Top five tips for planting annuals at your home or cottage.

It’s that time of the year: the risk of frost is over, your spring garden cleanups are completed, and your landscape is begging for that splash of colour that annuals provide. Annuals use their limited time well by filling it with rapid foliage growth, beautiful, colourful, fragrant and long-lasting blooms. Everyone likes a blooming flower, but one that lasts all season long is easy to fall in love with.

There are many ways to use annuals to enhance your home or cottage and make it a bright and beautiful place to enjoy your time. Annuals can be used in your landscape, in your gardens, as fillers amongst perennials and shrubs for constant bloom and colour, for border plantings using bedding plants (impatiens, begonias, zinnias) that add a huge punch of colour/interest and wow to any landscape.

A favourite use of annuals is container planting and displays using window boxes, hanging baskets, planters, pots and any container you would like to use on your decks, docks, patios and entrances.

Container plantings using annuals allow you to add visual interest to any areas of your property with colour, fragrance and interesting foliage — perhaps a simple herb planter by a kitchen window or a planter full of annuals to use as cut flowers for bouquets all summer long.

5 tips for Annual Planting

• Get the best soil. Like all plants, annuals need rich soil to grow healthy. Whether in a garden or a container, nutritious soil is a must.
• Add a granular fertilizer when planting annuals, and fertilize throughout the summer to enhance colour, blooms and growth. (20-20-20) (15-30-15)
• Pick your annuals wisely. You need to keep the location, sun/shade, completed growth size, specific needs of the flower, and most important colour of bloom. Pick a theme and complementary colours and foliage. Try to include some height, fillers and trailing annuals. Remember that some of the interest can be added from the colour, shape, and texture of the foliage of the plant.
• When planting your containers or garden beds, drench the soil before planting, break up the root ball being planted to help the roots grow into the soil, and make sure to have at least 6” of loose rich soil.
• To ensure continuous blooms and healthy full foliage throughout the season, remember to deadhead spent blooms and pinch back leggy foliage.

You can plant annuals in anything that inspires you: old eclectic antiques, flower bags, vertical garden walls, water features and vegetable gardens. Remember that no two gardens are the same and no two days in the same garden will be either.

Top Five Shade Loving Annuals

• Boston Fern
• Double Impatiens
• Lobeila
• Tuberous Begonia
• Fuscia

Top Five Sun Annuals

• Geraniums
• Wave Petunia
• Zinnias
• Potato Vine
• Calibracoa

- Advice from the team at Done Right Property Maintenance