February is the month to...

Get hold of seed catalogues and think about having a go at sowing seeds this spring. You may notice I'm avoiding any mention of actually going outside until it warms up a bit more.
Sowing seeds doesn't have to be difficult. You don't need a greenhouse or any 'pricking out' - if you want to take the easy route make sure you go for things that say – 'throw and grow' or 'sow in flowering position'. This means that all you do is sprinkle them on some nice soil, keep them watered if it doesn't rain and bingo, a really colourful summer.
My favourites are…

1. Cosmos:
   Tall and elegant these pink flowers can really lift a garden right through to autumn (up to 150cm if fed and watered well)
2. Love-in-a-mist:
   These small blue flowers with ferny foliage have really interesting seed heads. (45cm high)
3. Californian poppy
   Really bright, small flowers that may self seed and take over the garden. Not a bad thing, they are very pretty. (30 cm high)
4. Cornflower:
   The true blue cottage garden flower. (50cm high)
5. Sunflowers:
   There are so many different types available now; bronze ones, miniature ones and of course the real whoppers for the back of the border. Black Magic is a really nice, unusual one with, funnily enough, black flowers. (About 1.4 m high)

• If you want to get really good results, really easily, tip a bag of compost over the soil where you want the plants and sprinkle the seeds on top of that really nice, clean soil. The flowers will be huge and they won't be strangled by weeds.
• One year I sowed circles of these things, with the tallest at the back. There was a little bit of grass in the centre where I could sit, surrounded by banks of flowers.
• Don't sow them all at the same time – if you save some to put in the ground even as late as July you'll get flowers coming out into September and October if the weather's kind.

posted on February 1, 2008 by Caroline Tilston

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