Three Annuals to Start from Seed this Spring
By Sonya Welter
Those six packs of flowers at the nursery are tempting for the instant color they provide and the minimal work they require, but filling even a small backyard garden with store-bought transplants can get pretty spendy.
I prefer to start most of my flowers from seed, which gives me access to a lot more varieties and stretches my gardening dollar further.
I don’t have a fancy indoor seed starting station set up yet, but even here in northern Minnesota there are plenty of annuals that can be sown directly into the garden with minimal fussing.
Three of my favorites are sunflowers, zinnias and sweet peas. As an added bonus, if you want to save your own seeds to plant next year, these three plants also produce easily-harvestable seeds that require no special storage beyond a cool, dry location.
Sunflowers
I was shocked the first time I saw sunflowers being sold as transplants, because the seeds germinate in a matter of days and grow like weeds. Sunflowers range from mammoth varieties that grow 12 or more feet tall to miniature sunflowers that barely reach 18 inches, and they come in all shades of yellow, orange and bronze.
If you are extraordinarily cheap (like me) you can try sowing in-the-shell black oil sunflowers from birdseed. The germination rate won’t be too great and the resulting plant is nothing fancy, just your basic yellow sunflower, but goldfinches and other birds will flock to the mature seedheads, and you sure can’t beat the price per ounce.
Zinnias
You need to wait until after the danger of frost has passed to plant zinnias, but once they’re in the ground they shoot up fast and are flowering by midsummer, and they will keep on blooming until the frost hits in the fall.
Zinnias come in almost any color imaginable, and are usually sold as mixes of colors, although Baker’s Creek and a few other seed catalogs sell varieties individually. Zinnias make wonderful cut flowers, and cutting back the plants will induce more blooms.
Sweet Peas
Deeply fragrant sweet peas come in shades of pink, lavender and creamy white. They can be trained up a trellis to give your yard an old-fashioned, cottage garden look, or you can train them up the fence of your vegetable garden to hide the ugly chicken wire.
Like garden peas, sweet peas can tolerate some lights frosts, so they can be sown as soon as the ground is workable in the spring. Nicking the seeds with a rasp or nail file will hasten germination, but it’s not necessary. In cooler climates, sweet peas will produce flowers until the frost if you regularly deadhead spent blossoms.
