garden. Annuals make their food from the sun, so if you put them in the shade they won't be very productive. Choose the sunniest spot in your garden for your cut flower patch and you will get good results, year after year.

The way in which you garden in the first few years will be dependent on the type of soil you have. If you're lucky enough to have a rich, loamy soil then you won't have to do much soil improvement, but if your soil is heavy clay or chalk, you will have to put in more groundwork.

Perch Hill sits on heavy clay, in the first five years of our cut flower garden we regularly dug organic matter into our soil, as well as horticultural grit to add drainage.

Now, we are able to use the no-dig method as our soil is now very workable as it's been built up over 15 years. We still mulch regularly though, but now we leave it up to the worms to draw it down into the soil below.

How to Work Out What Type of Soil You Have

To discover more about your soil, dig a hole in your garden and see if you can physically see what type of soil you have. If you can see chalk or heavy clay, then this is a clear indication of your soil type.

If it is less clear cut, pick up your soil and feel it. Does it feel gritty or slimy? If it's gritty then your soil is sand based, if it's slimy then you probably have a clay base.

If You Have Clay Soil, Consider a Raised Bed

If your soil is heavy clay then consider raising the level of your beds so you can add in more organic matter. This means you'll be planting into lighter topsoil, composed of organic matter, rather than heavy clay.

While the no-dig method is better for the structure of the soil, we weren't able to start doing this from day one due to the heaviness of the clay.

It is only after building up our topsoil by regularly digging in organic matter that we have been able to improve it. This means we are now able to garden with more sustainable principles in mind.

Your Assignment

• Dig a 30cm by 30cm hole in your garden.
• Pour a bucket of water into the hole.
• Time how long the water takes to disappear.
• If your soil is chalky or sandy the water will disappear quite rapidly, but if you have heavy clay it will sit there for a long time.