Annual Flower Bed

You may remember that each year I plant up an annual flower bed on the plot. It provides cut flowers and the bees enjoy it as much as we do.

For the past few years I have raised the seeds in pots and planted them out as described in this post. The end result had been fairly successful even though at the planting out stage things haven't looked too promising.

This year I am trying something different for two reasons, the first being that space in the greenhouse is at a premium and, with fruit and vegetable plants taking priority, the seedlings never really had the best upbringing.

The second reason is that last year I tried some direct sowing and the plants seemed to grow stronger. The reason for the first direct sowing was that I wanted to use up the left over seeds so I mixed them up and sowed them in a trench of compost, just like we sow parsnips and carrots. The seeds were sown in mid-June and resulted in an attractive display of much healthier looking plants.

In retrospect I sowed the seeds too thickly and also I should have considered that some varieties would dominated as the cosmos did and hide the lower growing plants. I should have graded the seeds according to the height that the plants would achieve. Overall though it was a success and continued flowering after the originally planted bed had faded.

This spurred me on to try sowing some hardy annual seeds in autumn to overwinter and hopefully produce earlier flowers. I sowed cornflowers, some larkspur seeds that were a couple of years old, calendula and a packet of mixed annual seeds on 15 September and covered with enviromesh. This was more to protect them from being eaten than to offer protection from the weather.

The seeds germinated in a week and by mid October looked like this.

They continued to grow through November.

In March, when the mesh was removed, the bed looked like this.

The cornflowers were doing well, most of the calendula had been eaten presumably by slugs and the larkspur failed which could have been down to using old seed. As for the mixed seeds, there is a mix of leaf types but until they flower I can't say which varieties have survived. The cornflowers have gone on to produce the strongest looking cornflowers that I have grown and they are already providing cut flowers.

I'm standing by the side of the bed to give an idea of the height that the cornflowers have grown. I am five foot one and a half inches (just over 1.56m). I've always aspired to being five foot two).

The mild winter could have helped the plants to survive and it will be interesting to see what happens next year as I plan to repeat the process again, maybe adding some different varieties to the cornflowers which will be a must. Has anyone any recommendations?

The success with self sown annuals set me thinking, that maybe I have been too soft with the hardy annuals, so this year I decided to try the direct sowing method. I sorted the seeds that I had bought into hardy and half hardy. Some seeds of each of the half hardy varieties have been sown inside as an insurance policy. 

The hardy varieties and some seeds from the half hardy types were sown direct in compost trenches on 13 May and some only five days later are already germinating. I've learned for the late summer sowing and have sown each variety of seeds in a patch rather than mixing them together and tried to position smaller varieties in positions where they have less chance of being swamped by cosmos.

No doubt there will be patches in the germination and so indoor sown half hardy annuals will be used to plug the gaps.

The full list of the seeds sown is here

As with all gardening it is now wait and see time.

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett