Garden Tips & Resources

Archive for the ‘Annuals’ Category

Flowers are a great way to accent your home’s landscaping. They have a knack for complementing all of the previous flora which you or previous owners may have planted in your front or back yard with their elegant beauty and timeless forms.

Unfortunately for most amateur gardeners, flowering plants are both a blessing and a curse as they provide unsurpassed beauty and style but generally require lots of care and maintenance if you want them to look spectacular throughout the year.

While this is true for most flowering plants, there are a variety of more durable flowers which have been shown to survive just about anything with their beautiful flowers still intact. These amazing plants are commonly known as sedum, and one variety in particular – autumn fire sedum is an incredibly durable plant which produces flowers the colors of which you could have only dreamed of.

One of the reasons that autumn fire sedum plants are so incredibly durable is because they are constructed like tanks of the plant world. With their long, thick and robust stems they are able to support the weight of their big, beautiful flowers – a feat that most other plant species cannot readily undertake.

As long as you can provide your autumn fire sedum plants with the proper amount of drainage and a healthy dose of water from time to time, you will have an amazing garden that can stand up to even the harshest abuse.

While this astounding durability is true for nearly all varieties of sedum, the autumn fire sedum is a breed apart from the rest. Taking its name from the time it blooms (August to October) and the brilliant colors of its blossoms, autumn fire sedum is surely a plant not to be missed with its lavish oranges, yellows and reds. These bronze and coppery flowers are well matched with the grayish green leaves of the plant itself, lending it to be a must have plant for any home garden.

Annuals provide more color, more quickly than any other group of flowering plants. They definitely give you the biggest “bang” for your color buck! Moreover, they give you planting choices as well: you can plant them from seed or from seedling six packs or as already established plants in four, six or eight inch pots. 

The life cycle of annuals is to sprout from seed, flower, set seed, and die within one growing season. Many flowers, vegetables, and herbs are planted as annuals, either seeded or set out in the spring to grow during the summer and die when frost hits.

Some annuals will reseed themselves, thereby providing several years of colorful viewing pleasure for minimal expenditure of effort. Annuals come in virtually every color, height, and leaf texture there is; they are especially showy in masses of solid or mixed colors, but also appealing when planted in small groups or as colorful accent plants in perennial borders.

Many annuals are also well suited for container gardens on porches, roof gardens, terraces, patios and decks, while some annual vines may be grown on fences, arbors, porch rails, or trellises.

Here are some planting suggestions that will add annual color to your garden:

To make your garden glow with yellow and orange shades, choose marigolds, nasturtiums, mimulus, celosia, chrysanthemums, California poppies, or sunflowers.

For pink color accents, include some wax begonias, snapdragons, cosmos, dianthus, impatiens, portulaca or petunias.

Blue choices include ageratum, browallia, heliotrope, morning glories, lobelia, forget-me-nots and torenia.

The best white annuals are alyssum, crepis, gypsophilia, nicotiana and mullien.

For gorgeous foliage annuals, choose amaranthus, ornamental cabbage, coleus, euphorbia or castor oil plant.

Though annuals are less costly than perennials, they do require the same high level of soil preparation, fertilizing, watering and weeding as their more permanent plant relatives. Most annuals hail from semiarid climates and require full sunshine to thrive; some, however, came originally from woodland environs and do well in shadier sites.

Annuals that need full sun, such as periwinkle and marigold, grow and flower best when they receive at least 4 to 6 hours of direct sunlight each day, while woodland-based species perform best under partial to heavy shade. When planting annuals, avoid heavy soils and areas where water can collect and become waterlogged as well as areas close to large trees and shrubs with thirsty feeder roots.

Most gardeners add annual flowers to their gardens, window boxes and containers to ensure that there is obvious color in the garden all season long. It also is ideal for filling ‘gap’ times when your perennials are not in bloom, such as early summer and late fall. There are so many varieties of annual blooms that the only limits to what you can include in your garden is restricted by your imagination!

Annual flower beds are a beautiful site to see. Since most annual flowers are quite colorful, they’re planted into beds where color is most desired or needed. Used for a wide variety of exterior landscaping and garden design purposes, annual flowers come in every color of the rainbow and they can have any number of textures and shapes too.

Annuals are also popular because they’re versatile. In other words: You don’t have to make a long term gardening commitment to them. If you’d simply like to try various flower colors and arrangements around your home and lawn, you can put in annual flower beds whose designs change every year.

Creating an annual flower bed can be quite easy too. They range from the quick and simple to the more elaborate and established varieties. If for instance, you want a quick and easy annual flower bed, then you’d simply pick out a spot in your yard and get started with planting it. You could add a bed border later, or just not put a border on it at all so that the area is easily acclimated back into the rest of the yard next season.

If you know for sure you’ll want a garden bed in a specific place for many years to come of course, then you might choose to create a raised bed instead. Even raised beds are quite versatile when used for planting annuals though, because while the location may stay the same, you’ll be able to try out many different types of flowers as often as you’d like.

Quite possibly the most difficult decision you’ll need to make when creating annual flower beds, is to choose which flowers to grow this year. Since annuals come in so many different varieties, colors, shapes, sizes, and textures, you may be tempted to simply plant an eclectic bunch of mismatched everything. And if you like the eclectic style, that’s of course perfectly fine to do.

When planting a wide variety of annual flowers, there are of course several guidelines you should follow to get the best results. First and foremost you’ll need to make sure each of the annual plants you’ve chosen can grow in the flower bed you intend to put them in. You won’t have much luck if you try to mix shade plants with sun lovers for instance.

The other thing you’ll need to know is how large the annual flowers will grow throughout the season. If you plant a little bit of everything randomly in your flower bed, you may find yourself with something of a mess in about a month or two. If you have tall flowers growing in the front of your bed for instance, and little bitty ground covers flowering in the back, you won’t see those flowering ground covers well at all because the tall plants will obscure them from site.

So a basic rule of thumb for flower bed gardening is to put the taller plants in the back, and plant successively shorter ones in front of them. Repeat this with each plant size, until you have the shortest, smallest, or trailing plants at the very front of your garden bed. Then when everything is matured and blooming nicely, you’ll be able to enjoy the full variations of colors, textures, and groupings in your annual flower bed.