Sow & Grow July

There should be plenty of things growing away happily at this time of year. Any seeds that you've sown along with me already this year, and possibly already potted on, are ready to go in to their final growing space - whether that's your garden, a raised bed, a window box, or a large container.

There are a wealth of plants available from garden centres if you missed the seed-sowing boat for summer flowering annuals, but all is not lost!

Seeds to Sow

Late flowering annuals can absolutely still be bought and sown now to flower later in the summer, until the first frosts. I bought some Zinnia seeds from Wilko's last week, sowed them when I got home from work that day, and less than 48 hours later they had germinated!!!!

teeny tiny Zinnia seedlings (middle row, 1st and 3rd cell)

Other annual seeds you can still sow are:

Coreopsis

Calendula Cosmos

You could give some others a go, such as Cornflowers or any other annual, but it will very much depend on the weather as to how much success you have.

Now is the time to get head for next year, as I said last month. Your biennial plants for next year need to be sown by the end of this month to ensure they get a good enough root system to see them through winter, so they burst in to life early next spring.

You can sow the following biennial seeds this month:

• Wallflower

• Foxglove

• Sweet William

• Hesperis

• Honesty

• Icelandic Poppy

• Forget-me-not

You can also sow some perennial flower seeds now to get going before winter, but the good thing about these plants is that they will keep coming back year after year!

Spring flowering perennials include:

• Aquilegia

• Delphinium

and summer flowering perennials include:

• Scabious

• Echinacea

• Hardy Geranium

** As an aside, there are also Tulips and Alliums and Ranunculus which are bulbs that flower in spring, that don't need planting yet but DO need ordering pretty sharpish if you don't want to be disappointed by the selection that's left over when we get to September**

What to grow

Your spring sown seedlings should be bursting to get out of their 9cm pots by now, and I must admit some of mine were looking quite sickly by the time I got round to it last week. You can take a look at my Midsummer Madness post to see what I got up to on midsummers day, but I will do a further post with some more seedlings showing how you can use these in containers or smaller planting spaces.

I planted out Cosmos, Achillea, Lupin, Dahlia, Echinacea, sunflower, and a couple of others I can't remember the name of (Hey, I'm still learning too!!), which all got a good watering in over the weekend and seem to be doing just fine now.

Let me know what you have been sowing and planting, I'd love to know.

If you don't already subscribe to my newsletter, you can sign up here as there is some juicy news coming up in the next few weeks for more in-depth help with your flower growing if you feel you need it.

Until next time,

with love,

Sarah

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