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ANNUALS
 
The Annual Parade
 
Annuals are without a doubt the hardest-working, most productive, attractive, and undemanding flower group in the whole garden. Once annuals are planted, a gardener seldom need spend much attention to them. (To tell the truth, they seldom get any attention from most home gardeners, and yet continue to bloom day after day throughout most of the summer, and in some cases, far into the fall.) To top it all off, an annual lives its full life span in one year!
 
DRESS UP YOUR GARDEN WITH AMAZING ANNUALS
 
These amazing flowers have only one purpose in life, and that is to give beauty and enjoyment to the world around them. These beauties are the elves of the flowering nation. Happy-go-lucky, carefree ramblers, they complement and help accent all of the other plants in your garden.
 
Annuals keep the rest of your garden in stitches most of the summer with their antics. They crawl under the pines and tickle their limbs, they snore beneath the maple, and dance with the birch. They are truly the lovable jesters of the queen’s court, and will seemingly try anything once. For instance, they’ll try growing in the shade just because you want them to.
 
Anyone can grow annuals if you will just relax, and plan to have fun. There are only a few things that you need to know to have a beautiful and successful annual garden. So pay close attention, and follow me down the garden path.
 
DESIGN WITH A PURPOSE
 
 
Sketch It Out
 
When it comes to adding annuals to your garden, you must stick with a pre-planned sketch. As simple as it may seem, planning a garden without a garden plan is like taking a trip without a map. A well-thought-out plan allows you to get the best possible results from the flowers you select.
 
You must make certain that you have a place for everyone. It’s embarrassing to invite a flower over to spend the summer, only to find that you don’t have a spare bed for her, and then you have to rush around and find a makeshift spot where she will be uncomfortable all season long. Her discomfort will be reflected in her performance, and you will have no one to blame but yourself! All it takes to have a successful annual garden is a little foresight, which will only take a few minutes of your time.
 
PLAN BEFORE YOU PLANT
 
GREEN THUMB TIPS
1. Before buying annuals, plan your beds on paper, close to scale, so that you eliminate waste.
2. Don’t plant annuals that crowd and grow wildly in the same bed with perennials because they will crowd out the perennials.
3. You don’t have to wait until frost-free weather to start your flower garden. Lots of bedding plants, such as sweet alyssum and calendulas, actually enjoy cool weather.
 
Give Your Flowers A Home
 
Do you have a new home and want flowers right now? Or maybe you are renting, and want to create a lovely effect without spending a lot of money. If so, then annuals are for you.
 
If the property already has shrubs, plant annuals between the shrubs or in front of those that are well established.
 
Do you love the bulb blossoms that are such a delight in the early spring, and then vanish for another year? Plant annuals among them, either in the fall or early spring, and they will do much to “hide the fading bulb foliage. You might try centaurea, larkspur, or phlox.
 
Annuals are very obliging. Use them to fill gaps in your perennial beds where they will supply lovely color all summer long while the perennials are resting. Most perennials are either spring or fall-blooming, and without annuals in these beds, you aren’t going to have very much color during the summer months.
 
Of course, you can also use annuals by themselves to provide a quick and inexpensive wealth of blooms in beds and borders. If you have the space, consider making a cutting garden. Actually, most annuals will bloom far longer and more abundantly than perennials. Many, such as pansies, even benefit from constant cutting.
 
And today, with the diversity of form, color, size, and height available, you can plan for just about any effect you feel will best express “you.”
 
MOST ANNUALS LOVE FULL SUN
 
PLANNING
 
 
You Make The Bed, But They’ve Got To Sleep In It
 
The two most important things to consider when planning an annual garden bed are exposure and size.
 
Here Comes The Sun!
 
Most annuals are sun-loving plants (though some will obligingly grow in shade and half-shade), so you can logically expect them to flower most vigorously and abundantly in a sunny location. Dig your bed in an area that can offer them five or six hours of full sun each day, and then stand back and watch them grow!
 
Size Up The Situation
 
Don’t make your beds less than 3 feet wide; anything narrower won’t give you much of a showing of color. Generally speaking, 5 to 6 feet wide is plenty of space for a well-planned bed; if you make it any larger, the effect of individual flowers may be lost.
 
The length of the bed will, quite likely, be determined by the layout of your property. And right here, in the middle of all this excitement, I will inject a sobering thought: remember, we want this flower-growing business to be a fun thing—don’t bite off more than you can chew. You’ll enjoy your flowers much more if you tailor the beds to what you can take care of handily in the time you have available. Gardening is fun, but it does take time to do it well. Weeds are always with us and constant vigilance is the price of liberty—liberty from a frustrating and back-breaking accumulation which can seemingly grow up overnight if you don’t keep a watchful eye.
 
When you plant too much in a frenzied burst of spring enthusiasm, gardening can become a burden, and defeat its own purpose, which is to give you pleasure. If you are a first-year gardener, plan beds of manageable size so you can always keep them looking good, and enjoy them at the same time. Don’t try to grow too many different plants. Confine yourself to a few, choosing them after considering color, variety, and growth habit.
 
The mail-order catalogs are beguiling, the descriptions glowing, and the profusion from which to choose bewildering. But after awhile, you can begin to get your bearings and sort things out.
 
TO SEED OR NOT TO SEED … THAT IS THE QUESTION
 
When it comes to annuals, you have a choice of starting with seeds or waiting until the professionally-grown bedding plants appear in your favorite garden shop. If you choose to grow from seed, you can either start the seeds indoors, or sow them directly into your garden.
 
An Inside Job
 
Let’s concentrate on starting seed indoors, which is fine, as long as you don’t do it too early; seedlings grown too long indoors become tall and spindly. The result is a tendency to fall over. And don’t start too many—you may run out of sunny windows!
 
A TREAT FOR THE BIRDS
I’m sure that most of you know that many kinds of birds love to eat sunflower seeds. That’s one of the primary reasons for buying them at the store or growing sunflowers in your garden. When you grow your own sunflowers, however, you don’t have to harvest and clean the seeds. Simply leave the seeds in place, and the birds will find them and eat them up.
 
You can also have fun by cutting off a sunflower head and hanging it upside down somewhere near the house where you can see it from a nearby window. Birds that are not adverse to feeding upside down, like nuthatches, will come to the sunflower head, and perform their antics for you.
 
Keep ’Em Healthy
 
You must also address the problem of damping-off up front. Damping-off is a fast-spreading fungus which attacks young plants, and can cause a whole flat of your pretty baby plants to topple over and die overnight—just like that!
 
There are a number of ways to avoid this problem. You can buy a sterilized commercial soil mix, or you can sterilize the soil you use by baking it in your oven at 250°F. until a potato bakes through. Various seed disinfectants, such as Semesan, also can help prevent this flower tragedy.
 
You can also use vermiculite instead of soil. Vermiculite is weed-free, holds moisture extremely well, and is so light that the delicate seedling roots can penetrate it easily. When transplanting time comes, the roots will slip out easily. Vermiculite is inexpensive and obtainable at most garden supply stores.
 
In addition, don’t overwater your seedlings, and give them plenty of sunlight and ventilation—these cultural practices will help prevent damping-off.