Seed sowing: Some textural crops
This evening in April is misty, and as I write in the upstairs study, the cat is settled on my lap and a votive candle is burning on the desk. Outside the south window, I see the redbuds in color at the edge of the woods on the hill at a little distance. Out the east bedroom window, visible through the doorway, the elms are showing soft lime green buds in the wooded hills in that direction. The north windows are open a little, and I hear cardinals calling.
Bob is out in the shop making a few more peony supports, which I will need within days because even the latest-flowering varieties are up out of the ground. The earliest, ‘Coral Charm’, are 18 inches tall and forming buds.
Today I dropped off this season’s first flowers at the Merc in Lawrence, straight bunches of tulips: soft golden peony-flowering ‘Verona’ and honey-scented double-flowered white ‘Mondial’. Six months, which felt like years, have passed since I dropped off the last bouquets of 2020. Our lives are permanently changed.
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This post, part of my series on seed sowing, covers a few flower varieties recommended for sowing indoors in spring, five to eight weeks before the time when all danger of frost has passed and the ground is warm (early May here). It’s the fourth in a series of posts that follow up on one that lists my general seed sowing dates and categories.
My list of flowers to grow is in a continual process of refinement, but what I list in this series is the current iteration based on decades of flower gardening and six years of commercial growing at a small scale. And my schedule is affected somewhat by the fact that I grow in soil blocks, which seem to hasten plant development.
The next group I plant will be the largest one of the spring—celosia, gomphrena, basil, ageratum and more, along with the garden vegetables—but here is what I sow this week:
Limon/Jewels of Opar (Talinum paniculatum)—I’m planting this for the first time and look forward to seeing how it does and how its textural seed pods work in bouquets. I have some seed from Floret and some from Johnny’s; the germination has been good, and the tiny seedlings are a pale color hard to describe, a kind of taupe-pink-green.
Rosemary—Really this should have been sown much sooner, but it won’t mind being planted out in early June if it needs that long to grow. Rosemary loves heat and will come into its own in September and October. It’s not hardy here and needs a warm hoophouse to make it through the winter.
Sweet Annie (Artemisia annua)—These tall fragrant plants (5 or 6 feet) take up a lot of space but provide needed greenery and texture late into the fall. My seed is from Johnny’s.
Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare)—I should have started these sooner, also, but they won’t mind; the seeds germinate so easily and are flexible about when they’re planted. This is a perennial that does well in this area and offers plenty in October. I love its clusters of tiny yellow button flowers and its chrysanthemum scent. My seed is from GeoSeed.
I could have included gomphrena and statice in this round but will wait and plant them together with celosia and other flowers I give just four or so weeks to grow. Beyond certain baseline practices (this plant blooms in spring, this one in late summer), so many of these decisions are based on experience. If you’ve gardened at all, you’ve seen that gardeners have their differences. There is nothing to do but begin and try (as I do each time I get one of these posts done enough to be presentable).