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Treated As Annuals Seeds: MANY BIENNIALS flower in early and midsummer, thus usefully filling an awkward gap that can occur between the spring and summer flowers. Like annuals, they are temporary plants which should be pulled up and put on the compost pile when they have finished flowering. Also, as with annuals, though it's easy enough to save seed of most kinds it is usually impossible to prevent cross-fertilization of different varieties, as a result of which home-saved seed produces only a mongrel population. The distinction between annuals, biennials and herbaceous perennials is not always clear-cut since sometimes varieties of one group can be treated as annuals seeds as if they belonged to one of the other groups; hollyhocks (Alcea), for example, can be grown as annuals, biennials or short-lived perennials. However, to be sure of a regular succession of biennials it is necessary to sow seed every year at the correct season.
The great value of buying seeds is that you can get a far greater range of annuals and biennials than if you are depending on the purchase of pregrown bedding plants. Read the instructions on the packet thoroughly and make sure that the plant is for you. Many people believe that plants will flower from seeds in a short time. This is not necessarily true, many of the more beautiful plants that you can grow from seeds need a whole year; in which they must be transferred from their initial growing place into containers, before being planted out in their flowering positions the following year.
An English classification system for annuals, based on the temperatures the seeds need to germinate and grow successfully, divides them into three groups: hardy, half-hardy, and tender. Many gardeners in the milder sections of the United States think "half-hardy" is superfluous, but I have found that the term is useful to people who have long, cool, rainy springs. Most seed companies use all three.
Hardy annuals (HA) are plants that tolerate a reasonable degree of frost, and even in the colder parts of the country many of their seeds survive a winter outside and germinate in the spring. The alternate freezes and thaws of early spring will not harm them. |
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