First Harvest & Fresh Bouquets!!

An exciting day indeed!!

The first full harvest at The Old Flower Patch took place this morning!  Buckets filled with beautiful old-fashioned flowers and wildflowers... how can that not make you smile?

The harvest this morning included Shasta daisies, yarrow, blanket flower, larkspur, feverfew, cosmos, cornflowers, sweet peas, and snapdragons.  And this is just the beginning!




Clearly, I'm very excited to see how these first bouquets turn out, and even more excited to share them with you!  Enjoy!

 

Cornflowers! My very favorite "weed"

Cornflowers, officially known as Centaurea cyanus and sometimes better known as bachelors buttons, are one of my very favorite wildflowers - there's nothing else quite like cornflower blue!

 

Once so common a wildflower in England, it was actually believed that in bad crop years, grain seed that was sown came up as cornflowers instead!  The pesky weed grew so thick amongst the corn and grain that the edges of sickles were dulled from reaping fields choked with cornflower, earning it the old name Hurt-sickle. 


Even so, it was grown in gardens in Tudor times, and a wide variety of colors were in cultivation before 1630.  Today, it's one of my favorite cut flowers, blooming faithfully through the spring and summer.