Cool-season annuals
I have spring flowers on my mind. On the front porch are seed trays full of soil blocks planted with foxgloves and snapdragons and flowering carrot and scabiosa, hardening off to be planted in the next few days. They’ve been growing under lights in the cool basement for weeks, but now I’m leaving them out nights and sometimes have fans softly blowing on them so their tender stems will toughen up before they go into the ground.
We could categorize these spring-blooming flowers as “things to use with peonies,” but their season begins before and ends well after the peonies are showing off, and many cool-season annuals are so spectacular they compete with peonies for my attention.
As soon as the young plants are strong enough to plant, I’ll be ready—mostly. I’ve inventoried the length of landscape fabric, with planting holes already cut, to make sure I have enough. A new shipment of lightweight frost cloth, the spun-fabric stuff, has been delivered by Hummert’s from St. Joseph, near Kansas City. Bob has reworked nine 250-foot raised rows, 4 feet wide on the top. I need to do more about amending the soil, but the soil blocks themselves, which are compost-based little high-nutrient energy bars, will add quite a lot of amendment to the planting space (Eliot Coleman has calculated how much they add per acre). And as I plant more seedlings in soil blocks, season after season, it amounts to quite a lot of food for the soil. And the soil blocks are to the plants as egg yolks are to the developing chick.
Though I’ve kept flower gardens since I was four, cool-season annuals are a category of plants I was never aware of until four years ago, when I learned about them from Lisa Mason Ziegler’s little book, Cool Flowers. She brought this knowledge to the consciousness of this generation’s commercial growers: that these are flowers should be planted in fall, so that their root systems develop, then die back and burst forth in spring for early bloom. People must have known about all this before World War II, when everyone gardened who could, who had any room to do it. But learning about this method was a revelation to me—planting snapdragons or foxgloves in May, when the tomato plants go in, is far too late where I am (zone 6a at the farm and 6b at the North Lawrence garden). These flowers want to be up and strong and blooming by then. They can’t take another month to grow; it will start getting hot by June, and they like it cool. I had gotten clues that my planting dates on some of my flowers were off when I saw the larkspur and nigella that had self-sown in the North Lawrence garden looking better than the spring-sown plants; when I read the Ziegler book, I understood.
Over the past several years, I’ve refined my list of favorites—which plants, which colors. And I’m thinking of putting together a guide about my way of growing them, and which I like best, and why. Some are far more useful or reliable than others, and I like to grow to a color palette that gives me flexibility.
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There’s a narrow window of time to plant cool-season annuals here; they need to go into the field early enough so that they have as much time as possible to grow strong root systems before the day length drops to 10 hours (this I learned from Coleman’s book, The Winter Harvest Handbook), which in the Kansas City area happens in November. So I try to plant them during a two-week window around mid-September. But September days can be hot, in the 90s, and that’s hard on new transplants, so I try to be flexible. I hire people to help me plant during this window of time. There are several thousand plants, and they all want to be planted at once.
I also cover the plants, tray by tray as they’re planted, with the six-foot-wide row cover. I follow a method developed by growers in past decades of setting nine-gauge wire wickets over the rows (Bob buys a roll of this wire and cuts it into the wickets) and covering that with the fabric. This protects the little plants, as they’re getting established, from too much sun exposure and from the drying effects of the wind. It also keeps animals from getting interested in them. We hold the fabric down by laying old junk hose along the edges and rolling the fabric into the hose, then securing it with staples and eventually putting more wickets over the fabric. Using the hose makes the fabric less likely to tear away on windy days. The row cover stays in place over the winter and doesn’t get lifted until the plants are good and strong in spring. I lay the frost cloth flat on the ground over direct-sown annual seeds planted in September.
The plants get a good watering as soon as they’re planted, then more water every day until the first big rain. I like to let them go through two good rains before I stop watering, but I monitor them closely. Once they’re established in the fall, they really need nothing but the protection of the frost cloth—which means life or death for them in their first few days in the field and makes all the difference thereafter. Late fall rain, winter temperatures and spring rains give them what they need to grow; the woven black landscape fabric covering the rows holds a lot of the moisture. During the plants’ early fall growing time and their spring growth spurt, I selectively spray them with a foliar feed of Fertrell 3-1-1 solution.
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When the plants are about a foot tall in spring, I place supports over them. Typically growers use plastic netting for this, but because I live with someone who loves to weld, I have metal supports with folding legs that I place along the row. I can handle them myself. The plants must have this support to be a viable crop. Wind and thunderstorms would take them down.
The whole fall planting round starts in early August, when I mix the soil blocks and sow the seeds in the trays. And before that, I have to make sure that I have all the ingredients I need for the soil blocks and all the growing lights are working. Some of the flowers planted the previous autumn will still be hanging on then, having been cut back so I can continue to get a few stems: the black scabiosa, the pastel cottage yarrow (a perennial, but I treat it as an annual).
And after the cool-season annuals are planted, there will be the double-flowered tulip bulbs and a new round of peony tubers to go in, so I am thinking about spring right around the year.