Specialty Gardening: Does anyone have the secret to growing petunias ALL summer?, 1 by Highmtn

Highmtn wrote:
HI Cindyeo..
Well....... it sounds like you did it all correct. We have a newspaper garden guru who always reminds us to cut our petunias back hard about the 1st of August and mine always come back like gang busters. Having said that I see you're using window boxes (which I use too).

I change the soil in my boxes every year. Because we all water window-B's sooo much they really need some extra "fertilizer" even if you've used something like Miracle Grow potting soil (with a time release fertilizer). Also, as tough as petunias are...they don't like to sit in heavy wet soil and hot humid weather is not exactly a happy thing for them either. You also might want to look really close at the plants....flea beetles can nail petunias too.

I've only had trouble with my petunias once and it was flea beetles. They turned into scrawny sticky messes.

I would just pull the sick plants and sprinkle in some easy breezy seeds like alyssum to fill the spaces if you have much growing season left.

One of my bright ideas this year was to sprinkle in alyssum seeds about mid-season. Not a lot...just a few. As some plants faded out the alyssum filled out every corner of the boxes and looked great. This is not the best photo because it was a gray day, and the alyssum was not in full bloom yet. All that was originally planted in this w-box was one tiny little fuchsia 2"x2" basket stuffer and a little sprinkle of alyssum seeds. I should have thinned them out , but I just let them go. I'd go take a picture now but ...it's RAINING! I got to thinking about plants that like to sprout in tight cracks like Johnny-Jump-ups, and alyssum. So... I thought they should surely bloom in little areas in a window box...and they did.

Try it next year! This was about a month ago in the photo attached.

This message was edited Aug 29, 2009 7:28 AM