Curing Annual Decline

Disappointed with your garden's performance? Experiencing garden envy over the neighbor's color garden? Chances are you're afflicted with "annual decline." This condition causes all those bedding flowers you planted to languish in the heat. Often, rebloom just doesn't happen.

The solution begins with a little education. Most bedding plants you buy in six-packs or 4-inch pots are annuals. Annual plants live for just one yearly growing season. They must sprout from seed, mature, flower and set seed for next year's progeny. That work takes a lot of food and water to get the job done.

When the flower of an annual plant fades, it drops its petals and seed begins to form in the remaining ovary of the bloom. As seed matures, it signals the plant that it has completed its reproductive cycle for the year. Seed tells your flower in July that it's September, and the time has come to slow down. The first rule of annual color gardening is to never allow seeds to form on your plants.

Successful color gardeners are often out in the early morning and late evening while it's cool. Just what are they doing? Drinking coffee or sipping cocktails while they diligently nip off the day's faded flowers. This daily task ensures their color plants think it's May when it's really late August. They fool the plants into blooming continuously in an effort to produce seed.

Inadequate diet is a frequent cause of annual decline. After the first flush of blooms they need food to produce another crop of buds. This bloom-and-bud cycle will reoccur nonstop if plants are well fed.

The second rule of color gardening is feed, feed, feed. Do it thoroughly and do it often. It's the best remedy for less-than-ideal soil as well. Use liquid fertilizer on annual color. This lets you get the fertilizer down to the soil in beds where annuals are tightly packed into a mass of color. Liquid more successfully penetrates heavy soils than granules. Liquid spray food adds a bonus of feeding through the leaves. Be sure to feed only in late evening or very early in the morning because water on the leaves in direct sun will cause burning.

Don't wait for plants to slow down before you feed because this feast-or-famine roller-coaster ride reduces performance. It takes time for the plants to slow down and an equal amount of time to speed up again, and in between they languish. Feed every couple of weeks on a strict calendar schedule to keep nutrient levels consistently high.

It's also important to water heavily after any kind of fertilizer application so it will filter down deep into the soil more quickly.

The third rule of color gardening is to water deeply. Standard spray sprinklers may wet only the top few inches of the soil. Annuals' heavy activity needs more water than this, particularly when it is hot and windy.

Even if you have sprinklers, flood the bed with a garden hose to get the soil thoroughly wet as deep as possible. Do this every week or two, which encourages deep rooting so the plants can draw off a larger area of soil. Deep rooting makes plants doubly resistant to the effects of heat waves.

It's not difficult to be a very successful color gardener. The key is to understand the life cycle of the annual and to treat it accordingly.

Pick off the flowers every day.
Fertilize on a strict schedule.
Water like there's no tomorrow.
At the end of every day you can sit back and be proud as your neighbors succumb to the deadly sin of garden envy.