Let's face it – weddings are rather expensive things. Someone quoted me £20k as the average figure recently, and blimey, I can well believe it. I got married in June, and while we invested in the major things, like caterers and a marquee, there was no way I could write out a huge cheque for our wedding flowers. For someone without a big budget and who is heavily involved in growing their own, it just wasn't an option. So, back in October 2013, I set about my project – and the nuts and bolts of it is we spent £200 for what should have cost us £800.

Please don't zone out if weddings aren't your thing – cut flowers can lift any summer party or knees up, and just plonking a home-grown vase's worth on your desk can be hugely uplifting. I learned loads of practical tips for home cut flower production in the process, so let me divulge them.

Selection, sowing and growing on

The flowers after their transfer from drainpipes to growbags. Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain

My plan was to grow the filler flowers and foliage – I wasn't up to the stress of growing the statement blooms (in my case, roses and peonies) and in any case, the cost of buying the stock plants would have been more than the florist's fee. Annual flowers and herbs were my main theme – cornflowers, larkspur, mint, golden oregano – with whites, pinks, blues, purples and zesty greens being the colour plan.

First to the herbs: these were dug up last autumn and potted into 3-litre pots. I scrimped divisions of peppermint, oregano, variegated applemint, lemon balm and sage from my mum's garden, along with some self-sown Alchemilla mollis and perennial cornflowers (in hindsight, foxgloves would have been handy, too). I used gritty compost to keep these plants "hard and mean" – floppy foliage in the vase was not on the cards. The pots were put in a sheltered spot outside, out of reach of rabbits, then bought into an unheated greenhouse in March to ensure the foliage wasn't battered by the weather. It worked a treat. That's when I ordered the annuals.

Robust annuals such as lupins make ideal homegrown wedding flowers. Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain

I say ordered, I should confess here that the marvellous folk at Suttons Seeds sent me £20 worth of seeds for sowing, plus extra packets for making seed bomb wedding favours (which went down a treat but demanded very clear labelling to avoid being eaten as chocolate truffles). I chose robust annuals – scabious, clary, gypsophila, lupin (a gorgeous scented annual variety called 'Pink Fairy'), nigella ('Midnight Blue', which is a stonker of a selection, really deep blue) – plus a few delicate things such as antirrhinum, didiscus and stocks.

Because annuals aren't keen on root disturbance, I sowed into lengths of drainpipe and then, once germinated and thinned, also in the unheated greenhouse, I (helped by my dad and other half) hoofed them into pre-watered, pre-warmed growing bags. It worked – the plants shrugged off any transplant shock and continued to romp away, just demanding a daily light water.

Timings were always going to be a gamble (the didiscus and scabious were tantalisingly in bud come the wedding day). If you have space, two sowings a month apart would make a safer bet. Most annuals are forgiving, though – once flowering, if you continue to cut them they'll carry on producing new blooms (the only exclusion to this rule seemed to be the stocks which stubbornly produced zero sideshoots despite half of them being cut back a month before the wedding). So, come early June the greenhouse was full of flowers. What a relief!

Forages and flower supplements

On the Tuesday evening before the wedding, Lucy set off for some flower foraging with her secateurs. Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain

I'm blessed to live in a village where there are lots of keen gardeners (and I'm not too proud to ask), so on the Tuesday evening before the wedding (a Saturday) we went off with our secateurs. Due to the warm spring the cow parsley had gone over, but I'd been eyeing up a patch of ground elder and it bloomed bang on time. We were generously donated pinks, oxe-eye daisies, alstroemerias, foxgloves, roses (gorgeous, David Austin-style varieties – a real result), red valerian and philadelphus – all were ferried home pronto, stripped of their lower leaves and plunged up to their necks in cold water (garden trugs worked brilliantly here, and evening or morning harvest is said to be better than daytime cutting).

The finished table decorations. Photograph: Lucy Chamberlain

The following morning we transported the blooms to a cool garage, replenishing the water daily. Come Thursday evening, a team of fabulous volunteers helped cut the growbag flowers and deftly transform the whole collection into fifty table vases, three bouquets, a little flowergirl basket, two corsages, four buttonholes, two pedestals and four tent pole displays. It was in itself a thoroughly enjoyable evening, and led to the big day being hugely personal, so I can thoroughly recommend the experience.

(I also made my own confetti out of flower petals, which saved me £50, but reckon that I've run out of room here to write about it. If anyone wants to know, just ask).

• Lucy Chamberlain is the editor of Grow Your Own magazine, which contains a wealth of information about growing your own vegetables. There are even more resources on the website, including the new growing guides section. Follow Lucy on Twitter at @bramble36