If you follow me on Instagram @adoredhouse, then you know how much I love my flower garden and bringing fresh cut flowers in my home - they just make me so happy! This year I had a lot of success with starting flowers from seed, specifically zinnias.

I ordered my seeds from the Johnny’s Seeds website in April, and while I typically try to start them indoors, time got away from me and I decided to just plant them in the ground when the soil warmed up.

Here are the seeds I planted: (click the links below to find the varieties on the Johnny’s Seeds website.

Overall, the seeds grew very well and they produced a ton of blooms throughout June, July, August, and September.

Here are some of my notes:

• The white zinnias produced the most flowers and they were the biggest flowers too. It could have been the seed varieties, but these seeds had more sun than the other colored varieties.

• The Queen Lime and Zinderella flowers were much smaller and the stems were scrawnier than the white zinnias, but I think it is because they got less sun throughout the day.

• Moths loved the Zinderella flowers - so much that they made the flower centers brown and rotted looking from them sitting on them all the time. Other bugs also loved these and ate most of the petals before I could even pick them.

• I definitely planted the seeds too close together initially. I did spread the seedling out more as they grew, but because I had so many packed close they started to get brown and ugly at the bottom of the stalk towards the end of the summer.

• I cut flowers and dead-headed daily in the summer, but the Double Click Snow Puff cosmos needed constant dead-heading to produce new blooms.

• I did not fertilize the soil. This is mostly out of laziness, I typically fertilize once or twice a month. However, I will definitely fertilize the soil heavily next Spring - I’m sure those zinnias sucked a lot of nutrients out of the soil!

• There were a couple stowaway seeds in the white mixes - a few dark fuchsia ones and few buttery yellow ones.

Believe it or not, I am already planning out my next cutting garden! In addition to everything I grew this year here is what I’m thinking of planting next year…

I should add too that I am expanding my cutting garden significantly in the Spring. I’m excited to share my plans for that!

How did your garden grow this year? I’d love to know, so please share in the comments!

xo, Dana