Love the larkspurs! Here I just wait until the plants die and remove them. They die soon after blooming. I'll take some of the seed and spread it around. Always have some every spring. Pretty sure they are an annual.

Sandy

Sammy, you have to let some of them go to seed and then shake out the seeds on the ground. If you are getting larkspurs every year, you must already be letting some go to seed. They are annuals.

You don't need all of them to go to seed unless you will be saving seed. You could pull a few of them if you wanted to clean up the bed a little. I do that with my dames rocket. I don't want to let it all go to seed, so I start pulling them as they wrap up and then just a let a few set seed. Those I pull when they are finished and just lay down the whole plant in the bed. It's a wild kind of bed, so they get hidden fairly well.

I have no advice to offer, I just wanted to say how beautiful that picture is, so how beautiful your yard is! What a great color combo!

Sammy, Your garden is gorgeous! That is a spectacular color combination.

I do the same things Sandy and Lisa do. I have them in shades of blue, pink and white and just make sure I leave a few plants of each color in the ground long enough for seed to self-sow. After I take them out, zinnias, also from self-sown seed the previous year, fill in the space vacated by the larkspur.

Since we are on rural land, sometimes I take the larkspur plants I've pulled out and walk through the front pasture shaking seed out as I go. Every year we have more larkspur in the pasture, so I guess it is working.

We are a lot further south than y'all are, of course, so my larkspurs usually are a couple of weeks ahead of the ones in central and northeastern Oklahoma. The heat has really cranked up. It was 98 degrees here yesterday. I yanked out almost all of my larkspur and poppies late last week and expect the smallish-sized zinnias will take off growing now and will be blooming by next week.

Dawn

My poor (few) larkspur looked fried last night when I got home...they definitely do not love the heat!

Lisa

Lisa,

Last week I actually pulled out most of my poppies and larkspur from the roughly 10' x 20' corner of the veggie garden they occupy while they still were in full bloom and were looking wonderful. It was very hard to do, and I left a few that were a little further away, sort of invading veggie beds nearby.

This flowering corner of the veggie garden is filled with reseeders which makes it hard to ever improve the dense clay at that end of the garden because it has little seedlings of one kind or another in it virtually year-round. So, I sacrificed the larkspur and poppies in order to work on the soil a little. I worked peat moss and tons of pine bark fines into the soil where the larkspur had been, and then planted several dozen zinnia plants raised from seed specifically for this project. I planted Violet Queen, Will Rogers and Envy. I imagine zinnias in other colors also will sprout from seeds in the soil from last years plants, which were in the full range of available zinnia colors.

In another nearby bed where onions have been harvested, I planted a couple of kinds of pink zinnias (Pinca and Peppermint Stripe), some Pink Popsock Cosmos along with another couple of some of the newer Cosmos varieties in pink and white shades,Rose Queen cleome and some yellow profusion zinnias.

As for the poppies and larkspur I left on the edges of the veggie beds? We hit 98 degrees yesterday and they look pretty pathetic now, so in the cooler evening hours tonight, I think I'll yank them out. I'll also likely sow new larkspur seed in this area in the fall because I don't know how many seeds the plants had dropped before I unceremoniously yanked them out last week. I already have plenty of larkspur seed, purchased last year because I intended to enrich the soil last fall (ha ha ha), but poppies violas and larkspur sprouted before I could even get the summer plants out of the ground and improve the soil back in the fall. Better late than never....

I could go on planting flowers endlessly, but it is getting awfully hot now, though that may not stop me. When the corn harvest is done in June and July, I'm thinking of just planting big masses of sunflowers there.

I told Tim I didn't intend to succession plant a lot of edible crops that would need lots of watering this summer, but I didn't say I wasn't going to plant flowers! I have found many flowers get by on a lot less water, so they seem a wiser weather-choice for succesion plantings in early and mid-summer.

Dawn

I had transplanted a couple of plants over the weekend and they just looked pitiful last night. I have gotten spoiled by being able to plop plants in the ground and "bam" we get rain! I was wilting last night...so I totally get their pain :)

I planted deep lavender pentas and a big Lantana, both of which seem to be taking the heat in stride. I still have to plant and dig up some baby salvia lady in Red and various morning glories to move to other locations. I got my fall tomato seeds done, and a few other seeds like purple baron millet and malva Braveheart, which have already popped up! Also got out in the backyard and dug some pipevine clematitis to move. The pretzel beans are up 3 days after planting, but the ground cherries have yet to appear. I have another area to put down some cut & come again zinnias tomorrow.

As everyone says, too much work to do, so.little time before the day gets too hot...

Susan

Ok, I have to ask, what is the beautiful pink in there also?

Lisa, Me too. You know, since space isn't an issue here and I can plant endlessly (which isn't always a good thing), I just keep planting and planting more stuff until the heat either starts killing me or the new plants. I'd say this week has about reached that level. The plants I put in the ground over the weekend don't look too happy this week. We sure got spoiled during the cool, cloudy, rainy weather. Still, at this point the nights cool off enough that the plants and I both recover from the wilting overnight. In a few weeks, that may cease to be true.

Susan, You've been busy! I haven't even sowed my fall tomato seeds yet, and I need to get it done because I'm about to get really busy with harvesting, which always is a priority since produce that is ripe won't wait for me to "get around to" harvesting it. We are on the verge of being inundated with squash, corn and cucumbers, and all I can say is that it is about time. Everything seems so late this year after all that uncooperative May weather.

Most days, the only thing I'm harvesting right now is tomatoes, now that all the cool-season crops (except potatoes and garlic) are harvested. With the heat we're getting now, the potatoes won't hang in there too much longer, and I always dread digging them in the heat of late June or July, but it has to be done.

We have butterflies everywhere here now. I hope y'all are having as good of a butterfly year up there as we are having down here.

The garden is rapidly turning into a wild jungle, as it always does when the weather is so warm, but I don't mind that....the more the ground is shaded, the the cooler it stays.

Dawn

Dawn, you have squash??? After my zucchetta abundance last year, mine are a no show so far. I think they might have rotted in the wet. I just ordered new seeds today.

Thanks for your nice comments about my flowers. I mainly grow roses, but do like the almost all other flowers. In the background of the picture is Carefree Beauty. I have three of them together, and they are very pretty.

Right now my larkspurs are glowing. We must be having a late blooming time because I don't think they have ever been in so much competition with the roses before. I need to limit them, and learn to create a path so that the bermuda does not get such a hold.

Sammy that is a beautiful picture. When I pull up larkspur I stick the tops in a paper bag in case I want to save some seed. Same for poppies that haven't reseeded.

I just got some lilies from Eden brothers today I will plant this evening, in hopes they can establish & bloom next year.