Buying Bedding Plants

While we were in Idaho visiting my parents we visited their favorite nursery. It happens to be run by a group of Mennonites who really know their stuff. Their plant material is healthy, huge, and beautiful, and even better, at steal-of-a-deal prices!

Now is the time (in my gardening zone) to buy bedding plants! The general guideline is to plant after Mother's Day or after the risk of freezing is over, but sometimes you still have to be careful! Here in Utah we have had an extremely cool spring, and just Monday we had a huge hailstorm which stripped and damaged many plants! The forecast is looking better now and hopefully some of those April showers will turn into May flowers.

After visiting numerous nurseries and greenhouses in the last month, it occurred to me that many people probably don't know how to buy bedding plants. For example, Home Depot's nursery department was full of beautiful blooms, but they weren't labeled very well and it would have been easy to buy what was prettiest, only to be disappointed upon returning home and finding it was only in bloom for a few weeks when you wanted something colorful all summer. In fact I saw an older couple buying huge pots of flashy foxglove, and I could only hope they knew it was a spring bloomer. The key to this predicament is knowing the difference between annuals and perennials.

Annuals are plants or flowers that will only live for one season. They don't have the resources to over-winter, so you will have to replace them annually. (That's how I keep them straight.) Common examples of summer annuals are petunias, snapdragons, geraniums, stock, and marigolds.

Stock... oh, it smells so good! It doesn't like heat so is in it's prime right now.

Look at this hanging basket of petunias I got as my Mother's Day gift!
It's so heavy we don't know how to hang it without making a hole in the stucco!

Perennials, on the other hand, come back every year. They typically have one bloom period, but this can differ per species as well. Spring blooming perennials such as peonies, iris, and aurinia, only bloom for about a month in the spring.

My aurinia, or Basket of Gold, is still small and almost done blooming.

Others such as lavender, sea thrift, and scabiosa, bloom all summer as long as they are deadheaded properly.

Sea thrift is so compact and cute.

Scabiosa, or pincushion flower, is one of my favorite.

Another key to success is making sure you buy healthy plant material! This seems like a no-brainer, but don't underestimate it's importance! Ideally plants should be just beginning to flower and have lots of buds and lush green leaves. If a plant is already overgrown and full of blooms, it won't have much splendor left for you. If it's too small, however, it may have a weak root system and never reach it's full potential.

The little ones had a great time at the nursery too. There was certainly a lot to discover!

I also bought more of my veggie garden starts on this trip. Now I have basil, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and a tomato plant in the ground! I need to plant my beans and a few more tomatoes and I will be set! I can't wait for summer.