Backyard Wedding Flowers DIY: Growing Your Own

I never, ever thought that I would end up trying to grow flowers from seeds for a backyard wedding in September, even though we actually grow a lot of things in our garden over the course of the year.

It's not that we're strangers to flowers in our garden. We were lucky that the previous owners of our house put in plenty of bulbs, flowering bushes, and other types of perennials. Unfortunately from the scheduling side of things, all of these flowers are done by mid-August.

That's where starting seeds in the middle of July comes in (leading to the adorable little seedlings you see above).  Hopefully, they will end up as flowering plants right around the time of the wedding. I know that it's kind of an odd way to go about things, but hey, why not give it a try? We'll probably have to buy some flowers for the wedding anyway; these will just be a nice added bonus if they end up maturing properly. And things tend to grow really well in this area of Maryland, so it's a pretty good bet.

We're planning on transplanting them into pots and baskets, so that we can arrange them for the best positioning as we decide the flow of the wedding day more fully.

Here is what we've bought/planted so far. We decided to get pretty much one of each type of flower seed that was left in the hardware store this late in the season. Most are meant to flower in summer or late summer.

• Ageratum
• Poor Man's Weather Glass
• Celosia
• Marvel of Peru Four O'Clock
• Amaranth (pretty leaves)
• Larkspur
• Zinnia

Wish us luck!