LIFE OF A HARDY ANNUAL
It’s a cold crisp morning in early spring and I’m walking the farm, eyeing the handiwork of fall and late winter. The hard work of preparing soil, starting from seed, planting, and mulching is nothing more than a faded memory as I admire the tall, sturdy snapdragons, their buds ready to burst open. I can hardly take my eyes off the snaps until I notice the sweet pea patch. New little shoots of sweet pea vines are popping through the soil surrounding the baby vine I planted months earlier. The little vine I planted in the fall now appears wind-whipped and exhausted. However, I take heart in knowing that the frostbitten sweet pea vine planted long ago has done its job. It has fostered a root system through the winter that has grown into a well-established and strong foundation for this late spring bloomer to soar on. It brings a grin that is hard to lose when I think of those sweet pea vines and snapdragons riding out the coming days, blooming like crazy, even in the midst of heat and humidity.
A spring bouquet of hardy annuals.
These early season walks in the garden, allow me to explore and enjoy my garden in a new way. It is still chilly, but warmed by the bright afternoon sunshine. I investigate, pull a weed here and there, and even cut an early-bird bloom to bring in the house. Just a single bloom from the garden in late March and early April takes a place of honor on my desk. Then I carry it to our kitchen table so we can all enjoy the message this bloom is bringing: spring is on its way.
Before I discovered hardy annual gardening, my gardening experiences in late winter and early spring were more about scouring the gardening catalogs as they arrived and just dreaming. Now, it’s as if I have been given yet another season in my garden to enjoy.
One of my first hardy annual gardens that included; snapdragons, love-in-a-mist and corn cockle.
The lifecycle of a hardy annual is an oddity to most gardeners. It seems unreasonable to expect anything from seeds or plants put out in the garden when cold weather is just over the horizon, or in early spring while it’s still frosty and chilly like winter. It just doesn’t make sense. But the truth of the matter – the secret – is that hardy annuals are cut from a different cloth than that of our tender warm-season annuals (the ones we think of when we hear the term “annual”). And that’s why we must garden differently if we want these beautiful hardy annual blossoms in our gardens.
At-a-Glance
• Hardy annuals live for one year and survive cold temperatures. Many are planted in fall to winter-over and produce blooms the following spring and summer. These flowers prefer growing in cool conditions.
• Tender annuals live for one year and do not survive cold temperatures. These flowers are planted after the threat of frost has passed in spring and the soil has begun to warm. Tender annuals prefer growing in the heat of summer.
Pansies are among the most popular and widely planted spring bloomers. They are hardy annuals. Planting pansies in fall and late winter for the best spring blooms has been common practice for a long time. I like to refer to pansies as the “kissing cousins” to all the other hardy annuals, only related because they enjoy the same type of growing conditions. So, just think of pansies for a moment while we wrap our heads around this concept of hardy annual gardening.
Why is it so tough to grow these spring bloomers? Here’s why: in most gardens, spring comes on quickly and moves right into summer. It doesn’t hang around long enough to accommodate our natural gardening instinct to plant spring bloomers in… well, spring! We naturally think spring should be like summer. We plant summer bloomers in summer once the warmth starts, and then they grow into valuable members of the long, leisurely summer garden.
Following suit, we storm the garden on the first days of spring with our seed packets, plants and trowels to plant some of the beauties of spring. But it’s too late. Spring flowers don’t work that way. The window of opportunity has long passed, and our efforts are short-lived and frustrating. We never get the gorgeous display we are promised, because we are planting during the time that this group of flowers is being asked by nature to perform with wild abandon. New little plants just can’t do that.
Hardy annuals naturally develop and grow into strong plants when they have opportunity to do it during cool conditions. When these plants get the great start that cool weather provides, their stamina and ability to perform makes you wonder why you didn’t think of this sooner. It’s all about getting the plants started and established during their preferred growing conditions. Once they are well established, hardy annuals seem to look adversity in the face and bloom even more. What I said in the introduction bears repeating: plant them in the right spot, at the right time, nestle their roots deep into rich organic soil, and stand back.
The term hardy annual indicates a plant that typically lives for one year and doesn’t just survive the cold, but thrives under cooler temperatures. Both plants and seeds can be planted in the fall, winter and/or early spring depending on your region. In a large portion of the country, hardy annuals can be fall-planted to winter-over as immature plants. This allows them to establish an incredibly strong root system that gives the earliest possible blooms in spring and keeps them performing well into warm and hot weather. In more northern zones where there are frigid conditions or heavy snow loads, these flowers can be planted in the very early spring while waiting for warm temperatures to arrive. For those who plant in the fall, a repeat planting in very early spring can extend the blooming season; we do this with excellent results on our farm here in southeast Virginia.
As a general guide, hardy annuals can be planted 6-8 weeks before the first frost of fall, to winter-over as an immature plant, and/or planted 6-8 weeks before your last frost in spring. When you plant depends on where your garden falls on the hardiness zone map (page 138). Getting this better understanding of what makes hardy annuals tick will help you to tweak these guidelines even more to suit your garden. I encourage you to be bold and experiment with flowers that may thrive just outside of your zone; sometimes those results are the sweetest of all.
Bachelor buttons holding their own as the snow cover melts away providing a deep slow watering.
The life cycle. The hardy annual’s natural life cycle is to go from seed into making seed in the span of one year. The annual plant’s whole purpose in life is to grow into a plant to produce flowers that will produce seeds – and then die. The confusion with hardy annuals comes because their year of life follows a different calendar than we are accustomed too. They begin life from a seed in the fall, then winterover as a young plant, becoming well established so that when spring arrives, they quickly grow into a robust plant. Their
