Choosing Annuals for Your Tulsa Garden

Many Tulsa gardeners can’t wait until spring when they can get back in to their gardens. A colorful garden of annuals can enhance any landscape. What are annuals and how can you successfully use them to enhance your Tulsa home and landscape?

Annual plants are generally ones that complete their entire growing cycle in a single growing season. They grow from seeds, create foliage, blossom, and then grow seeds and die all in the same year. Perennials, however, bloom year after year, for at least two years, but they can have a fairly short blooming season. Some hardy annuals can act more like perennials and vice versa with perennials depending on the local climate.

Annuals offer a simple way to add interesting color combinations into your Tulsa garden. They are very versatile – they work great in containers, flowerbeds, window boxes, and are ideal for lining a sidewalk.  Because they have such vigorous growth, they provide an instant or close-to-instant way to have a vibrant flower garden. These lively plants provide a showy array and diversity of color, texture, and form.

“There are annuals that are tall, medium, short or climbing; ones that prefer either full sun or partial shade; and those with special virtues, such as delightful fragrance (stock, mignonette, nicotiana) or attractive foliage (caladium, coleus, dusty miller),” Gardener’s Supply Company noted.

How can you select the best annuals for your Tulsa garden?

Planning out the colors and varieties you want along with their environmental needs on paper first can help you have a more attractive and organized garden design. Annuals generally should be planted outside in the spring after any danger of frost has passed.

Annuals that are already in bloom can be purchased at a nursery or garden center in packs and then can be relocated into the outside garden. You can also buy annuals in seed packets and either grow them indoors in late winter or early spring or grow them directly in the garden soil outside, depending on the type of seed. Buying seed packets is less expensive and offers a wider variety of flowers than what you might otherwise find in nursery packs.

Make sure the soil is well-fertilized before planting or transplanting annuals into the garden. Check the nursery or packet instructions for correct spacing of flowers to ensure they don’t get overcrowded once they mature. For flowers from nursery packs, gently break up the compounded soil/roots so that the roots will be able to grow freely in the soil.

Annuals and perennial flowers can be combined to create a colorful and engaging garden for your Tulsa home. Call Oklahoma Landscape’s horticulture experts for more details on planting your spring garden.