My beautiful flower bed with a mix of summer flowers, the picture was taken in August 2015.

Parts of my garden are completely dedicated to flowers. Growing these flowers in spring and looking forward to the beautiful color combinations I will get to see later in summer is such a kick! There's just something special about starting your own flower garden exactly how you like it. I hope you will enjoy this guide on how it's done!

More about growing flowers: Growing annual flowers from seed

Preparations

Pick 5-7 summer flowers that blossom at different times. Grow enough plants so that you can fill up the entire space. Put the plants around 4-8 inches apart. It's always better to have a few too many than the other way around, so make sure to grow a few extra plants.

I decided to grow garden cosmos, dahlia, aster, cornflower, low-growing sunflower, bronze fennel and red orache.

Sow the summer flowers well in advance and grow them in separate pots. You can prune the tops of some of these plants like cosmos, dahlia, cornflower, godetia and mallow so they get nice and bushy.

Fertilize the flower garden with a few buckets of bokashi compost before you start planting. Make sure you wait until you know for sure that there won't be any more frost, or cover them with fabric if the temperatures start creeping towards freezing.

I planted the flowers here one by one, like a string of pearls in the large bed.

The red orache looks so beautiful together with the flowers in my garden. The red leaves makes it look pretty even before it blooms too.

I enjoy these beautiful flowers day and night. The moon is on it's way up and the garden looks amazing.

Planting

Imagine all of the plants like a string of pearls in your flower garden. Put 3, 4 or 5 plants of one variety in a row, for example like in the picture below. I put the flowers one after the other in the pictures above.

This is how I plant the flowers in my flower garden. The different varieties become a sort of weave of flowers.

The bed behind the bikes can look very different depending on which flowers bloom at the time. The dahlias grow in late summer.

I use my pots made from newspapers to re-plant my summer flower plants. It's so easy to simply bury the entire pot in the soil. This will help the plant adapt to its new environment quickly. It will grow out of the pot and get nutrients from the soil instead in no time. The earthworms will help break the newspaper pot (made from newspaper with non-toxic ink) down.

Tips

• Pick flowers that bloom at different times in summer.
• Pick colors you think go well together.
• Choose one or two plants with beautiful leaves.
• Pick summer flowers of different heights.
• Combine plants with high stalks and bushier plants.
• Remove the flowers that have already bolted.
• Fertilize with diluted urine or nettle water at least 1-2 times each season.
• Use the plant parts at the end of the season for mulch, it will help fertilize the soil.

My flowers

I already mentioned a few of the flowers in my flower garden. Here are a few more great options:

• Black eyed-Susan
• Mallow
• Tagetes
• Lupines
• Godetia
• Poppy
• Baby's breath
• Marigold
• Flowering tobacco
• Zinnia
• Pincushion flower

Make sure that the flowers you pick are similar when it comes to growth, so that none of them overpower any of the others.

This lovely dahlia Fantasia is easy to grow from seed and blooms for a really long time.

Read more: No dig gardening, creating raised beds

Good luck!
/Sara Bäckmo