How exciting! I love getting those little seed packets in my mail box! The zinnias and cosmos will have plenty of time to bloom. I believe the shastas and yarrow are perennial, so I'd wait to winter sow those because they likely need cold treatment and then will break dormancy.

Dawn probably knows about Laura Bush petunias. I went ahead and sowed mine a week or so again. There were just a few seeds, though, and I thought I would experiment to see if they will come up for one thing, and for the second, whether or not there is sufficient time left for them to bloom.

Have a blast!!

Susan

I'd go ahead and try Laura Bush now. It goes from seed to flower really fast in hot weather. If I do not deadhead the plants fairly often, I have oodles of new petunia plants sprouting all summer long. Most seeds now should give you blooms for late summer or fall.

In 2004, we had a large, barn-style detached garage built in the spring and summer. They finished it up right before the Fourth of July holiday. There was a lot of bare ground left around it when they were through building, and I knew undesirable weeds were likely to sprout quickly in the bare ground, so I broadcast sowed a lot of hot weather flowers like verbena bonariensis, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, globe amaranth, etc. I probably sowed the seed on July 2nd or 3rd. We had blooms on a lot of those plants before the end of August and got a couple of months of blooms from them, or maybe a little more. Then they reseeded, so I had flowers back in that spot the following year too.

If the weather cooperates, you certainly could get flowers well before your first freeze, but if the weather turns against you or if the ground is so hot that they are slow to germinate, you might not get many flowers this year.

Dawn