From now until October when our temperatures again descend to freezing, we’ll have beautiful bountiful summer bouquets. Our annual cut flower garden grew three times in size this year, offering us more space to plant everything that we love. These annuals like zinnias, ageratum, marigolds, cosmos amaranth and nicotiana are just beginning to bloom. It’s heartbreaking work, but necessary to cut the first few flowers and leave them for compost in order to encourage the plant to put more energy into growing larger, taller and stronger before they really being to crank out flowers. Sometimes this means cut 1/3 to ½ of plant off! Sometimes I hardly believe that they will grow back, but each and every time they do. Our dahlia field is 5 times larger than it was last year mostly owing to the fact that in November we dug out dahlia tubers out of the ground, washed and divided them before storing them for the winter. We used a mixture of sawdust and peat moss and kept them at a steady 45 degrees all winter long. As soon as spring temperature allowed, we potted them up into their own little homes and saw who sprouted before we transplanted them out to the field. These guys just started blooming but soon our bouquets will be filled with them!