Add Annual Flowers to a Garden

with Amanda Switzer

Transcript: Add Annual Flowers to a Garden

Hi, I'm Amanda Switzer for About.com Home.

Why Add Annual Flowers to a Garden?

Early spring and summer gardens can look fantastic, but later in the season as the temperatures start to increase, your plants can start dying back and looking a little shabby. What you want to do is add vibrant annuals into your garden. This will pick up where the perennials left off, adding a whole dimension of color back into your garden, and bringing it back to life!

Coosing Annual Flowers

There are so many varieties of annuals on the market now. There are so many exotic and tropicals that people are incorporating into flower beds and into pots. What you want to do is go to your nursery and ask them about the types of plants they have.

Sun Loving Annual Flowers

There are many sun-loving plants, we have geraniums and verbena, and lantana, just to name a few.

Shade Loving Annual Flowers

We also have shade-loving plants, like lobelia, and coleus, which bring so much color into your shade garden.

Add Annual Flowers to a Garden

Today we're going to add color to a garden that looks a little bit lacking. It doesn't have a lot of color. It's more of a shrub garden. So we're going to add some white to really spark it up for the entire season. Once you've purchased your plants at the nursery it's time to start filling out those bare spots in your garden.

Instead of using a trowel, I like to turn the soil over this way. It aerates soil at the same time. Then I can just go and simply, lay the flowers out on the soil, and use my hands to put them in. I actually like using my hands better because I can smooth out the soil at the same time. So I don't need to go back later with a cultivator or rake, disturbing the fragile plants.

Now I'm going to lay the plants out all along the length of the garden and then come back and plant them. I like to lay them out just so I know I can space them properly. I don't want to space them too close because then they'll just die out. That's just a waste of money and also a shame to kill plants.

This is a nice, healthy, root system here on this impatient. It's very well established, with soil staying in the cell-pack formation. Sometimes when you pull them out of their cells, they're all root-bound and you have to break them apart before you plant them, to facilitate root growth.

Now that we've laid out all of our annuals in the garden bed, we can put them in the soil.

Care and Maintenance for Annual Flowers

Once you've planted your annuals in the garden it's going to be time for some maintenance. Yes, there is a price to pay for beauty. Dead-heading is the number one way to keep your flowers blooming all season long. Dead-heading is simply removing any dead blooms from your plant. And what you want to do is go in with a pair of pruners and cut any dead debris, any dead stems or any dead flowers off of your plant. Then put it in your compost pile.

The next thing you want to do is feed your plants all season long. I like to go in once a week and use Miracle Gro because it's high in phosphate. If you put too much nitrogen into your garden, you have too much leafy growth. If you put phosphate - which Miracle Gro has plenty of - into your garden it gives lots of bloom growth.

Although an annual garden might seem like a lot of work it gives back much more than it takes. Annuals add life to your garden all season long!

Thanks for watching. To learn more, visit us on the Web at Homegarden.About.com.

Video Channels

• Autos
• Business & Finance
• Cities & Towns
• Computing & Tech.
• Electronics & Gadgets

• Entertainment
• Food & Drink
• Health
• Home & Garden

• Parenting
• Sports
• Style
• Travel