There are a couple of ways you can do it. You could go to the Thompson-Morgan website and look up the ones you want to start. They will have a designation HHA and HA. HA can be sown right now, but HHAs need to wait until the weather gets warmer and there is no chance of frost. HA stands for Hardy annual; these are the ones that self sow as far as I can figure. If you run into a designation GH or TP, then you usually have to wait on those, too. The other way is to list them here...that's because some of the HAs like Zinnias, Sunflowers and Cosmos can be direct sown so easily it seems a shame to go to all that work with the milk jugs. Lime

I do it because I get unusual plants/exotic colors only catalog seeds can give me. I do it because I like doing it. Yes, you can get earlier bloom with some plants. With others (like cosmos and zinnia) I find they do best planted directly outside. You learn from experience. Lately (after doing it for 30 years) it's become a bit of a chore so I stopped doing seeds that need to be started before March 1st and buy those plants in the nursery. I use an 8 tray light setup with two shop lights next to each other on each level, each light with one ordinary 40 watt tube and one full spectrum tube. Keep a list of when each plant needs to be started (by weeks before last frost), keep the lights no more than an inch from the plants, and always have a fan or slightly open window in the plant room to prevent fungus. Try to water from the bottom and without soaking the top of the soil. Have as much fun with this and go nuts obsessing over whatever you feel comfortable with. Rewmember, it's for pleasure!

Wow, you do have a lot of questions! I will try to answer a few. Yes you did wait a bit long before starting your seeds. Poppies can be sown outdoors now. Direct seed cosmos outside when no danger of frost. You do not need heated mats now, but it would help to get things going faster. Usually you start seeds 6 to 8 weeks before last frost. Depends on the seeds, some take longer than others. I have one that could take up to a year to germinate! Not a usual one. Some seeds need cold stratification in order to germinate. This means they need to be kept cold for a couple months or so. That is why many people wintersow. Check out the faq on that forum for many answers for next year. You can also check out the growing from seed forum. Both have great people on them who will help alot. You can probably sow the rest of your seeds outside in the next week or so, since last frost is fast approaching. Hope this helps some, Lee Here is a link that might be useful: winter sowing frequently asked questions

Hi 123, Hey, great photos !!! Very helpful. " I was referring to the comments about the distance between the leaves. I think it was mostly this particular [dying] plant that looked leggy. The others don't look quite as leggy and have good branching... " Yes, your pictures show some good-looking well-nourished zinnia plants. Uproar Rose is an F1 hybrid, and should be and is very uniform. I think the stretching you are seeing (and we are seeing via your good photos) is due to your 6½ hours of direct sun. Full sun is 8 hours or more, and all three of your flowers, zinnia, cosmos, and marigolds, are "full sun" plants. If a zinnia plant is getting full sun, it can be very "non-leggy", like this one.Yeah, I know, no shadows -- it was an overcast day. We did rent a place once that had the entire yard full of trees and was completely shaded. And I was wanting to grow some tomatoes and zinnias, so I used a pole saw to high-prune the trees to at least let some light through. I didn't want to kill any trees, but I was fairly aggressive at pruning them to open up some sky. I got maybe 4 hours per day of direct sun where there had been none. Still not nearly enough to grow zinnias, but I was determined and did some online research. Sun promotes photosynthesis, which converts Carbon dioxide and Water into Sugar, which the plant then uses in many ways. The chemical stuff that happens inside a plant is mind-boggling complex. But I noticed that Glycerine was one of the intermediates that was formed that wasn't incredibly complex and also had the advantage of appearing on the shelf at a drug store (or in the drug department of a grocery store, including Walmart). There are many different sugars, and they have different molecules, but fortunately ordinary Sucrose (table sugar) was a sugar that was common in plant internal workings. So I decided to try to supplement the Sun with a foliar feeding of Miracle-Gro Tomato Food, Sugar, and a little Glycerine for good measure. And I included a little Physan 20 to keep that from fermenting and becoming an on-plant science experiment. There was some Physan 20 serendipity, it also acted as an effective wetting agent. By spraying that mix on every week or two, I got a decent (but not impressive) crop of zinnias in a scary shady environment. I did make some crosses between those, and save seeds. I was growing a garden of hundreds of zinnias, so that could very well be way more trouble than would be appropriate in your situation. But I thought you might be interested to know that you can fight the shade. " ...but the distance between the last set of leaves and the actual bloom looks long on a few. Should it not stick out so much? I don't get it though, because they are in the same bed with the same sunlight, etc. Why are they growing differently? " That is a mystery. Uproar Rose is an F1 hybrid, so your zinnias should be very uniform. Long stems are considered desirable for cut flowers -- they stand up out of a vase better. I don't see any obvious micro-climates in your photos. Maybe the limited light has something to do with it. When something weird happens in my garden, I always blame the Chupacabras. ZM