Perennial/Biennial sowings

Hi all,

If I sow some perennials and biennials for next year now, will they likely be hardy enough to plant out in the autumn? My little mini greenhouses aren't going to protect much over the winter are they?

I imagined sowing them now, getting a smallish but sturdy plant by the end of the season, ready for a good strong plant next year. I don't want to be too fussy about it - just wondered if it might work.

 

Hi VP

The quick answer is yes, go for it!

If you can give your little plants some protection in the autumn, though, it will improve their chances. It's not so much low temperatures as destructive wind and rain, not to mention slugs that seem to remain active late into the year and/or become active very early in the spring.

What varieties did you have in mind?

 

I have some lupin seeds, fox gloves, echinacea, and some Clarkia, which I know is an annual but I haven't seen it before (even though my step mum and I have been looking for ages) so I thought I would just pop that in outside now for this year - only a day late for a May sowing!

I am worried that if I don't keep a good flow going of lupins and fox gloves I will start losing them with nothing to replace them with.

Oddly, I asked to a bloke that worked at a nursery we popped into yessterday if removing the flower spike after fox gloves had flowered would keep it flowering. He said 'no, but next year they'll come back again.' That raised the subject of them being biennials, and he said they would live for five or six years! He said they keep theirs for much longer than two years.

Is he deluded??!

 

Victoria, as Flinty says the answer is yes. Christopher Lloyd (Great Dixter) used to write that he sowed many of his biennials in August - essentially so that they wouldn't flower in the same year. Amongst them were Lupins, which are strictly speaking perennial, but he treated them as a biennial as he said they looked so awful after flowering and couldn't be moved as they have a tap root.

He also wrote about the fact that if you dead head bienniels, you can sometimes make them live longer.

My own preference is to sow biennials early in the year, but that is solely to give them longer to build up a big rootstock, and hopefully make larger plants in the second year.

 

Brilliant!

So should I plant them out when they are big enough this year, or overwinter them in my mini greenhouses?

 

They should be totally hardy. I sow mine in March, then leave them in pots till about October, as there won't be any space in the border for them. Then in the autumn, when the annuals like Cleome and Cosmos are done and the tender perennials such as Dahlias have been lifted, I plant my biennials in the spaces left.

However this last autumn, my Lupins were eaten by slugs as soon as I planted a few out, so I left the rest of the Lupins in their pots standing on gravel and only planted them out earlier this year. The earlier they are planted out the better they will do - but that does't make allowance for the slugs.

If you are going to leave the biennials in pots for any period of time, I would suggest that you use the biggest pots you can spare. A cheap option is to use cut flower buckets, which Morrisons were selling this week at 8 for 99p, and just use garden soil rather than compost. But then you need the space. :D - you can't win.

 

Agree with what the others have said. I'd add Wallflowers and Sweet William to the list as well.

PS love the new avatar - is that your Clematis Josephine?

 

Yep... now I have two big flowers!

 

I have the Clematis Josephine ... and I too have 2 big flowers !:hehe: