Is a DIY Wedding Right for Me?
If you’re here, you’re probably beginning to plan your wedding florals—and maybe you’re thinking, ‘Could I do this myself?’ At Salt Farm, we work with couples, planners and families all along the spectrum from DIY to fully designed weddings–here are some things we’ve learned that might help determine whether DIY (or partial-DIY) is right for you.
DIY is not for everyone, but it’s a great option for some! DIY is an amazing option for couples or family members passionate about flowers or with floral design experience—especially those looking to focus their spending on other aspects of their wedding. That said, DIY isn’t ‘free’ and while it may be a financial savings, it requires an investment of time, space, and advanced planning.
An example of a DIY bucket from Salt Farm
Here are a few questions to consider when trying to decide if DIY is right for you:
Will working with flowers bring you joy, or cause additional stress during an already busy wedding week? We all love flowers–that’s why we’re here! That said, if creative challenges stress rather than soothe you (or whoever is tasked with putting together your flowers), a full DIY wedding may not be your best option;
Are you traveling to your wedding from out of town? How many days in advance will you arrive? Does your venue or housing space have room for assembling florals? Is that space able to get dirty and wet? Do you have vehicles to transport flowers and finished pieces from assembly site to your venue?;
Do you have a dependable crew of helpers? In our experience, most people don’t want to come to a wedding to work–despite what they say a year in advance (even your mom or your crafty bestie–we’ve seen it!). Ensure that your “design team” knows what they’re signing up for in advance and is able to commit the time necessary to get the job done.
Do you have the time? We recommend setting aside at least a full day for designing, if you’re preparing a full wedding of centerpieces. You’ll also need to factor in time to pick up flowers from the farm, prep vessels and stems, and transport finished arrangements to the venue. Does your wedding week schedule realistically allow for flower assembly time?
Do you have the resources to source supplies and vessels? Most floral supplies are readily available online, and vases can be found everywhere from thrift stores to craft supply stores to Amazon, but they do require some advanced planning. Do you want to spend time sourcing these pieces? If you’re traveling to your wedding from out of town, what is your plan for transporting or shipping supplies to your venue? What’s your plan for rehoming or transporting arrangements once the wedding is over?
Overall, think realistically about the value of your time during an already busy period–your wedding! When you hire a floral designer, you’re not only investing in their time, you’re investing in YOURS. Think through the value of your time during specific aspects of your wedding week–what do you want to be available for? What do you want to NOT think about?
Or maybe you do half and half? Another option to consider is a partial-DIY wedding, where you have some aspects of the wedding designed by a professional florist, but assembly others on your own. This is a service we provide often for clients! Typically, we will design personal flowers (bouquets, boutonnieres, corsages, etc.) and ceremony pieces, while clients purchase our DIY buckets to arrange their own centerpieces and reception flowers. Splitting the work this way ensures that the flowers that will be photographed most—and require the most design skill—are off your plate, while you still get the option to work with flowers for your reception.
If you’re committed to DIY’ing it and ready to start planning, jump to our next post with our favorite DIY tips and resources.
Planting Dahlias
Dahlias are amongst the most fascinating flowering plants, not only because of their array of colors and forms but also because of their history and biology. Least to say, at Salt Farm Flowers we love them and are passionate about everything related to dahlias from reproducing them to using them in arrangements and sharing them with you. Below are a few tips from us on planting your tubers, as well as our favorite links for deepening your knowledge. Keep in mind, this is a summary of how we go about planting dahlias here in Trenton, Maine, (in growing zone 5).
A wedding table arrangement filled with dahlias.
Dahlias are native to the highlands of Mexico and Central America so they appreciate rich soil, temperate cool nights and warm days. They can be perennials where the ground doesn’t freeze but they benefit from digging and division of the tubers. In Maine, where the ground freezes it is important to dig them up at the end of each season—after 120 days of being in the ground, usually somewhere between October and November. Every year we awe at the fact that the one little tuber (referred to as the ‘mother’) can produce so many blossoms within a couple of months and by October the one tuber becomes a mass of daughter tubers, which can go on to become their own plants. Once cleaned and divided, any of the new tubers with viable “eyes” can then be stored and planted the following growing season. Viable new tubers get tightly packed in Saran Wrap and stored in a cold (and dry) basement during our long six months of winter.
In the spring, we check the Zone 5 Frost Free date prediction and we count back two weeks for the date to place tubers in the ground. Before planting, we prepare the soil that has good drainage with compost, mineral amendments and a light sprinkle of North Country Organic Fertilizer. We make sure to plant on a dry day, with little rain on the horizon. Once in the soil, depending on the variety, it takes from one to three weeks for the leaves to poke up through the ground. Because they are very sensitive to frost and wetness, it’s very important to take care of the timing. When planting dahlia tubers outdoors, a long spell of rain can cause the tubers to rot before they have a chance to develop their roots.
STEPS FOR PLANTING DAHLIA TUBERS
Find out your Frost Free Zone date. Count back 2 weeks for your dahlia planting date.
Prepare the ground in a well drained spot that receives full sun. Add compost and a light dusting of a well balanced granular fertilizer.
Dahlias can be dwarf or very tall (up to 7 feet tall!), check the expected height of your varieties before planting. Tall varieties benefit from having a stake close to the main stems for support, particularly during windy spells.
When planting the tubers, place the tuber in the hole in such a fashion that the “neck “ of the tuber gets gently covered by 2-3 inches of soil. In warmer areas you can plant tubers deeper but given our short season, we make sure that the “neck” of the tuber is only 2 to 3 inches below the surface. We like planting our tubers in a slanted position, with the eye facing up, to allow for maximum drainage. Be careful to keep the integrity of the “neck” and “eyes” of the tubers, don’t crack or break the neck. And remember, this one tuber, “the mother” will become a mass of tubers at the end of the season, so be sure to give it at least 18 inches of space all around to develop underground.
Do not water the tuber. This is VERY important. All the tuber needs to start developing roots and shoots is warm soil and the bit of moisture that already exists in the ground. During this stage, the tubers can rot if there is too much moisture in the ground.
After a few days sprinkle some Sluggo or use your favorite slug-snail deterring trick. Slugs and snails love dahlia shoots and they can decimate the first leaves overnight.
Once the dahlia foliage emerges you can safely water them. Be sure to water dahlias well in the summer.
When your dahlias have reached about 4 sets of leaves or 1 foot tall, pinch them back. Removing the top of the stem will help them develop stronger basal stems and will produce more flowers.
Mark your calendar with the day you planted your tubers. Count 120 days and mark your calendar again to remind you of a safe time to dig tubers out of the ground in the fall.
FUN FACTS
Dahlias can be grown in containers but keep in mind that they need wide space to make more tubers underground and will need plenty of water.
Dahlias are edible. These plants are not poisonous. The tubers are edible but not all of them are delicious! Dahlia petals are safe and colorful to eat as long as you grow them without any pesticides. I grew up in the Highlands of Guatemala and one of my favorite things to do as a kid was to drink the water of the thick hollow stems of the wild dahlias growing around trails. However if you ever encounter a rotten tuber you are in for a foul experience! They are stinky when rotten.
Dahlias are octoploids (8 chromosomes) which means that every single seed from the same flower reproduces a unique flower. This makes them very versatile. Over centuries dahlias have been transformed into an enormous variety of dahlias registered today. We are fans of the current particular work of Coseytown, Floret and Santa Cruz dahlias.
Dahlia varieties can only be true to their variety by way of cloning the plant by dividing the tubers or by cuttings. Dahlias grown by the seeds are more like children, each seed produces a unique type. The most common way of preserving a particular dahlia is by dividing the tuber mass with viable “eyes”, a method we have been using at the farm from its very beginning in 2014 and described above. This year, we propagated some varieties via cuttings, which involved potting tubers, taking cuttings as stems grown and then rooting the cuttings to be planted on their own. The photo below shows the formation of tubers amongst a mass of roots from a single tuber that was planted in May and dug up in October. For more information on vegetative propagation see Kristen Albrecht’s YouTube video on the subject.
Dahlia KA’s Cloud
At Salt Farm Flowers, we specifically select dahlia varieties that work well for cut flowers, as they are some of our most popular flowers for weddings, events and grab-and-go bouquets. We have been reproducing and selling our own stock of tubers for more than a decade under the belief that tubers need at least 2 years to adapt to their local conditions. This means, when we test out a new dahlia, we give it two season’s of growth to see if it meets our standards for stem length and color.
This past winter, we experimented with leaving dahlias underground in an unheated high tunnel, they were cut back and covered with a warm bed of straw and winter fabric. We were happy to discover that for most varieties, this proved successful! The plants that were lost in overwintering were simply replaced with dahlias grown from cuttings, meaning we rarely (if ever) need to buy new tubers, unless we’re trying new varieties.
We look forward to your success in planting your tubers and growing your own dahlias. Be sure to send us photos of your flowers or tag us in your posts on Instagram @saltfarmflowers!
For more information on growing dahlias and dahlias in general check out the New England Garden Society.
OVERWINTERING DAHLIA TUBERS IN THE HIGH TUNNEL
This shows our process of protecting the dahlia tubers over the winter! We start in the fall and the results in the spring are amazing!
Choosing What to Grow in Your Cutting Garden
This time of year most gardeners are in the process of seed starting. Here at the farm, we are sowing seeds using the recommended timing from the seed packet or from the handy chart that Johnnys’ Seeds provides on their web page. The anticipation is real and we marvel at what lies ahead from a tiny seed to a towering floral.
This bouquet includes: peonies, shasta daisies, lisianthus, astilbe, ninebark, asparagus ferns, baptisia and clemetis buds
Grow a variety of florals with different bloom times.
Each season, we put over 10,000 plants in the ground between our tunnels and our field. That does not include any of the perennials and woody shrubs that we already have and use as cuttings for our bouquets. We are careful to grow a variety of things that we can use throughout the season for our arrangements and events. Our plantings are staggered for different bloom times. Spreadsheets are our friend in gathering all the information we need for this. But no worries, you do not have to do that much to put together a delightful colorful cutting garden.
Bouquets contain a collection of florals.
First, consider the bouquet elements. There are the focal flowers and often some smaller secondary flowers. We include greens because they enhance the colors and frame the flowers so they can be noticed. After those stems are arranged, a few textural elements really make your arrangement pop and provide some depth and interest. Plan on growing a few of each of these elements and you will have stems to arrange that will be uniquely yours. More importantly, flowers bring joy to your living space and anyone can grow them.
Start with some flowers that are easy to grow.
For flowers, there are far too many to explain so consider this a starter list. Zinnias are the easiest! They can be direct seeded into the ground and come in a wide range of colors and shapes. Some of our favorites that we grow are Benary’s Giant Dahlia, Oklahoma’s, Cactus series as well as the new Queen series. They are colorful and stunning. We call this type of flower “cut and come again” because the more you cut them, the more they grow. Sunflowers are great too. Many of these are considered “cut and done” because you can only get one cut from the single stem series. There are also branching types that bloom over the course of the summer so you only have to plant these once. These too can be direct seeded. Early in the season, consider the fragrant varieties of Sweet peas which can be planted before most things and offer a wide variety of colors. Other flowers that you may already have in your garden are peonies, lilacs, lilies and hydrangeas. If not, think about adding these to your perennial garden and you will have blooms that brighten your yard and stems that you can cut for a season of use.
All zinnias!
There are many textural elements that will enhance and inspire any arrangement.
Some of our favorite textural elements that you can grow or purchase at you local garden center are snapdragons (a fav), statice, nigella, gomphrena, celosia, cosmos, cerinthe, mints, Italian petunias and scented geraniums. Pick the ones that make you smile. A side note about design, plant your selections in clusters of 3 and 5 or more. This simple rule of thumb will help make the garden more appealing to the eye and in the process you get more stems to cut as well.
In regards to greens for your vase, you may be able to forage some or add them to your garden landscape. We use the culinary herbs such as Greek oregano, Sage and French tarragon. They make a great addition to a mixed bouquet! Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is a workhorse since you can use the stems in all stages, all summer, for arrangements. Apple mint, mountain mint and chocolate mint are fabulous and grow back each year, sometimes too well. For shrubs, the greens of baptisia and snowberry have particularly lovely green shades that work well in the vase.
So create some space this spring for a few flowers. Pick a sunny area and prep the ground so you can plant some seeds. Maybe even use a section of your vegetable garden. They actually provide a habitat for beneficial insects. Add a few essential perennials to your landscape. Be sure to check out your local cooperative extension service for information as well as some of the bigger seed companies such as Johnny’s Seeds which have detailed growing libraries on their websites. It is proven that flowers are good for your soul so why not start growing some now!
And for those of you not quite ready to dig in, we do offer a weekly bouquet subscription with pick up at the farm. See below for more details! We offer the subscription by the month in July, August and September. Each week, we select what looks best at the farm and put together all the bouquet elements of flowers, greens and textures, from our farm to your vase.
On the threshold of Spring
February and March are always a mystery in Downeast Maine weather. The soil can be ice solid one day and turn into chocolate soil only to switch into rain or snow by next sunrise. Usually we keep a closer eye on the weather during the growing season but with new experiments in the farm we are more watchful this winter and spring. In the fall of 2021 we decided to embrace the dormant season with new projects in the hopes to fill you up with earlier flowers.
Caterpillar Tunnel Experiment: Snapdragons
This spring our eyes have been mostly tuned into the signs of life on the resilient snapdragons that we tucked in as little seedlings back in October. We spy nervously under the layers of row covers particularly after the fluctuations of temperatures that marked February with the range of 30 to 40 degrees within a few hours! So far, things look promising.
Farming requires high tolerance for risk. As we enter our eighth year at Salt Farm Flowers we decided it was time to dive into new experimentation. We have no control of the weather patterns or the temperature and all of what this implies but we are determined to grow earlier blossoms while keeping our usual planting patterns as a backup. If all the snapdragons take a hit from shifting temperature fluctuations we have a dedicated row of snapdragons to be planted early spring as usual. We also know that more and more farms in Zone 5A are experimenting this way and we can compare notes and experiences while following the Johnny’s Selected Seeds Greenhouse Trials. We are very excited about this project and we look forward to sharing these beautiful long lasting flowers with you. [(https://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-library/flowers/snapdragon/video-v191.html)]
On The Dahlia Front
The spring of 2022 will mark our third planting in the High Tunnel. The soil is starting to develop a nice structure and it is showing a life of its own. In its first year ranunculus, anemones, lisianthus, tuberoses, eucalyptus, and a few annuals did well. In the spring of 2020 we rotated plantings so the dahlias got planted in the center two rows whereas the outside rows were dedicated to early campanuals, ranunculus and anemones followed by our signature flowers, lisianthus. The dahlias bloomed profusely, grew big healthy tubers, and we were able to furnish several weddings later in the season.
In the fall of 2021 We experimented here as well. Our team left the dahlia tubers in the ground and tucked them in well with lots of loose straw and blankets of heavy duty Agribon. We also did a little whispering to deter hungry winter rodents but recently added Coleman-style vole traps.
This experiment is even more risky than that of the snapdragons because these starchy tubers which are native to the highlands of Central America and Mexico do not tolerate freezing temperatures. Our Winters in Maine, however, have changed so much that the risk was worth it to learn something new. The fact that the ground of the unheated High Tunnel did not freeze in the winter of 2019 served as enough evidence for us to give it a try. Time will tell if we will get earlier dahlias as it takes about one month for them to sprout after planting them, but, we believe that if the tubers survive well they will sprout when the conditions are warm enough to do so. And yet, if the tubers were to freeze we can quickly implement the method we used last year which provided us with abundant blossoms earlier and longer than the dahlias planted in the field.
All this experimentation meant that we needed to hold back more tubers in case our experiment failed as we can’t control the freezing temperatures. This also meant that we needed to delay the 2022 tuber sale date until we could examine the conditions of our High Tunnel. We therefore want to reiterate our apologies to all of you who were looking forward to purchasing tubers from the farm cart and our mail order. As soon as we assess the grand dahlia experiment we will post news on the sale date and hope that we have enough for everyone interested.
Last fall we also cut back (after much deliberation and pain) the number of varieties that we will cultivate aiming at 20. This has been a long arduous process from the start but one that makes more sense for us as a farm business. In eight years we went from 67 varieties to almost twenty! Although we love all the dahlias we have to select varieties that are favorable for designing with, that have strong long stems, and that display other important characteristics. We came to terms with the reality that it is best to grow fewer varieties while increasing the planting area for each. We still have a few listed as trials because at Salt Farm Flowers the rule is to give each variety a 3-4 year window of adaptation including time to rule out environmental factors that affect performance. And although we selected twenty varieties we still kept a few stellar dinner plates and a few other specials that may not be very productive but that we simply can’t let go of. We also added a handful of new varieties of dahlias because we are passionate about all things dahlias and we couldn’t resist testing a handful at a time as cut flowers.
Last but not least, we hope that you are all doing well as we enter the Spring. We invite you to follow our farm news on social media where we will post our dahlia tuber sale and our first buckets of flowers. We are also excited to show you our new workshop building. In the meantime we will continue to plan weddings and other events, sow hundreds of seeds in trays under growing lights, plant lilies, ranunculus and anemones, and get the ground ready to plant one more row of perennials, sweet peas, and other beauties. We are looking forward to the day when we can share with you the fruits of our efforts in the form of beautiful, long lasting flowers.
