Golden Drifts

Here’s a great reason to love re-seeding annuals: you only have to plant them once! My two favorite annuals, marigolds and cosmos, re-seed themselves with abandon in favorable circumstances, coming up in drifts of glorious color that serve as reminders of the power of massed plantings. Learn to identify your re-seeders, and when the seedlings come up in areas where you might not otherwise want their rambunctiousness you can either transplant or remove them. Enjoy their persistent beauty – these are the plants which are adapted to your growing conditions, which require little more of you than some space and admiration. They don’t want extra water or fertilizer, they don’t need to be deadheaded (unless you want to limit their abundance next year), and they’ll happily unify diverse areas of a garden.

On a more serious note, the other thing to recognize about re-seeding annuals is the reason they re-seed themselves. These are open-pollinated plants, offering up enormous quantities of the stuff that keeps our beneficial insect populations healthy. Want to reduce the numbers of pest insects in your garden, or to simply increase the yield of your vegetables? Try planting some of these re-seeders and watch the amazing variety of predatory insects – wasps, bees, soldier bugs, and lady beetles, amongst others – come to dine at the banquet you’ve set.

Feeling motivated? The Great Sunflower Project (http://www.greatsunflower.org/) is continuing its work collecting data about the health of the country’s bee populations. Plant some cosmos or coreopsis or bee balm, maybe a few Lemon Queen sunflowers, and join the citizen scientists working to better understand this great garden of ours.