If you love bringing fresh flowers into your home, but don’t love the price of weekly bouquets, there's an easy solution: You can grow your own!

A "cut flower garden" is fun and rewarding, and can work in any garden. However, not every flower is a good candidate. I'll show you the prettiest and easiest blooms and the conditions your garden needs to have them grow.

A cut flower garden isn’t just beautiful, it’s practical too!

These flowers also make a great gift for your friends and neighbors!

While all flowers are beautiful, not all are ideal for bouquets. Some, like impatiens or petunias, have short stems that don’t hold up well in a vase. For cutting, you want flowers with long, sturdy stems, a long vase life, and continual blooming.

Here are some of my top picks for a beginner cut flower garden:

Zinnias are fast-growing and have a lot of variety! You can find small zinnias that grow only a foot tall for containers, or tall varieties that get 5 to 6 feet tall. They only need 8 weeks to grow blooms from seed and perform well in poor soil.

It's a classic bloom that gives you a LOT of bang for your buck if you grow your own. A single flower costs a dollar at the store, but you can grow dozens from seed for a few dollars. The seeds are big so it's easy to handle with the kids. You'll want to protect the seedlings from hungry animals for the first week, but after that they are maintenance free.

Large sunflower varieties typically only produce one bloom per plant, so plant new sunflower seeds once every 2 weeks if you want blooms all summer long.

Cosmos agave beautiful lacy foliage, but don't let their delicate look fool you, they are great landscape plants that hold up well in vases.

These bulbs have gorgeous blooms and you can dig them up, store the bulbs inside over the winter, and replant year after year. They bloom best in late summer and autumn.

Taller and more dramatic than their smaller counterparts, African marigolds are easy to grow and have large flowers that come in shades of reds, yellows, and oranges. Plus, their scent can help deter garden pests.

Roses are a great landscape shrub. They have a reputation for being finicky, but modern varieties are easy to grow and are by far the longest blooming landscape shrub for our area. Knock-out roses bloom from May to November.