Apr. 12 Column: Annual Flowers

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about growing vegetables lately. Well, that’s because I’m getting so many questions from folks who’ve never grown a garden before. And that is awesome! But for today’s column, I wanted to discuss some of the easiest and prettiest annual flowers you can grow. Here’s a link to it in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Annuals add delightful color all season long. 

Annual flowers grow, bloom, set seeds and die in a single growing season (compared to biennials and perennials). I included some of my absolute favorites to grow and the best part of all is that you can start them from seed in your garden.

The important thing to remember is that they shouldn’t be planted until the danger of frost has past. Here in my zone 5b garden (and in the Inland Northwest, which is also in zone 6), we need to wait until mid-May. But I’m OK with that because I have plenty of other things to do in the meantime!

If you’re wondering what that fabulous flower is at the top left of this post, that is ‘Cupcakes’ cosmos. As I mentioned in my column, I grew them last year and am  absolutely smitten with them. At the very top of the post, those amazing blue flowers are ‘Dwarf Blue Ensign’ morning glories. I know a lot of folks don’t like morning glories but I grew these last year and they weren’t invasive at all.

For this week’s “Everyone Can Grow a Garden” video, I thought you would enjoy a slideshow of awesome annual flowers both to perk you up and to give you ideas of what you might like to plant this year. The slideshow includes dahlias, which are grown from tubers. In regions with cold winters, I should mention that the tubers have to be lifted and stored over the winter. And if you forget to lift them, that makes them annuals, too, right?