My First Garden Ever

Beautiful big strong flowers although I like to compare them with butterflies because the plant leaves are not that handsome... The downside? once the flowers blossom it takes only 2 weeks for them to fade and never blossom again, in that sense you get stuck with an ugly stick and not so pretty plant leaves. Another negative?, they take more than 2 months to start flowering, once they do you get 2 weeks of nice flowers, then they turn brown(dying). You see the most part part of their lives are like caterpillars, at the very end is just glorious. The flower at the top of the plant is the biggest one, the one flowering first and the first to die, once that happens you know the rest will follow, that's the sunflower life. Citrus sunflower. Citrus sunflower. Hopefully my other sunflowers will grow this summer and I'll post in here once they flower.

They are not hard to germinate, when they immediately do the seedlings look BIG to be just new born, but sow them only by the 1st of March when the heat is already there. Sow them only on pots or window boxes that you can move inside in case a cold front arrives and plant them in the regular garden soil once the risk of a last spring frost is gone. They are annuals and do not tolerate colder weather below 35F, so you now by the first frost arrival in autumn they will die. Impatiens love total shade environment, there's where they grow the best. Big seedling at the bottom is an impatien. Now here below are the same impatiens 5 or 6 weeks after, in good soil they seem to grow nice, still more time to see when the flowers start to come up. BIG MISTAKE!. Those are not impatiens, they are cypress vines, somehow I mixed the seeds in that soil before and didn't realize it!.

The last 2 days we've been in the low 80's and my vine seeds seems to like the weather responding immediately to germination, they were sowed around 2 weeks ago and around 5 days later only two of five germinated at that time, but I think it was because on the germination days we had 2 days of 80 degrees then we had cooler days and nothing, the other seeds didn't showed up, until today!, yes, yesterday and today we touched the low 80's again, so obviously the plants like this temperatures. Same thing happened to my zinnias, hot weather annuals start to grow fast from seed when the weather is right!, it a lesson I just learned. By mid January I sowed several seeds indoors(marigolds, calendulas and other hot weather annual seeds), from my experience it was not a good choice, the weather was still too cold for them and when is colder than 35 F you cannot let them in the outside because they are not pansies or violas and at those temperatures they could die; so bringing t...