Jean- My 4 o'clocks never come up the following year, they always get frozen by winter. They do not even self seed here. I mean they do alll summer but then again nothing comes up over winter. So I have to start them again, which is a real pain. I had them running all along the front wall last summer until I yanked them to make that big planter box in the front yard were lots of new daylilies are going to be planted. Now morning glories are another story, those always (and easily) self seed. I find that if I leave any or miss any they bloom the wrong colors with smaller flowers, so I pull out self seeded vines and plant new ones from bought seeds. Last year I had some on a tower but they got so overgrown I pulled them out. This spring I think I will plant them on a much bigger, stronger tower were my trumpet vine died. Julie- I love the flowers on the bearded iris but for me the bloom period is too short to go nuts and plant them all over. Also, I do not like the looks of the bearded iris folliage. That skinny bed section in the front will be it for now. The Siberian Iris are different and I think they will be a lovely no fuss addition to my garden. Last night I also ordered one Japanese Iris because the picture was so lovely, I could not resist. I had some Japanese Iris many, many years ago at another house but not since then. I have this empty spot that I tried daylilies in but moved them because I did not like the look there. Its got roses and crosima on the sides and daylilies in front and then empty spot will now be iris. I also bought my first ever Spuria Iris and still don't know where I will plant it.

Legacy77a, It is hard to say, but not necessarily. It would depend on how greenish they were.....sometimes when harvested green they do sprout and sometimes they don't. The more the green has faded to a whitish-green or a tannish-green, the better, though. If you want to test their germination, let them sit for a week to ten days which is sort of a dormant period for them. Then, wet a paper towel or coffee filter, lay a row of 10 seeds on it, wrap them up in the paper towel, put it in a plastic zip-lock bag and put it in a cool, dry location. Check every day to see if the seeds sprout, and how many sprout. After a couple of weeks, all of them that are going to sprout will have sprouted. From that, you can estimate if your germination rate is going to be 10% or 50% or 90% or whatever. And, you'll know if your seeds are viable or not. Patty, That's all I do. When I clean up the garden debris, I just leave the flower heads that I want to self-sow. I don't generally tear the flower heads apart and scatter the seed around, although you can if you want to. Sometimes, too many seedlings do come up in one small area and you can either transplant the extras while still vey small, or just pull them up and discard them. Generally, though, wind and rain will scatter the seeds around on their own. If you pile the chopped leaves onto the beds only a couple of inches thick as mulch, the odds are that the seeds still will sprout in the spring. If you put the leaves much thicker, though, they might prevent or slow down germination of reseeding annuals like zinnias. If you want to play it safe, save some seed to plant next spring in case your plants don't self-sow. That way, you're covered either way. I suppose this is an extreme form of winter sowing, minus the containers. I do it all the time. I even gather wildflower seed from one pasture and sow it in another just by scattering handfuls of it around the pasture after the first hard freeze. That seed will lie dormant and at least some of it will sprout in the spring. When plants self-sow naturally, whether in a cultivated garden, in a pasture, in a woodland, etc., those seeds also have to deal with plant debris and, generally, the debris doesn't hurt the seeds or keep them from germinating. All kinds of annuals and half-hardy perennials self-sow in my garden with little or no help from me, including zinnias, four o'clocks, poppies, larkspur, evening primrose, angel's trumpet, swamp hibiscus, morning glories, moonvine, hummingbird sage, black-eyed susan vine, cypress vine, cardinal climber vine, ornamental peppers, some tomatoes, some herbs (including catnip, catmint, some basils, parsley, cilantro, etc.), clasping coneflower, hollyhocks, french hollyhocks (malva), kiss-me-over-the-garden gate, and verbena bonariensis. Often, pumpkins, winter squash and gourds self-seed as well. In my garden today, I already have verbena bonariensis, malva 'Zebrina', angel's trumpets, tomato plants and hummingbird sage that have sprouted in the last month or so from seed that ripened and self-sowed in late summer. Of these plants, the tomato plants will not survive and come back next year, but the others usually do if their roots get large enough before it gets really cold here. The reason some people have better success with winter-sowing than with self-sowing seed in their gardens is often that their gardens have too much wind or too much rain and their self-sown seed blows away or rots before it can germinate in late winter to late-spring, depending on the type of plant it is. In my garden, I let "the usual suspects" self-sow as they choose, and I winter sow other plants in containers if I know from experience that they have not self-sown successfully in my garden in the past. Hope this info helps. Dawn

Hi everyone, Well, I am double posting this in 2 forums - I hope nobody minds. As promised, here I am posting about what in the world I've been doing all summer while traveling to & fro Wisconsin. As some of you already know, I work with fish-eating birds: cormorants, pelicans, herons, egrets, gulls, wood storks, etc. My husband and I have been working in Wisconsin for the past 3 years, but we also regularly work in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Ontario, and a few other places. Yes, we are a husband + wife team, working together out of the same office. Many people are surprised that we work together, but it is great. We make a fantastic team, and are often at our best under challenging field conditions. Great minds think alike, and being dear friends & in love sure helps too. (ok, enough with the mushy stuff). So now for a few photos from the vegetation surveys we did this month. Background: We are working on remote islands in Lake Michigan, around the Door Co. Peninsula area. All the islands have nesting double-crested cormorants and herring gulls. Some also have nesting Am. white pelicans and Canada geese. Back in April, we put up some 6 ft x 6 ft pens (we call them exclosures) to exclude the cormorants because they damage vegetation with their nesting activities (too much POOP!). So then we went back in August to catalog everything that grew in the pens, by plant species, and weighed it to also determine biomass. That meant breaking out the field guides, studying up on botany and the flora of Wisconsin, and bringing the plant presses for species we couldn't identify on the island. We compareed the exclosure plots to some "control" plots, which had nothing but 4 wooden stakes at the corners. We had 45 plots to do on 3 islands, plus another 3 islands down by the city of Green Bay that we did simple vegetation surveys on (no pens). It was alot of work, but very interesting. The bottom line: there are lots of nonnative species on those islands, like motherwort, catnip, pigweed, common mallow, stinging nettle and sow thistle. The native vegetation was primarily lambsquarter and smartweed species. Almost done clipping this 1-meter plot: Looking for small plants beneath the lambsquarter The finished, sampled 1-meter subplot Who would even know what this was?!?! I saved seeds to winter sow and see if I can't figure it out. The very last veg plot to measure. You can tell, because we look so happy! A friend found crawling across the plant press The stinging nettle I hacked through to make us a nice trail to get to the center of the island. At least its not poison ivy! Ok, that's all for now. Have a great evening. Katie (heh - I've been working on this post for days!)

I always mix together flowers, some fruit, veggies and herbs in the same beds, and have been doing so since at least the early 1980s. With most flowers that are growing near veggies or herbs, I choose shorter flowers that will not get big and fight the veggies or herbs for space. I use a lot of heat-loving Laura Bush petunias, moss rose, dwarf zinnias, annual salvias, nasturtiums, balsam, shorter forms of marigolds like Tangerine Gem or Lemon gem, cuphea, cosmos, celosias, gomphrena, dahlias, begonias, angelonia, verbena bonariensis, and also poppies and larkspur (which have been reseeding in the same space for 12-15 years) very early in the season. I plant a ton of sweet alyssum very early in the year to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects. Sometimes I use Dusty Miller plants for a punch of white in what is otherwise a dark green bed. Additionally, I have some borders on the edges of the garden where I grow the taller flowers like hollyhocks (there are some dwarf ones though), malva, crinum lilies, daylilies, echinaceas, gladiolus, irises, lantana, hardy hibiscus, taller forms of zinnias and cosmos, and some annual vines that climb fences and/or trellises. One reason I plant so many flowers in my fenced veggie garden is that it is hard to keep anything planted in beds around the house alive because the deer and rabbits in our rural area just mow those down to the ground. I can grow whatever I want within the fenced area and precious little outside of it, though the deer don't eat four o'clock plants. The key thing to remember is to grow flowers with the same sunlight and water requirements as the plants they'll be sharing beds or rows with. Also, be sure you space your plants so their roots aren't fighting for the same soil, water, nutrients or sunlight. I plant most flowers where they will get plenty of sun, but since begonias are shade tolerant, I often plant them on the north side of taller plants so they can spend their summer growing in the shade of taller plants like tomato plants, okra or peppers. I also use lots of ornamental peppers---different varieties of ornamental peppers can mature at anywhere from 8-10" tall to 4' tall or taller, so choose varieties and their placement carefully. I also grow many kinds of herbs that flower---including borage (both the white-flowered and blue-flowered forms), catmint, catnip, lemon balm, chamomile, tansy, silver tansy, comfrey, fennel, bronze fennel, agastache and many kinds of basil. I don't let the basil flower until late in the season, but let the others flower sporadically over the course of the growing season. In general, the flowers attract a plethora of pollinators and beneficial insects, and the smaller the flowers themselves, the more insects they attract---so plants like yarrow, dill, tansy and alyssum attract many beneficials. When you use flowers as companion plantings in an edible garden, they can be multipurpose: some flowers are edible, all of them are pretty, many have nectar or pollen that attract beneficials, and if you use low-growing, spreading types, they serve as a living mulch, keeping the ground cooler by shading it and reducing how many weeds will sprout by shading the soil, etc. There are some plants that have a tendency to reseed too much and to become garden thugs. Since your garden space is limited, you'll want to avoid those. In my garden, all are welcome because it is big and there's tons of space, but I do spend an inordinate amount of time pulling up excess seedlings. The types of flowers that reseed too much and become a problem will vary from year to year depending on what sort of weather we had in the previous growing season. Often, lemon balm, if allowed to bloom, gives you too many seedlings, as do morning glories, cypress vine, black-eyed susan vine, Texas hummingbird sage, corn poppies. Tansy is always a thug and I only grow it on the extreme outer edge on the north side of my garden where it seems to reseed less vigorously than it does in full sun. Four o'clocks tend to reseed too much so I try to keep them outside the fenced garden, although they'll grow right through the fence and drop tons of seed in fall, so I still have lots of sprouts to yank out in the spring. Verbena bonariensis can reseed a lot, but I love it so much that I don't mind. Some years, the ornamental peppers reseed and I love when that happens----when small ornamental pepper plants start sprouting in the spring, I carefully dig them up and replant them around the garden where I want them. I also grow several kinds of amaranth that are more of a grain plant than a celosia-type floweriing plant, and each big flower seedhead has thousands of seeds, to I keep those strictly on the outer edges of the garden as well. Otherwise, there's a million seedlings in spring. You can have a lot of fun with mixing flowers into your edible gardens. I prefer to raise my flowers from seed instead of buying them at the stores. When you buy them at the stores, you're often buying plants that were treated with a systemic pesticide at the wholesaler's growing site. The issue with the kinds of systemic pesticides used is that since they are systemic, they stay inside the plants, and some of them can harm the bees and beneficial insects that visit the flowers. I won't say that I never buy a flat of annuals in spring to transplant into the garden, but I buy fewer and fewer every year. It takes quite a lot of time and space to raise my own flower transplants from seed, but I prefer doing that to bringing in purchased plants that have been treated with systemic pesticides. There are some flowers that attract insects that can become pests in an edible garden, so I grow those in a separate, fenced-in space that is away from the main garden. That way, they are serving as a trap crop that lure pests away from the garden. Sunflowers are great to use in this way---they will lure stink bugs away from your garden. I love the perennial vine, Sweet Autumn Clementis, but it is highly attractive to blister beetles, which devour many kinds of plant foliage, so I don't grow it near the garden. One of my favorite seed sources is Select Seed Antique Flowers because they offer many varieties of plants that are hard to impossible to find anywhere else. I ordered a huge number of seeds from this year, so I am planning on having a flower-filled garden. However, the seeds sold on the seed racks in local stores are fine too. I started out with those, but increasingly switched to places like Select Seed because I wanted old-fashioned flowers like I remember from my childhood. A lot of the modern flowers bred to be used as bedding plants are really uniform and look almost too "manufactured" whereas heirloom strains of flowers often have more variation. I like that. Also, some of the fancy hybrid flowers just are not attractive to bees and other beneficial insects like the old varieties are. Hope this helps, Dawn