Benefits of Mulching, Interplanting, Removing Poor Crops Early & How I Started

Hello, it's Tuesday 9 June 2026.

I have lots of news from the field in today's episode including planting seedlings, staking and netting, and weeding (or rather, pulling endless creeping thistle). I've also removed a succession of one of the Saponaria seedlings because they weren't performing well and space is at a premium. It's the first time I've ever done this - and I thought it would be hard - but it wasn't and I'm glad I've done it. 

The quality of the soil under the chipped bark mulch is incredible and much better at surface level than the soil that isn't mulched. I'm a huge fan of mulching and I highly recommend it. I talk for a little bit about the reasons why bark mulch is so good for the soil and the plants, plus the benefits of having mycelium growing under the mulch.

Finally I answer Sue's question about why I began flower farming and where I found my farm. It actually all started with my hens and I hope you enjoy the story. Do come back and join me for the next episode - you're always very welcome.

Check out Daniel's amazing time lapse reel on Instagram of his Cosmos Fruit Sensation closing up at night - it's brilliant! https://www.instagram.com/rainesflowersuk/

Details of how to buy an issue of The Flower Farmer magazine or subscribe can be found here: https://www.theflowerfarmermagazine.co.uk/

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If you like what you hear, please follow/subscribe to this podcast so that you're the first to hear new episodes when they become available every Tuesday and Friday. And if you enjoy this episode, please take a minute to leave a review because it really does help more cut flower-lovers just like you to find the podcast. 

Follow me on instagram @henhillcutflowers for a behind-the-scenes look at life on my cut flower plot. And you can find my website at www.henhillcutflowers.co.uk and my email is lydia@henhillcutflowers.co.uk.

Join me on my journey through a year of growing and selling cut flowers in England. I'm giving you the low-down on what it's really like, how I'm getting started, what you do and don't need, what I do when and why, the successes and failures, and just about everything in between. All in real time. With guest appearances from my chickens every now and then. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, welcome to my podcast, Becoming a Cut Flower Grower. I'm your host, Lydia, and I'm here to share my year of growing and selling cut flowers. I'll be giving you the lowdown on everything I'm doing and sharing all the highs and lows, the good times and the inevitable disasters, all in real time. Join me on my cut flower journey starting right now. Hello and a very warm welcome to the latest episode. It's Tuesday, the 9th of June 2026. It's half past ten at night. I did not plan to record this so late. I've had a very busy day. And then I went to have dinner with my best friend this evening, which is really nice because I hadn't seen her for absolutely what feels like forever. And I was so tired of saying no, sorry, no, sorry, all the time. I thought no, I'm gonna go and see her. I've actually just got home as well. I've been house sitting for three weeks, so as well as everything else, if I sounded a bit frantic, that's why I had to come home every day to water all the seedlings in the greenhouse and shuffle them around and move everybody around. But it has been an awful lot to manage. And if you're thinking what a really stupid thing to go and do in May, you would be absolutely right, and believe me, I don't quite know what I was thinking in the winter when I said, Yes, no problem whatsoever. I was not thinking, but anyway, it went really, really well. Um, but I'm back now, so everything is um totally chaotic, but it's sort of manageable. We'll get there. It's been very warm and sunny, but very windy today. Really, really windy. So almost as soon as I've planted things out, they've just sort of slipped to one side. I had a very busy weekend as well. It was too busy for planting, really, most of the weekend. I don't like being on the soil when it's wet, it just compresses it and um just really not a good idea. So I got it all done today. But I did manage to collect another 200 litres of water over the weekend, which was pretty amazing. Now, um, if you listen to the last episode when I was talking about moving the cockroaches around, which I called cock swap, um, I was laughing to see that when I looked on the Apple Podcasts and also Spotify, they'd put asterisks in the word. So it was C asterisk asterisk K, which I thought was hilarious. They probably think it's like some explicit content in the episode, and I didn't tick the box that says this episode contains explicit content, but they're clearly not chicken people, otherwise they wouldn't have done that. Now, shout out to one of my new listeners, Daniel. I'm gonna put his Instagram in the show notes. I would like you guys to go and check out one of his reels. Now, Daniel is new to the podcast and he's also a new grower, and he made a fantastic time release, slow, like sorry, time lapse reel of some cosmos that he has called Fruit Sensation, which actually closes up, like the leaves close up. The plant basically closes itself up at night. Absolutely fascinating. I had never I mean I knew trees do this, some trees do this, and also some are touch sensitive, but I had no idea there was a variety of cosmos that did that. It's a fantastic, fantastic video. So go and check that out. It's really eye-opening. Now on Friday's episode, I told you what I was planning to do over the weekend, so I had to do it and come back and tell you all about it, like having an accountability person. I was I would have been too ashamed to come back and say I didn't do any of it. So let me tell you what I've been up to on the field. There has been weeding and tidying of the daily bed. So this is one of the things I told you I was going to do. It was absolutely chock full of forget me knots, and that is actually my fault because I had a load of plants up there over the winter, and I thought it would be quite nice just to make the dahlia bed pretty because there's obviously nothing visible over the winter. It got mulched with the bark chips and then just left, and it just didn't look very nice. So I relocated loads of clumps of forget me knots, and they've all been flowering like mad, and it's looked really, really pretty, and then they've pretty much finished, and you know, you just get those sort of long, dead flowering stems that go to seed, and it was just looking too messy for me, so I've cut all of those off. I don't pull forget me knots up because I find that they just seem to perennialise, and they'll just do their thing for years to come. So I just cut off all of the seed heads and I store them and then I just scatter them all over the place in due course, and then just leave the clumps, and they don't do any harm. I mean they'll get completely dwarfed by the dailius, but it really doesn't matter as long as they're out of the pathways, that's all that matters. I've added a second tier of netting to the Achillea and the Aryngium. So I've already put the first layer in, which is probably about one foot off the ground, and the second layer is probably about two and a half feet off the ground. I'm so paranoid about things falling over this year that I want to be super on top of the netting and the staking. And I know that these guys do get very tall, I remember it from last year, and in fact, the oryngiums are probably about three feet already, and they would lean if they weren't supported. I know some people raise the first layer of netting up as the plants grow, but I didn't want they're not all growing at the same height, like they mostly are, but there's always some that aren't, and I didn't want any stragglers or any of the lower bits falling over, and I also want to make sure that as I cut the top stems, the lower stems are still supported, and I think if I put the netting too high with not a layer at one foot tall, there's a danger that anything that comes through afterwards is going to fall over before it reaches the top level. Uh turns out that I had my netting in the car for most of last week. I think I said on Friday I needed to go and look for the netting, and it turns out that I had received it, so I was expecting a couple of parcels last week. One was a bag of mealworms for the chickens, and one was a bag of netting. And a bag got delivered. I had a feel of it, I didn't bother opening it, had a feel of it. I thought, yep, that feels like mealworms, chucked it in the car, left it, and because the chickens still had mealworms in the feed room. And then when I finished all the mealworms up over the weekend, I thought, no, I'll I'll get the new mealworms out, and it turned out to be netting. So I had the netting all along. Very frustrating, and the moral of the story there is to always open everything as soon as it arrives. I've been doing lots of weedling weedlings, weeding amongst the seedlings, that is a tongue twister, just to keep on top of things. Some of the seedlings are very small, and I don't want them to get swamped because the weeds just seem to outcompete absolutely everything else. They're not going to kill the seedlings, they're just it's just not a situation I want to be having. Now I know that weeding is like dead time and not productive, but I like to have a tidy plot, so that's what I've been doing. And I've also got a creeping thistle problem up there, and those guys are just like double decker buses, they just burst through the ground, they just seem to get bigger by the day, and they're quite the stems are quite fat. And if they're growing too close to any of the seedlings, they really are going to cause problems and just push them out of the way and distort them and compete for resources and all the rest of it. So they all had to come up, and to be honest, most of the weeding was the creeping thistle, and it's actually really fun to pull it out. I don't bother using the horri horri knife to get them out, I just pull them and they make this sort of like a little tiny pump as you pull them all out. It's it's great fun. I've done hundreds and hundreds today, and I just love the sound every time. I've also weeded the Achillea, the Pearl, uh, the Oryngium, the Flox, one of which actually is just about to start flowering. It just opened this evening, which was interesting. I thought that was a bit early, but I might be wrong. Uh the Hellenium, the Stocks, the Amy, the Scabius, around the raspberries, around the sapinaria, the agrestema, and the physicarpers as well. Now, I also removed a whole batch of sapinaria today. This is one that I sewed on the 16th of March. They were really weak and spindly, uh, just absolutely rubbish plants. Now, this is the first time that I've actually pulled out a crop early. And I think, I think it might actually be, I can't remember who it is. It's either Lisa Mason Ziggler or Jenny Marks that's like, you know, pull out a crop that's not performing well. And I've always just given everybody a second chance and a third chance and kind of willed them along and been so committed to them, and like, you know, I grew you from seed, I want you to do well. And this year I'm like, nope, no second chances. If you don't come out of the gates absolutely storming, you're gonna get pulled up and composted. Now, at the moment, actually, everything is getting composted on the living paths because it's it's pretty much weeds that are coming out at the moment, and I'm not too worried about composting them. So it's I mean, I compost everything apart from perennial weeds, obviously, but I just thought there's a lot more time involved in collecting everything and taking it up to the compost bins, and I've already got quite a bit of material in there anyway, so I'm literally doing like a chop and drop with all the weeds. They're going well, they get chopped from the borders and then they get put onto the living paths, and they can just break down there. That's what I've been doing with those. So, yeah, so goodbye to one batch of sapinaria. The batch that's next door got sewed on I think the 3rd of April, and they're doing absolutely fine, pointing all in the right direction. Um, but yeah, the 16th of March lot were just absolutely rubbish. They were flowering, but just the most pathetic things you've ever seen, so they had to go. And in their place, I've put out some scabius, and um I think they will do much better in that spot. Now I've been planting out my pro-cut sunflowers. This is the first year that I've done pro-cuts, and thank you if you're the listener who suggested I grow them. I used to do well not, I used to. Last year I didn't do any sunflowers at all apart from some self-seeded accidents. 2024, when I had the trial beds, I grew sunflowers then, and I just grew ones that I bought from a garden centre. Didn't have a clue what I was doing, and they were absolute beasts. They really were totally. I I just ended up with like a jungle, and they were about well, they were over six foot tall, so they were quite just a logistical nightmare. And I planted them all nice and close together. I did actually get the spacings for those guys right, but you then couldn't get up amongst them. Uh yeah, I just didn't have a clue what I was doing, and they all needed staking, and they sort of turned into like mini trees, and then they all started to wobble and fall over, and I was desperately trying to hold them up the whole time. It was ridiculous. So this year I've actually planted the pro cuts amongst the roses, like at the at the very top of bed one, where they are not going to overshadow the roses, but they're kind of tucked in around the roses, and they're spaced much closer together, so they're actually ten inches apart. Um, I watched uh quite a few YouTube tutorials on the spacing of those, and I think I worked out that nine inches apart was probably the best, and then when it actually came to doing them just because of where the roses were, they've ended up ten inches apart. But it means I can put a couple of road pins at either end of the row, run some wire across. I don't think I'll bother with string because it snaps if it gets too wet and too dry, too wet, too dry, and then too much pressure, it just breaks. So I think I will actually just be able to wire those guys in to support them. So I'm very pleased I've done that, and the pro cuts look to be really amazing. As I say, it's the first time I've ever grown them, don't quite know what they're going to be like. I've got red, white, and peach. They look beautiful on the packets, and they are supposed to be the one to grow. Uh, no pinching required because they're just going to do one single flower. Oh, we'll see what happens. I've also planted out the first of my cosmos and the first of the Nigella I've had. Um, I've had a bit of a disaster with the Nigella this year. Um, I've ended up, I think, with one very, very tiny tray. A couple of trays just came to absolutely nothing. I don't I don't know what happened there at all. Um, I've also planted out some scabius. I've gone really big on the scabius this year. I hope that's not a mistake. I bought a packet, so a couple of packets of one called Fondant Fancies, which are a selection of gorgeous wedding-y, pastely colours, and my wedding florist Jo was very excited when she saw the photos of those. And then I went and bought some mixed colour scabius. But they were the loveliest plants last year. I really, really enjoyed them. They were just so so pretty at all stages of their growth and development and flowering, and the seed pods were really lovely, and I'm going to be netting them this year, so everybody is going to be going vertically rather than what they did last year. The ammial also doing really well. Um, and I think actually between the ammy and the agristema, I mean the agristema are just incredible, they're really tall, they're really pretty, they're not flowering yet, but they're just doing exactly what I hoped they would do. And they've been in the ground for a few weeks now and sort of sort of didn't do anything, and then they finally got their groove on ditto with the Amy next door to them. They're also looking really lovely as well. And the agristama bed got netted today as well, so that's like one layer of that has gone in. Uh, so I put in I put it well, I mean I spent hours on the plot. I put in a total of 97 transplants, which just really actually doesn't sound that many. I have found that the germination rates, I guess, what you've what you think you've sewn sometimes they just haven't all germinated. So I will compare the numbers uh in my notebook for how many I sewed versus how many I've actually put out on the field. That's always very interesting to know. Now I made quite an interesting discovery on the field today, apart from oh yes, there was something else I had to tell you about. Um, I had a magpie in with the chickens the other day. That was quite funny actually, because I could see it on the camera. I could see suddenly, you know, I've got a camera up there and it suddenly started pinging me all these notifications to say something was going on up there. So I had to look at the camera, and all you can see are these like dark feathers, and I thought that doesn't look like one of the chickens, like they'd never be able to get up there. And it turned out it was a baby magpie, which I've had them in in the past before, and I always thought they came in for the water, but I've got a sneaky feeling they're coming in to steal the eggs because we've still got a problem with something laying eggs. Sorry, with something stealing the eggs. I thought the chickens weren't laying, but I was on the field all day today and collected four eggs, and literally every time one of the girls made that clucking sound that they do when they've laid an egg, I bolted across the entire field and grabbed it. And so I got four today, which is amazing. Some days I get well, most days I get nothing at all, and then I'll just find a shell somewhere, and I'm never sure whether it's one of the girls that's eating the eggs, whether it's rats or birds, or I I just don't know, it could be a lot of things. But it was interesting that I was on the field all day today and none of the eggs got stolen that I'm aware of. So clearly I need to be up there a lot more. Anyway, going back to the magpie, so it eventually it just knocked the camera completely and I couldn't see the bird anymore. And when I went to put the birds to bed, I was looking out for it and I couldn't find it anywhere. And I thought, oh great, he's managed to get squeeze his way out and he's gone. And I was literally in the dark, in the hen house, just shutting the pop pole door, and all of a sudden, this magpie just literally flew into me, and I nearly had a heart attack. Um, because he would clearly he'd been hiding in a corner somewhere and then just came out, was all flustered. So I had to catch him and put him outside, obviously, after I'd taken a photo, because they are such beautiful, beautiful creatures. I don't know if you've ever had the good fortune to see one close up, but they're absolutely exquisite. And right, yes, that's what I wanted to tell you. So interesting discovery when I was on the field today. So I decided, as I've just said, to interplant the Procut sunflowers in between the roses as a space-saving device. Now the roses take up all of bed one and half of bed two, and in the rest of bed two are the peonies and the bearded iris. And beds one and two are fully mulched, and then other beds that have got perennials and shrubs in are also mulched, and I have used chipped bark for this. Now I have access to a pile that I use because obviously it's significantly cheaper than having to buy it from the shops, it's very expensive, and the quality from the shops is not great, and there is nothing better than chipped bark in my opinion. I absolutely love it. The reason I haven't done the rest of the beds is because the majority of them have got annuals in. A couple of them have got perennials in, excuse me. A couple of them have got um perennials in, so things like the echinacea, they've got a bit of bark down, but generally speaking, all the other beds are reserved for annuals, and I don't put mulch down on them. And that's because there is a temporary nitrogen lock up on those. It it is small, but the thinking is you're not supposed to use it for things that require nitrogen immediately. So for shrubs and perennials that are going to be in for year if for years, it's not so much of a problem. But I'm gonna test this out. I'm gonna mulch one of my annual beds this year and see what a difference it makes. Maybe not a whole bed, just like a small area. I'm gonna test it out, see what happens. Because the difference between the soil underneath the bark mulch and the soil that doesn't have a mulch on it is absolutely extraordinary. And I was digging all these holes to put my sunflower transplants in, and the everything is grown on the same part of the field. This is like the extension to my growing area that I did last year when Nigel came and scraped the turf for me. And I once he'd scraped the turf, all I had was this um bare earth, completely bare earth, and I've had to make all the beds and then mulch them and basically slowly, slowly do the soil improvement because the soil was very stony, very dry, very compacted. It's literally just had grass on it for years, and before that it had been grazed by livestock, so pretty compacted, nothing fancy going on, no worms in it, not much of anything going on in it, really. And the so basically all these beds are in this same area, so it is like comparing like with like, and in the mulched beds now, what I saw today is much higher retained moisture in the soil, particularly at the surface level, which is important. And when you then go and have a look at bed four, for example, which I'm slowly working my way through lifting all the nettles and everything, and planting seedlings, you've got this really dry, well, not really dry, but a dry layer at the surface level, because obviously it's got the sun baking down on it, it's got wind, it's got erosion from when it rains, and we've had some very heavy storms recently. So there's all of this impact, you know, on the soil surface that that the chipped bark completely mitigates it because it's basically like having a little blanket over it. And when you dig down into the soil, what I found uh just below the bark mulch level on the surface of the soil, but kind of intermingling, is all of these white filaments of fungi, which you would expect with chipped bark, and they're called mycelium. Now, mycelium is fantastic, it's a fungus that digests the lignin and the cellulose that you have in the wood, and it helps to break down those two into hummus and a gosh, I said that like the um Greek dip, didn't I? Hummus, hummus, hummus, I don't know, is it the same? Anyway, um, you know what I mean, and um into plant available nutrients as well. It also, this mycelium stuff helps to bind the soil particles together, which is how you end up with soil with a really nice crumbly texture. It helps to feed the food web as well, so all the bacteria, all the worms, uh, all the beetles and everything, they're all helped to be supported by this mycelium as well, and it creates an environment for bugs to just hang out and live in. So, all around, a much, much better environment. And of course, the other thing that the chip bark mulch did during the heat wave was to act basically as like a sunscreen, so it kept the beating sun off the soil, which is really really important. Now, I already said earlier, but I'll say again, I don't put it on the annuals, but I am gonna do a teeny tiny experiment and see what happens. But it's perfectly fine to use for perennials and shrubs and roses and everything like that. In fact, they will absolutely love it. And if you've ever kind of walked through a woodland and wondered why it's all just so lovely, the soil is always fantastic beneath trees, it's just because they create this incredible environment, like wood is just the best thing ever, and obviously the leaves that come off the trees, but you just have so much more fungal. Activity wherever you've got the chip bark, which is such a useful thing for your soil to have. So that was that. Now I had a question a couple of weeks ago from a listener, Sue in Auckland in New Zealand. She asked me a great question, two questions, in fact, that I'm gonna answer now. Now, the first question is how I began flower farming, and the second one is how I found my farm. So I'm gonna answer the answer the second one first, how I found my farm, because that kind of leads on to the other question. So I've ended up, it's not a first of all, it's not a farm, it's a one-acre field, and I ended up with it because a neighbour of mine who used to keep chickens invited me up to the field one day to have a look at the chickens, and I ended up getting some chickens from him. And about a year later, he retired and got rid of all his chickens and everything, and he just said to me, you know, just take over the field, you know, keep it tidy, keep it maintained, look after everything, carry on with the chickens. Um, you know, and there you go, it's your responsibility. So that's how I ended up with the field. So I had probably I don't know how many chickens I had at the time. I rescued six, and when I say rescued, it's because his chickens were at their sort of end of life stage, and so they were all going off uh to be uh well put to sleep would be the diplomatic way be of describing it, but they were going to it was the end of their life basically, and uh I'm all for rescuing things, so I said, Well, can I have half a dozen? So I ended up with half a dozen, and then before you know it, everybody has babies, and uh so it just the numbers just escalated, and then I got my first lot of ducks. Um, and so I that's how I ended up taking over the field, and really chicken I'm obsessed with chickens and ducks, I really am. It's kind of crazy. I got my first chicken when I was nine years old, and he was cockroel called Sweetie Pie, and that kind of started this sort of addiction, if you like, and then you know, I left I had them all through my teenage years, and then I left home and went off to work, and that was kind of the end of that. And I had always been waiting, like my whole adult life, for the right time to get chickens, and you think, well, maybe it's when I buy my first house, or maybe it's when I do this, or maybe it's when I'm settled, or you know what it's like, you just kind of wait for the right moment, and I'm here to tell you the right moment never arrives. So when I got the opportunity to rescue these chickens, I literally jumped at it, and yeah, I jumped at it, and I have never looked back. Uh, so that's how I ended up with the chickens, and what happened was because I'm so in love with them and so obsessed with them, they're part of my family, they've all got names. They're all, if you're interested, named after female singers. So, you know, we had Whitney Houston and Diana Ross. We've still got Diana Ross, actually, still got Adele, uh Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. The first girl I ever got was called Celine Dion. So that basically started the whole thing. Anyway, anyway, I find it really hard to leave the chickens in the morning. It's pretty much why I'm always late for work and why I never want to go to work because I just I could spend all day up there with them. They're fascinating to me. And I was just I just kept thinking, I just don't want to leave this field. Like it's a really, it's a really special place. It's like it's my place, you know. And I just didn't want to leave. And I was racking my brains thinking, what am I going to do? How could I spend more time here? How could I generate some kind of revenue from here that means I could spend more time here than in other people's gardens? And lots of them are like second home gardens, so they're hardly ever there and they're not in the garden, you know. I just wanted to be in this really special place, and I don't quite know where the whole flower farming thing came from. I, as you know, if you're a regular listener, I've had issues um over the last few years with my hormones and brain fog and not being able to remember what day it is and stuff, and so lots of things happened a few years ago. I just cannot remember them at all. In fact, I can't remember what I did yesterday, so I have to write everything down and take lots of photos to remind myself. But I can't remember like the moment when I decided I was going to grow flowers, but it must have been sometime around 2024, 2023, 24. I knew I'd had enough of the gardening, I didn't want to do it anymore. I literally just wanted to be on the field with the chickens, and I thought I could just grow flowers here, and you know, I really thought it would be easy. I thought, how how difficult can it be? You just like I can grow stuff. This is my job, it's what I do. I'm not perfect at it, but I can do it. And I remember thinking, yeah, I could just grow flowers, it'd be so easy. And then 2024 was the year of the trial beds, so that was really the first year that I started, and I did actually sell some bits and pieces, and I've talked about that in a previous episode when I took them to a local florist and unwrapped them and all the petals fell off. It was a disaster, and they've never bought from me again. But you know, you live and learn. So at some point, which I can't remember now, I decided I would grow the cut flowers, and so I started it all in 2024, and then really went for it in 2025. So that's where the story came from. So I hope that um I hope that all makes sense. It wasn't too convoluted. I did have a glass of Bailey's before I started recording the podcast to celebrate the fact that it's Tuesday evening, and um, so anyway, hope that all made sense. Now I've got a very busy week, you won't be surprised to hear that. I've got hundreds and hundreds more seedlings to get into the ground, and I want to do the bulk of it tomorrow because the weather forecast for Thursday is really, really nasty. Lots and lots of rain, which is great for the IBCs, but not so great for planting. So I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week, and I hope that you'll come back and join me on Friday. If you've got any questions or anything you'd like me to answer, please do get in touch. You can always send me a DM on Instagram. I think my email address is in the show notes, and also don't forget to check out the time lapse reel of the Cosmos from Daniel because it's absolutely amazing. Alright, that's it from me. All the best.