Seed sowing for beginners

@groundbeetle Not to worry as they are annuals they are in a great hurry to flower & set seed ready for a new generation & they will continue to flower until they are killed by the frosts. I've had them flowering still in November on the balcony! Admittedly they look bad by then but with colder weather the flowers get smaller but can last several days!
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Here's a Morning Glory flower from October 2021!
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I grow a perennial morning glory, Ipomoea indica, needs a greenhouse overwinter though.
Not flowering just yet.
Pic from last year.

 

My May-sown Morning Glory, Grandpa Ott, has now produced four deep purple flowers with crimson stars, over the past week. They are much bigger plants with bigger leaves but don't have as many flower buds as the February-sown Heavenly Blue, which has grown about another ten inches and has a lot of flower buds, some ready to open, but only tiny leaves, though it is quite tall, nowhere near as tall as the May-sown.

It is only July and I expect the May-sown Grandpa Ott to eventually flower a lot more than the February-sown Heavenly Blue.

Another year I would definitely leave it until mid May to sow Morning Glory seeds. I don't have a greenhouse or anything like that, and it would probably be different for people who do.

They are fascinating to watch the way they climb, and they can decide they are climbing in the wrong place and untwist their spiralling stems and attach them somewhere else.

 

My June sowing is coming on but Scotland is a month to six weeks behind the south of England sowing-wise.

 

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Sometime in May is a good time to sow these plants! I always did that. You don't need a greenhouse or any form of artificial heat, just sow them where you want them to grow. They don't take kindly to being moved around & transplants don't always work.
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I agree they are fascinating to watch as they climb higher every day! I've often moved the stems if they are not growing where I want them to grow as well!

 

I will definitely be growing Morning Glories next year too, and will remember to not sow their seeds until mid May.

While a lot of my garden is now looking tatty and straggly and has needed a lot of work to tidy it up, the Morning Glories mostly look after themselves, just needing water (they are in pots) and the occasional high potassium (rose or tomato) feed, and occasional extract of seaweed feed. They produce new flowers every morning.

I will try to find out how to collect their seeds to use next year, and will probably also buy some more seeds of different varieties. I will try to grow more of them, and avoid having them competing with sweet peas which got tatty and overwhelming. I have read that Morning Glory self-seed, but I am not sure if they do in our British climate?

 

My Morning Glory are producing one flower every second day - but they look lovely. The seeds I sowed last week have germinated as well.

 

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They are lovely flowers, aren't they? Glad they are flowering for you! Although I haven't had any success this year I have found a couple of self sown plants on the balcony; one is in a hanging flower basket!!! Not for the first time this has happened! I'd put up a photo but I don't have one - yet! Perhaps if I remember I will take one tomorrow. I haven't seen any flowers yet but no doubt it will flower very soon.

The other plant found it's way into a pot that had a Pelargonium cutting growing in it! I have no idea how it could have got there! I didn't even know it was there till a couple of weeks ago, it's not on the balcony as I planted a lot of Pelargonium cutting in the gardens of my church some moths ago. It's stems are now several feet long! I didn't see any flowers on it this morning when I watering the Pelargoniums.
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Here is a photo I took some years ago of a self-sown 'Morning Glory' flowering in a hanging basket on the balcony.
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Here is a photo I took today of the selfsown 'Morning Glory' in a hanging basket on the balcony. It doesn't have any flowers yet but it will no doubt flower very soon.

Perhaps you can see the first buds.
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@Balc, interesting that they can self-sow in our climate, that the seeds know how to only germinate when it is warm enough and after a cold winter. Maybe yours were sown by a bird or some other creature?

I just watched a Youtube video showing how to collect Morning Glory seeds, and the lady commented that her blue Morning Glories, probably Heavenly Blue, had just started flowering in the fall, in November. It sounded as though she was in America, no idea which state. Her purple Morning Glories, probably Grandpa Ott, were no longer flowering so well having flowered all summer. She commented that her blue Morning Glories were especially beautiful and bigger. Hers might have been different cultivars but they did look like Grandpa Ott and Heavenly Blue. (Heavenly Blue are sold by Poundland in a set of six different seeds labelled for Hanging Baskets, trailing - Lobelia Cascade Mixed Colours, Busy Lizzie, Nasturtium Tom Thumb, Petunia, Morning Glory Heavenly Blue, and Verbena. I didn't get round to setting up the hanging baskets and planted these in tubs, but they would have looked very nice all together in a hanging basket. I have some small wall baskets, but they wouldn't give the Morning Glory anything to climb up).

I am noticing that there is a lot of difference in how advanced they are depending on where I planted them, and the only Heavenly Blue that is flowering is the one I sowed in February, whereas I planted both Grandpa Ott and more Heavenly Blue in mid May. I have some Grandpa Ott flowering in smaller pots mixed in with other things and they haven't grown tall enough to climb and there is nowhere really for them to climb to, but they are still flowering. The best Grandpa Ott are those I planted in a really big pot with fresh compost in mid May, and some I planted in the ground which is scrambling through a shrub. The former is the best, planted in a very big pot of fresh compost. Others were planted in fairly big but smaller pots of fresh compost, with too many competing plants, and they are now doing ok but nothing like as vigorous and tall and floriferous as those in the really big pot.

Now I am wondering if the tiny beginnings of Morning Glory plants in some smaller pots with competing plants (now cut back a lot) will be late flowering when the others have finished, and maybe Heavenly Blue has a different flowering pattern than Grandpa Ott.

 

I sowed some "Heavenly Blue" a couple of weeks ago as we had a pyramid planter we had removed Sweet Peas from standing idle. It will be interesting to see if and when they flower.

 

Being as 'Morning Glory' is from the same family as the Bindweed they can put up with quite a bit of competition. They also need to reproduce so what better way than to climb up existing plants to get your flowers up into the air & pollinated! They also come from warmer climes than our British one. They may also start to develop & flower later in the season so as to take advantage of their hosts having already having done most of the hard work of getting out of the ground & their heads into the air. They climb very fast as well & make Sweetpeas look like slow coaches!
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Birds have no interest in the seeds so I doubt very much the Morning Glory in the hanging basket was dropped by a bird. No, it probably came from a seed that dropped into the basket after I removed the dead plants last year.

I have grown 'Heavenly Blue' on a couple of occasions & find them totally different to the others. They are much more vigorous & have much thicker stems. Their foliage is a much lighter green than the others as well.
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@Jocko, I found the Youtube video where the lady commented about her Heavenly Blue Morning Glory being bigger and flowering later. At least they look like Heavenly Blue to me. After what she said I realised that my Heavenly Blue flowers are bigger than Grandpa Ott flowers. And the only one of my Heavenly Blue that is flowering so far is the one I sowed in February.

For some reason this video didn't save to my Youtube history so I had to search for it again.