BTW my message emphasized flowers but I'm also open to herbs. Really, to anything that will take the place of weeds and look nice. Not catnip, though, because I have dogs. Would mint be a good idea?

I have some orange mint that grows quickly. Basically any mint would do. Marigolds are easy to grow from seed. I don't think you can get it in seed but the ornamental sweet potato vine does really well. My mom likes to plant cosmos and russian sage. Cardinal vine rambles well.

Do you have color preferences?

I got a big box of wildflower mix last year from Atwoods or Dollar General (can't remember which) for three dollars and change. I only used a little bit and I had beautiful flowers from april to October. I have probably 3/4 of the box left, so this was a great buy. I just tossed the seeds out and let them go, and I had flowers, bees, and butterflies GALORE.

Jo

I got a big box of wildflower mix last year from Atwoods or Dollar General (can't remember which) for three dollars and change. I only used a little bit and I had beautiful flowers from april to October. I have probably 3/4 of the box left, so this was a great buy. I just tossed the seeds out and let them go, and I had flowers, bees, and butterflies GALORE.

Jo

Tadsana,

When you say you can't grow zinnias, do you mean that they never sprout and grow from seed or that they sprout and grow and then die?

There are lots of flowers that are cheap and easy from seed and many of them, at least here in southern Oklahoma, reseed and come back every year.

In addition to zinnias, I grow the following flowers that are "easy" here in my location:

Larkspur
Pink Evening Primrose (invasive)
Oriental Poppies
Tall verbena (Verbena bonariensis)
Marigold
Cosmos
Nasturtium
Liatris
Coreopsis
Indian Blanket
Hollyhock
French Hollyhock (Malva sylvestris 'Zebrina'
Sunflower
Dahlia
Purple Coneflower
Clasping Coneflower
Black-eyed Susan
Mexican hat
Texas Bluebonnet
Butterfly weed
Gomphrena 'Strawberry Fields'
Yarrow
Texas Hummingbird Sage
Salvia, including Clary Sage
Four O'Clock
Datura
Laura Bush Petunia (bloom all summer in our heat and reseed aggressively)
Celosia
Mexican Sunflower
Nicotiana (aka Flowering Nicotine)
Sweet Alyssum
Calendula
Viola
California Poppy
Cleome

If you have a fence or trellis, these are easy from seed and reseed:

Morning Glory
Moonvine
Black-eyed Susan Vine
Cardinal Climber
Cypress Vine
Hyacinth Bean Vine

Herbs:

Chamomile
Borage, Blue-flowered
Borage, White-flowered
Sage
Basil(many kinds)
Mint (many kinds)
Feverfew
Tansy
Mexican Mint Marigold
Dill
Chives (pretty purple flowers)
Catmint

I did the same thing Jo did with a box of wildflower seed our first or second year here....just scatter sowed them in the pasture in mid- to late-winter and they grew fine and many reseeded and have been here ever since.

Dawn

Wow! You've all really given me hope! After my failures with zinnias I shied away from all seeds except sunflowers (and those were actually black oil sunflower seeds I use to feed the birds).

Anyhoo, okiedawn, when I say zinnias haven't worked I mean two years I tried them and never saw a single bloom and one year I got maybe a couple of blooms but that was all.

I've been plagued with white grubs for years, so that may be one reason I've had trouble also. (I've been applying beneficial nematodes the last couple of years but still have the grubs. Also cucumber beetles. I've kept the garden organic for five years--usually I have vegetables--so I've been relying on eco-friendly pesticides with varying degrees of success. I'm still optimistic about the nematodes re: the grubs. The grubs haven't seemed to have injured the sunflowers.)

I'd forgotten about sweet potato vine. Boy that might work.

I think I might need a soil test too.

Dawn,
Can Laura Bush petunia seed be purchased locally in Oklahoma, or does it need to be ordered? I'm really interested in that one in particular.

Suzie

Suzie,

I've only seen the seed at one place....Wildseed Farms which is down in the Fredericksburg, TX, area. Back when I bought my original seed 5 or 6 years ago, they only had purple and pink, but now they also have a mix which includes purple, pink and white. (The pink ones I have don't reseed as well as the purple ones, and I haven't deliberately planted white, but I get white ones from some of the volunteers that come up from the pink ones every year. I also get some solid pink and some pink and white streaked, striped or mottled ones.)

Orginally, when I still lived in Texas in the 1990s, they had a petunia called VIP (for Very Important Petunia) and it grew better and better as the weather got hotter. You did have to cut it back once or twice during the summer or it would get sort of raggedy but it came back into bloom really fast after you cut it back. It spread out about 3 or 4 feet and was wonderful. Then, for a year or two, it seemed to disappear from the stores. Then, just as suddenly, we had 'Laura Bush' petunia which I think either was an improved VIP petunia, a selection from VIP or maybe had VIP as one of its parents. Then we moved here and I couldn't find them here. After several years of searching for them, I found seed at Wildseed Farms, ordered some, planted them, and they've been happily reseeding themselves ever since. The ones I planted last spring (volunteers I dug up from the garden and transplanted into the pots) in large containers (as understory plants under brugmansias and daturas) have been overwintering in the garage. They were in bloom until it snowed and our temperature dropped to 3 degrees. They didn't die, but the cold knocked their blossoms off and the tips of some branches are freeze-damaged though not dead. I need to cut them back and feed them and see if they'll come back into production, but am amazed at how cold-hardy they are and also at how well they flower in the heat.

I've linked Wildseed Farms below. I get a lot of my flowers seeds from them, includng a wildflower blend, Texas Bluebonnets, Alamo Fire (Red) Bluebonnets, the Laura Bush petunias, and various types of zinnias, cosmos and sunflowers.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Wildseed Farms

Tadasana, I can't tell you how many times I have grown a targeted "easy to grow" plant that has simply spelled disaster for me, lol!

In case you try to grow Zinnias again, they need fertile, well-drained soil in full sun (at least 6-8 hours) and they love heat. I sow mine around April 15th. Same with Cosmos, which really ARE easy to grow. I grow Cosmic Orange cosmos, which are a different species (Cosmos sulphureus) from the regular pinks, whites, purples, etc. (Cosmos bipinnatus). The C. bipinnatus will grow here, but I don't get near the reseeding from them that I do the C. sulphureus.

Zinnias need to be deadheaded in order to continue blooming, too. I stop deadheading around September and let them go to seed. Once the seedheads are completely brown and dry, I pull them apart and sprinkle them in other locations around the garden.

I have avoided the "wildflower mixes" because I have a small yard and if you don't have a wide area to sow them in, you'll get tall ones in front of short ones, and to me, a tangled mess. I also have this thing about knowing what I'm sowing. Ooohhh, a rhyme!

An easy herb to sow is Borage. Can just direct sow it. Basil, Cilantro, Dill, Thyme, Chives, Anise, Lemon Balm, Sorrel, Parsley, Salad Burnet, Clary Sage, can all be direct sown. Just don't let the seeds dry out until they germinate, and then still water frequently until they get a bit taller.

On the issue of Mints, they can run rampant in your garden, so best advice is to confine them to pots away from locations where they can reseed after flowering.

Right now you can get flower packets at Walmart for 20 cents if they are in your budget.

Let me look at what seeds I have and I can probably share some with you. I live close to Horn's and the Belle Isle Shopping Center.

Susan

I am quite sure I have some seeds I could share with you as well. If you will email me and give me your address, I'll look through my stash.

Winter sowing is a great way to start seeds. :)

Lisa

Thanks for the link to Wildseed Farms, Dawn. I love petunias but usually have trouble with them in the heat so these sound perfect! Also, I have a question about petunias. Last year I set out petunia bedding plants and they did great for a while then began shriveling up and dying, and that was before the onset of the heat. I wondered if petunias can be affected by something in the soil, the same way that periwinkles can when they are planted in the same spot where previous periwinkles had problems. Since last year was our first summer in this house, I don't know what might have been planted there before.

Suzie

Suzie,

You're welcome.

I don't know what happened to your petunias, but if it happened really quickly...almost overnight...then it might have been bacterial wilt. I've never seen phytophthera affect petunias the way it does periwinkles. Petunias are relatively disease free but sometimes are affected by alternaria or by fusarium wilt and a couple of other diseases.

I love petunias and used to raise Wave petunias from seed every year for the hangng baskets on my front porch, but they don't handle heat very well and that's why I switched to the Laura Bush petunias.

Dawn

Dawn, it wasn't real quick. It seemed to start with one or two plants and then progressed to the others. After they all died I planted pentas in the same spot and they did fine. I may avoid that spot for petunias for a while though, just in case. Petunias and iris are sentimental plants for me because I remember them from my grandmother's house. She planted petunias in the holes in the concrete blocks that edged her garden. You'd think the Oklahoma heat would just fry them in those blocks, and maybe it did, but I just remember how pretty they were.

Suzie

Suzie, It sounds like it might have been fusarium wilt which can progess through a planting like that, so I wouldn't put a tomato plant or pepper plant there either.

I think some of the old-fashioned flowers were tougher back then, and maybe it is because they were not especially pampered.

My grandmother, even when she was in her 8os, always grew godetia which burns up quickly for me in the heat. Then she'd follow it with cosmos, so probably her godetia burned up just as early for her as it does for me and I just didn't realize it back then.

I have grown some of the old-fashioned petunias from Select Seed Antique Flowers and they remind me of the ones our neighbors grew when I was a child in the 1960s. The petunias nowadays have far superior flowers, but the old varieties were a lot tougher and didn't melt away in the rain like wet tissue paper like modern-day ones seem to. The Laura Bush petunias are really tough and that's what I like about them. Also, they reseed very easily, and I love reseeding flowers of any kind!

I've linked their website below in case you're interesting in looking at what they have. If you don't receive their catalog, I recommend it very highly. Many of the old varieties of flowers that I grow here have been purchased from them as seed over the years, and I can spend hours looking at the catalog during the long, boring, cold, winter months.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Select Seeds Antique Flowers

Oh wow, looking at the Select Seeds online catalog really makes me want spring to hurry up! It is just chock full of gorgeous flowers. Do sweet peas grow well in Oklahoma? I don't remember seeing them in any of the posts about flowers that do well here, but I could have overlooked them.

Suzie

Suzie,

Sweet peas can grow well here, but you have to plant them early and their bloom period isn't terribly long because of our heat.

I have grown them from seed sown in the fall (late Oct. or in November) and overwintered as fairly small plants and from seed sown indoors in December and transplanted out at the end of January.

I never get more than 4 or 6 or 8 weeks of bloom out of them because we get too hot too early here. They grow much better in cooler areas or in the winter in places like the Texas of Florida gulf coast where it is cool in winter but seldom gets below freezing.

I haven't grown them the last few years, but the last time I had them, it must have been a coolish spring because they bloomed until early June and then burnt right up in the heat.

Many cool-season flowers have a fairly short season here because we get too hot too early. The cool-season flowers that perform best for me are larkspur, poppies, violas and pink evening primrose.

Today in our yard, we do at least have some spring wildflowers (some folks call them weeds but I love anything that's blooming in winter) in bloom---spring beauties and henbit. It is, at least, a start and if the weather holds, we'll have more flowers in bloom soon.

Dawn

Any one growing sunberry or wonder cherry? I know it makes very good curry and has excellent medicinal property. Its seems to close relative of eggplant. I am looking for seed sources and any success stories. I have searched Google and found one link provided below.

Here is a link that might be useful: sunberry or wonder cherry