Perhaps when you think of gardening you think of a bountiful harvest of vegetables. Vegetable gardening is just one way to enjoy this hobby. Gardening with flowers is another. Gardening with flowers is a wonderful way to relax while beautifying your yard.

Gardening With Flowers: Understanding Annuals

Annuals are flowers that last for one season. When you plant flowering annuals, you can expect them to bloom for the season and then die off. Depending on what climate and planting zone that you live in, annuals may reseed and come back the next year. There are ways to extend the bloom time of an annual, but you can’t save an annual from year to year. Even if you planted annual gardening flowers in a pot and then brought them inside before the first frost, your annuals would die. They only live for one cycle, which lasts through one season.

If you want to add quick color to your yard, annuals are the way to go. You can grow them from seed or purchase mature annuals at a local garden center. If you choose to grow them from seed, you can start your seeds indoors weeks before you plant to place your plants in your yard, or often you can direct sow annuals right into the soil after the danger of frost has passed.

If you want to get the most blooms from your annuals, make sure that you give them lots of plant food, water, and sunlight. If you constantly let your plants dry out and get droopy, they won’t bloom well and might not even last the entire season. It is also important to dead head your annual flowers. Simply pick spent blooms off your plant and it should send out many more blooms. At the end of the season, let a few of the dead flowers remain on the plant. When they are dry you can collect seeds from them and save them for next year’s garden.

Gardening With Flowers: Understanding Perennials

Unlike annuals, perennials come back again each year. Flowering perennials tend to last less time than flowering annuals, but if you plan carefully, you can always have at least one type of perennial blooming in your garden. Many perennials are biannual bloomers. This means that you will only get flowers every other year. A well established perennial garden always has resting perennials and blooming perennials at the same time, so that you never have to go without beautiful flowers.