How to grow petunias from seed

Petunia ‘Mirage White’ F1 Hybrid from Thompson & Morgan

Grow your own stunning petunias from seed this year
Image: Petunia ‘Mirage White’ F1 Hybrid from Thompson & Morgan

There’s a real sense of satisfaction in growing your own show-stopping display of petunias from seed. And the good news is that sowing petunia seeds isn’t difficult at all. Follow the advice from T&M’s petunia expert, Kris Collins, and produce a bumper supply of strong and healthy seedlings. Here’s our quick and easy guide to germinating petunia seeds.

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How to get the most from your petunias

Petunia ‘Pegasus Wine Splash’ from Thompson & Morgan

Petunia ‘Pegasus Wine Splash’ petals are attractively flecked with burgundy
Image: Petunia ‘Pegasus Wine Splash’ from Thompson & Morgan

Petunias are hugely popular bedding plants that you can order as plugs or garden-ready plants. Alternatively, you can sow your own petunia seeds as a cost-effective way to replenish hanging baskets and fill your garden with colour. 

Here, T&M’s resident expert, Kris Collins, shares a few simple tips to increase the flower power and longevity of your petunias. 

Why grow petunias?

Petunia 'Frills & Spills™ Susanna' from Thompson & Morgan

Buy scented petunias to add an extra dimension to your displays
Image: Petunia ‘Frills & Spills™ Susanna’ from Thompson & Morgan

Petunias are something I turn to every spring in order to get my garden ready for summer. I couldn’t be without them in my hanging baskets. Trailing types, covered in masses of fragrant trumpet blooms, such as Petunia ‘Easy Wave Ultimate Mixed’, are perfect for lending that luxurious feel to your summer garden.

Most commonly used in container displays, there are actually many varieties that work well in border plantings too. Prolific growth smothers weeds and traps moisture in the soil, whilst also providing a carpet of colour.

Petunias require very little specialist upkeep. As long as you’re prepared to water regularly and remove spent flowers as they go over, you’ll be in for a season of scent and colour right through to autumn.

Which petunia should I choose for my space?

Petunia ‘Back to Black’ from Thompson & Morgan

Petunia ‘Back to Black’ produces gorgeous velvety black flowers
Image: Petunia ‘Back to Black’ from Thompson & Morgan

When it comes to choosing your petunias, firstly consider where you want to grow them. Grandiflora types, like Petunia grandiflora ‘Cascade Pink Orchid Mist’ F1 Hybrid, are best saved for basket and container displays – the large blooms are better shown off at height, and will be less prone to weather damage and mud splash.

For a show-stopping petunia bedding display, multiflora types including Petunia ‘Frenzy Mixed’ are the best option. They have smaller flowers and more of them, creating a carpet of colour that will shrug off a summer shower.

How often should I water my petunias?

Petunia 'Surfinia' Collection from T&M

Keep hanging baskets out of direct sun to reduce water loss
Image: Petunia ‘Surfinia’ Collection from T&M

Watering is very important for healthy petunias. In the height of summer you may need to water containers and baskets twice a day, but at least every other day in an average British summer.

For those that work long hours and have less time for watering, it’s a good idea to move petunia hanging baskets and small containers to a shady spot during heatwave conditions, keeping them out of the afternoon sun until you can get home to give them a drink.

Alternatively invest in an auto watering system to reduce your workload and keep your baskets evenly moist.

Do petunias need deadheading?

Petunia ‘Trailing Surfinia White’ from T&M

Keep petunias blooming by removing wilting flower heads 
Image: Petunia ‘Trailing Surfinia White’ from T&M

Remove spent flowers as often as possible. Don’t just clear away the spent petals, but make sure to remove the entire flower head otherwise seed pods will form, the plant will think it has achieved its objective, and flowering will start to reduce.

Should I feed my petunias?

Petunia ‘Trailing Surfinia Purple’ from T&M

Petunia ‘Trailing Surfinia Purple’ produces electric flowers and long trailing stems
Image: Petunia ‘Trailing Surfinia Purple’ from T&M

Feed your petunias using a specialist petunia fertiliser for the best results. Add the fertiliser to the compost mix before planting containers and baskets and it will feed your plants for the whole season.

We’ve seen some excellent results with petunias in our technical trials for Incredibloom. Our one-off granular feed, applied at planting time to soils or composts, encourages up to 400% more blooms and provides everything your plants need for up to 7 months – covering the whole growing season.

Can I train my petunias?

Petunia 'Trailing Surfinia Blue' from Thompson & Morgan

Train your petunias by pinching out young growing tips
Image: Petunia ‘Trailing Surfinia Blue’ from Thompson & Morgan

Pinch out the growing tips of your plants during the early stages of growth, and do this two or three times before planting out to encourage side shooting. This will lead to much more compact plants with many more flowers.

By mid-August, some petunia varieties may start to look a little tired and straggly. To encourage a second strong flush of blooms to last well into autumn, cut the whole display back by a third and offer a general purpose liquid feed. Within a week or so the plants will start to bush out again and fresh new flowers will soon follow. Within 2 weeks, just in time for your August Bank Holiday garden parties, the display will again be in full bloom with no sign that it has been pruned.

If you’re growing your petunias from seed, aim to sow plants 10-12 weeks ahead of safe planting. So if you’re generally safe to start planting out bedding plants in your area from the 1st week of June, aim to sow your seeds in the first week of March. I’ll be looking at sowing petunias in more detail before then, so stay tuned!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this post and found our top tips helpful! If you think we’ve missed anything let us know! For even more info, visit our petunias hub page for lots more resources to help you grow and care for petunias. Get your garden ready for summer – check out our summer flowers hub page for advice, inspiration and top tips!

Low-maintenance outdoor plants for busy gardeners

Plants are beautiful decorations for your garden, and luckily there are many of those which are easy to care for if you have a busy lifestyle. There are plenty of varieties that don’t need staking, frequent deadheading and dividing, complicated pruning, or excessive watering. Below we’ve listed the most popular low-maintenance outdoor plants for busy gardeners.

Daphne

Daphne is an evergreen, easy-care attractive shrub, with beautiful yellow-edged foliage. It has intensely fragrant white blooms in winter. The right conditions are full or filtered sun and well-drained soil. The beautiful Daphne requires no pruning, but be sure to plant it where it will have room to spread. Since Daphne is a relatively small and slow-growing shrub, it’s a good choice for small gardens and containers.

Daphne Plant

©Derek St Romaine – Daphne is an evergreen, easy-care attractive shrub with beautiful yellow-edged foliage.

Catmint (Nepeta)

Catmint is a non-culinary mint variety that has aromatic foliage, long-lasting blooms, and good drought tolerance. It’s one of the low-maintenance outdoor plants that busy gardeners love because of its beauty and color. You’ll enjoy clusters of purple-blue flowers of Catmint from April through October. It forms wide clumps, and needs room to spread. Plant it in the sun to part shade and this hardy plant will grow and flourish naturally. You just need to cut it down to the ground in the fall.

Nepeta plants

©Shutterstock – Busy gardeners love Nepeta because of its beauty and colour.

Rozanne Geranium

Rozanne Geranium flowers non-stop from late spring until a hard frost. This plant has an abundance of tiny, brilliantly colored periwinkle blue flowers with a white throat and dark purple veins.

Hardy Geranium is one of those plants that are great for curb appeal, and it will never look unkempt. Plant it in spring in part shade to sun, in moist, organically rich, well-drained soil, and it will bloom amazingly. Remove wet or moldy leaves at the end of the growing season and let healthy foliage remain for winter.

Geranium Rozanne plant

©Photoshot – Rozanne Geranium flowers non-stop from late spring until a hard frost.

Vinca

Vinca is one of the popular low-maintenance outdoor plants that will add color to your garden. They bloom in every shade of the pink, rose, and lilac spectrum and attract butterflies. If you can provide full sun and regular watering, you can expect them to bloom richly until frost. Vincas that are fertilized every other week can grow in almost any soil that drains quickly. They are pest-free and great for busy gardeners who can choose from beautiful Vinca varieties such as:

Vinca plant

©Shutterstock – Vinca needs virtually no maintenance once established.

Low-Growing Sedums

Carpeting forms of Sedums (also known as stonecrops) are very easy to care for, and they can survive unfavorable conditions of all kinds. There are many evergreen and herbaceous varieties to choose from with various foliage colors. They can produce flowers from bluish-gray to reddish-bronze, which will add wonder to your garden. When you find the perfect style for your yard, designing a tapestry of these weed-suppressing, drought-tolerant succulents will be very exciting.

Sedum plant

©Shutterstock – Carpeting forms of sedums are very easy to care for, and survive unfavorable conditions of all kinds

Final thoughts

Being a busy gardener may seem like a daunting responsibility. You probably don’t want plants just to survive – you want them to thrive. You want to keep an eye on them, check how they are doing, and give them all your love and affection, but sometimes that seems like a lot of effort. However, if you follow the right advice and choose low-maintenance outdoor plants, you’ll be able to keep your garden beautiful without too much work.

Weaving the Garden Tapestry

There can be much more to a beautiful garden than masses of flowers.  Although a ‘sea of colour’ border is spectacular it may be fleeting in beauty, and can lack definition through the seasons if it has no underlying form or structure.  

Putting together the shape and outline of different types of plants to create harmonies and contrasts is what can give a garden a distinctive, cohesive look.

Fatsia japonica and Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – A ‘green on green’ combination gives a subtle harmony of two hardy shrubs that will both cope well with shade; left is Fatsia japonica (False Castor Oil) sporting glossy, broadly fingered leaves, while to the right is the newish Mahonia ‘Soft Caress’ delicately feathery and full of grace.

Plants are endlessly varied in their forms, ranging from the vertical spires of narrow conifers, down to the mounded shapes of Lavender, giving way to the creeping horizontal mats of Ajuga and Thyme.  Feathery Fennel emphasises the strong form of Phormiums.  Wispy grasses intensify the solidity of leathery Hosta leaves.

Phormium ‘Black Adder’ and Plectranthus argentatus

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Some of the most dramatic plant groupings involve a number of different contrasts, in this case of light and dark, as well as of form — skyrocket verticals set against a softly rounded mound. The wonderfully glossy rich purple Phormium ‘Black Adder’ is underplanted with the felted leaves of Plectranthus argentatus in one of its variegated forms. The Plectranthus hales from Australia and is not hardy (kept from year to year by cuttings in the Autumn), but similar effect would be to substitute the hardy Brachyglottis ‘Sunshine’ (formerly Senecio)

Playing with the geometry of nature, in juxtaposing plants with differing forms and habits delights the eye, and gives the planting a clear framework on which to build the more ephemeral delights of colour and scent.  In other words, the way plant varieties are grouped together is the essence of great gardening.  

Phormium ‘Rainbow Sunrise’ and Canna ‘Australia’

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Another dramatic phormium grouping see Phormium ‘Rainbow Sunrise’ against the rounded leaves of the dark Canna ‘Australia’. This duo also gains resonance from the tone on tone colouring of the two plants together.

Although it is a daunting prospect to tackle the redesign of an established garden, in reality plants come and go.  Once you have finished mourning the loss of a favourite plant, the realisation comes that each demise gives a chance for a little improvement to the scheme, by then making a more considered choice of replacement that will enhance and resonate with its neighbours.

Carex trifida and Rogersia aesculifolia

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – A waterside grouping sees a ‘fountain’ of the variegated grass Carex trifida intertwined with the hand-like leaves of Rogersia aesculifolia, delighting the eye from early Spring to late Autumn. Plants adapted to wet or damp conditions often have lush expansive leaves, giving scope for the most interesting foliage combinations.

In small gardens already furnished with many favourite plants, and new ones just waiting to be to tried out, it is tempting to plant just one of each variety, but one plant very rarely looks good — unless of course it is a ‘specimen’ with dramatic or sculptural form.  The ‘one of each’ policy can produce a ‘spotty dotty’ look that is visually too restless, with no repose for the eye.

Dicksonia antarctica mingles equally well with Darmera peltata and Astelia chatamica ‘Silver Spear’

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Foliage plants alone are perfect for furnishing parts of the garden, especially shady areas, which are intended to be calm and restful. The delicate, acid green fronds of baby tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica), can contrast equally well with the rounded, handlike leaves of Darmera peltata, or entwined with the strappy spikes of Astelia chatamica ‘Silver Spear’. Interestingly the Astelia, although adorned with glossy silver leaves, does very well in shade, whereas silver-leaved plants usually need full sun.

The key to an harmonious effect is to gather up smaller plants or shrubs in three’s or five’s of one kind, and then use these groups, set against one another, for maximum effect.  Luckily the smaller plants are often very easy to bulk up by splitting clumps, or taking cuttings, ensuring planting for style and substance does not dent the budget too much!

Heuchera 'Big Top Bronze' and Saxifraga stolonifera

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – A subtle combination of two ground cover plants for shade, both with attractively veined leaves. Above is Heuchera ‘Big Top Bronze’, underplanted with Saxifraga stolonifera giving a subtle interplay of scale, tone and form.

Making patterns with leaf colour — the subtle interplay of greens, or silver, or gold — is a never-ending pleasure that ensures a furnished garden even in the darkest months, without the need for the fleeting attraction of flowers.  Just as interesting are the many forms and textures of foliage, from the shiny and glistening spears of Astelias, through to the furry felted mats of Stachys byzantina (Lamb’s Ears), via the satiny leaves of Heucheras, and the broad ribbed leaves of Hostas.  Essentially texture gives us contrast of rough with smooth, matt with gloss, as well as providing another level of interest, that of sensation and touch.

Hosta ‘Sum and Substance’, Chionochloa conspicua and Libertia ‘Goldfinger'

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Scale and form again relate to good effect in this grouping of grasses and hostas. The solidity of the massive plate-like golden leaves of Hosta ‘Sum and Substance’ point up the wispy drooping heads of the grass Chionochloa conspicua (to the right) and give a background of contrast to the ribbon leaves of the grass-like plant Libertia ‘Goldfinger’, to the left.

Endless permutations of form and the subtleties of foliage texture can be harnessed to make the building blocks of a great planting — the answer then is to ‘compare and contrast’ for stunning, enduring effect in your outside space!  

Pennisetum macrourum and Tetrapanax papyrifera

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Playing with scale is another great strategy to give interest and depth to borders. Here the feathery uprights of African feather grass Pennisetum macrourum, are delicately poised against the massive solidity of a Tetrapanax papyrifera leaf. As the Tetrapanax is not especially hardy, in more exposed gardens The False Castor Oil, Fatsia japonica would have somewhat the same effect. The Pennisetum started out as a single plant in the previous year, but was split in the spring to make a substantial group of three plants.

Pennisetum ‘Tall Tails’ and Astelia chatamica ‘Silver Spear’

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – No other plant gives the same effect as grasses in the landscape of the garden with their fluttering leaves catching the light, or passing breeze. Grasses are generally pest-free, need no staking, have a long season of beauty, and, if carefully chosen, add airy elegance to a scheme. Here the fountain effect of Pennisetum ‘Tall Tails’, in the foreground, is contrasting with the sword-like silver leaves of Astelia chatamica ‘Silver Spear’.

Tetrapanax papyrifera and Begonia ‘Benitochiba’

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Gardening in smaller spaces, using groups of pots on paving or decking, can still offer opportunities to play with leaf shape and colour. Although flowering annuals are the usual way to furnish pots for the summer, foliage plants have a long season of beauty and are less demanding of care and deadheading. Here a young Tetrapanax papyrifera, is teamed up with the gloriously metallic, net-veined Begonia ‘Benitochiba’.

Begonia luxurians and Canna

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – Another idea for a foliage pot sees Begonia luxurians planted up with a dark leaved canna. The fingery brillant green leaves, against the solid ‘paddles’ of the canna would enhance the tiniest garden and give pleasure from May to October.

Sellonia ‘Richardii’ and Bergenia ‘Bach’

©Steve Lambert, Lake House Design – A telling foliage contrast sees the needle-like leaves of the small pampas grass Sellonia ‘Richardii’ poised elegantly above the robustly shiny ‘plates’ of Bergenia ‘Bach’. Both these plants are not fussy as to soil, put up with a certain amount of shade, and have a long season of interest, both in foliage and flower.

Christmas is fast approaching!

Over the past few weeks I have been tidying the garden, putting the containers away upside down so they don`t fill with water.  Also have been putting away ornaments which were in the garden so they don`t get spoilt with the salt spray/wind that gets carried here in Bournemouth from the sea front. Sprayed them with a well known oil spray to stop them going rusty and wrapped them in fleece, putting three of them together in a black bag. Covered some of the more tender plants with fleece and waiting for my fleece bags to arrive  – with thanks to Geoff Stonebanks letting me know where I could buy them.

Unnamed trailing antirrhinum trialled & Begonia 'Apricot Shades'

Unnamed trailing antirrhinum trialled & Begonia ‘Apricot Shades’

I have also finished planting up some tulip bulbs, unfortunately they were being dug up as fast as I planted them. Whilst talking to friends at our coffee club who said she had a large holly bush if I would like some. I put quite a few sprigs into each container and so far this has stopped my bulbs being dug up – we shall see how long this lasts!
My patio Begonia ‘Apricot Shades’ which were planted on the edge of a narrow border have just finished flowering. I have had them growing with Senecio cineraria ‘Silver Dust’ which really filled the small border right up to the middle of November. I have cleaned off all the begonia corms that were dried off and put them away in newspaper and then wrapped in brown paper until around February when I hope to get them started for Summer 2017.

 

Rose 'Golden Wedding' & unnamed fuchsia trialled

Rose ‘Golden Wedding’ & unnamed fuchsia trialled

My smaller acer trees have looked  wonderful this autumn, the colours seem to change day by day, also the Rose ‘Golden Wedding’ was still managing to flower up until middle of November with slightly smaller flowers.  The Fuchsia FUCHSIABERRY has lost all its leaves and almost all the fruit but there are a few fuchsia flowers still appearing. The trial of the un-named white trailing bidens is still flowering even though I have cut it back, from the same trial an un-named peachy pink antirrhinum was still flowering and as there was a frost forecast I decided to gently take it out of the basket and pot it up for the kitchen window sill, where it is continuing to thrive and grow – fingers crossed!!

Acer trees

Acer trees

We have just had the first storm of the season – Storm Angus! Trees down, roads blocked, underpasses flooded and the poor garden knocked about. That really was the end of the leaves on my acers, such a shame, now they just look like twigs. At the top of the garden I found the top part of one of my containers (which is usually fixed on its own stand) just sitting on the ground and couldn`t find the stand anywhere. Eventually found it under a fuchsia bush at the bottom of the garden, at least it didn`t tip the plants out that were still flowering. I was thrilled to bits that both my Calla Lilies (as mentioned in my previous Blog) are still flowering – end of November. I also have two cactus indoors which are flowering profusely and have been for almost a month now.

Indoor cactus plants

Indoor cactus plants

As we approach the end of November and in my case there is less to do in the garden, everything is turning towards the Big Man in his Sleigh and with over 30 members of our family ranging from a four year old great granddaughter to Alan who is 79 we have to start early with presents etc. and cards, I usually make all my own cards.
Here`s hoping that you all have an enjoyable and peaceful Christmas with lots of `garden` presents and a great gardening year for 2017.
…..Happy Christmas Everyone…..

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