Wow, what a Month May has been here, the field in the last couple of weeks has burst into bloom. There is a period in May called the May lull known by growers as the time after the spring bulbs and before the summer flowers kick in. But with a late Spring and then a period of hot dry weather here the lull was pretty non-existent. Admittedly as I have discussed before I am helped a lot in Spring by growing selected flowers in the polytunnel but this year the Perenials have also been fantastic, Lupins have lept forth, Geums are galloping and the Verbascum is very bountiful. Whilst we are discussing covering yourself for flowers in May this is also the time when the biennials become the backbone of many a floral display, I have been picking Hespiris for the whole month of May and its clouds of beautiful flowers have been a great early filler flower. We will come back to the biennials later in this article, and you will get to see many foxgloves used in the video section.
Picking is a skill which many people don’t realise even exists, photos of fields of flowers in full bloom will pop up if you google Flower fields, these photos are undeniably beautiful and many would think wow there are so many perfect flowers there for picking but I can guarantee you if I walked through a bed of flowers in full bloom there would be very few which I would be happy to pick if they needed to last more than a couple of days in a vase. Picking the perfect flower is all about when it likes to be picked, some flowers like to be picked in bud, some won’t open picked in bud, some will not condition picked in bud, some are best freshly opened and some, believe it or not like to be picked when fully pollinated.
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