Pacific Northwest Gardening: Favorite Annuals?, 1 by

wrote:
Wow! You guys have more patience than me and also more sun than me. I've tried growing coleus from seed and it's always been slow going. By the time they are ready to put out at my place, the season is half gone. I've also done cuttings and overwintered them, only to lose them to warm/damp conditions in the greenhouse. In the end, I buy them every year at a nursery in Tacoma. They generally have a decent selection and theirs are nice and full and lovely. Then, around the time mine would be ready, they mark them to half price, with their 'geraniums', and I go a little insane. Last year I was into the orange ones to pump up the foreground of the 'hot bed'. You can see them in this photo.

I also give up on trying to grow those beautiful amaranths. I have seeds from several varieties, but I don't have the 'touch' with them. I love them, but they do not love me or my yard.

I love the nicotiana, including the green varieties, and i plant that every year either in flats or in the ground. great filler plant.

I love dahlias, but I will not dig them up, so i go around and see what survived the winter and replace those that didn't make it.

What I finally decided I really loved is shopping for the small basket filler annuals at my local Fred Meyer. They have a good garden person and always have cool things. I can spend hours mixing and matching, then days doing the pots. Last year I picked up some short pink snapdragons and the bloomed until we had that hard freeze in november. They were glorious. I let them seed, but I don't have high hopes for that. I'll just buy more.

I plant annual poppies each year, then end up either covering most of the seed with mulch by accident, or weeding them out by accident. This year I hope to do better. I've marked them. I'll probably have thousands of them because I literally just threw handfuls of seed into certain areas.