Specialty Gardening: Spectacular 2007 Cottage Garden Seed Swap #4, 0 by Lala_Jane

Lala_Jane wrote:
Good Morning!

I notice the talk has moved to winter-sowing so I thought I'd pipe in with my own experience. Last year was my first time trying my hand at it and I absolutely loved it. If you check out the WS forum here at Dave's http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/f/coldsow/all/ you'll note that the top 5 threads have been made sticky and are all titled "Lesson's for Next Year." Some of the tips you'll find there are worth their weight in gold. I can't remember exactly but I think I sowed something like 50-60 jugs last year. I am fortunate to have a place I can hide them from view in the winter, but the yard admittedly looked pretty trashy for about a month while I was planting out.

My biggest "lesson for next year" is to save the WSing primarily for perennials and do my annual sowing inside under lights. My WS annuals bloomed about a month later than the others and of course we're all anxious to see color as early as possible when spring emerges. One big advantage to wintersowing is that you do not have to harden the plants off which to me is a huge, HUGE, bonus. I had about 20 flats of flowers started inside and the constant shuffling to avoid sunburn was a full time job for a week or two. The WS plants had already been exposed to all the elements so could be pretty much ignored as long as they were kept moist. (Of course if you don't get them planted out early enough you have to be careful to not cook them in their tiny little greenhouses. The ones that got planted last were put in a shady spot and watered every other day and seemed to be quite content with the arrangement).

I'll include a picture of the front of my house. Sorry, the more "cottagey" part of my garden is in back, but this will give you an idea of how successful wintersowing can be. Almost everything in this picure but the sweet potato vine was wintersown.