It is true. Nature does it! However, some plants are more successful than others. If you are looking for early spring flowers...poppies, larkspur, ect. You do need to get them sowed soon.

However, I find winter sowing to be a more successful technique. (there is a forum on the main page that will help you go into detail, but at its most basic, it is sowing seeds in containers in winter and leaving them outside.) Broadcast sowing leaves the seeds open to various problems...getting eaten, getting washed away, ect. The Winter Sowing technique protects the seeds from birds and rain.

Lisa

Not only does Nature do it, but she also does it very well. However, success in emulating Mother Nature can be very elusive for gardeners. Much depends on what specific flowers you're talking about, the kind of soil you have and what the weather is like. Also, the kind of weather we are having right now plays a role in your success (or lack of such) with the fall broadcast sowing of seeds.

Right now, it is warm enough during the day that warm-season flowers like zinnias, verbena bonariensis, Laura Bush petunia and morning glories are still sprouting in my garden from seed dropped by this year's flowers. However, we also have the right nighttime lows and moisture that encourages cool-season flowers to sprout, so I've also got next year's poppies, larkspur and chamomile sprouting and growing in the garden already. So, if you're talking about annual warm-season flowers, if you sow the seed now, there's a good chance that they'll sprout and grow, and then die back to the ground on a freezing night or suffer frost damage and die on a cold morning. If all your warm-season annual's seeds sprout in the fall and then the plants freeze, you'd have to sow more seed in the spring. It likely is staying cool enough now that if cool-season flowers sprout from scatter-sown seed, they'll survive and bloom in the spring.

There are no guarantees though. In we have a particularly wet winter, sometimes some fall-sown seeds will rot before they can germinate, although many won't. If your cool-season seeds germinate now and grow and we have a particularly brutal cold spell, they still could freeze back to the ground or die altogether. When you're dealing with nature, there's always a wide range of possibilities because many variables are in play.

I'm not especially thrilled that my larkspur and poppies are up and growing this early while we're still having highs in the upper 80s. This can cause them to grow very quickly and attain a large size earlier than usual. That can lead to them blooming far too early and getting nipped back by frost. It also means I have larkspur and poppies growing among the rows of cabbage, broccoli, kale and chard in the fall garden so I have to work around those seedlings while weeding or harvesting, which is inconvenient but certainly not the end of the world. In a more typical year, those veggies don't have to compete with cool-season flowers in October. Sometimes I'll have the little cool-season sprouts in late November or early December, but not in early October.In a different year with different weather, I wouldn't notice any larkspur, chamomile or poppy seedlings sprouting until sometime in January or February.

If you're talking about perennials, the issue is more about the type of soil than the weather. If your soil is very heavy clay, you'd have more success winter-sowing them as Lisa mentioned. If you have a nice sandy loam that drains well, you might have the same success with broadcast sowing that you'd have with winter-sowing in containers. If you have a sandy/silty soil that drains very quickly because it has very low to no organic matter or clay in it, the seeds may germninate and grow but will need to be watched and watered as needed if your winter is dry.

With all the things that can go wrong, and Lisa mentioned another common one--seeds being eaten before they can sprout--winter sowing gives more of a guaranteed result, though nothing in nature is really guaranteed.

If you want, you can tell us what kinds of seeds you want to plant and anyone here who has had experience with those specific types of flowers can tell you if broadcast sowing worked for them, and if they did it in spring, winter or fall.

Finally, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, so you're right to be skeptical.

Dawn

I've never had good luck with sowing Fall seed, but I think it washes away in my area. Wintersowing works great.

I would be afraid that seed would come up now and just be killed off. I noticed petunias coming up in a hanging basket, my volunteer tomato plants are starting to bloom, and I have about a three foot square of parsley with plants about a half inch apart. If it was Spring I would have enough for everyone attending the Fling. It has been a strange year.

Save your milk jugs and try wintersowing.

Carol, It drives me crazy when self-sown tomato plants bloom in October because only 1 year out of 10 will they live long enough to ripen a fruit from October flowesr. It has been a long time since we last had weather warm enough in fall/winter to ripen tomatoes from fall volunteers. I "think" the last year it was that warm late into winter was either 2003 or 2004 at our house, but as the years fly by, my memory gets fuzzier on what year it was.

While weeding last week, I pulled up oodles of volunteer tomato plants that were sprouting underneath bush bean plants. I had cherry tomato plants in that area all summer, so if I'd left the volunteers alone, based on location the odds are they were either Ildi or SunGold, so yanking them out wasn't easy....I kept thinking of the tomatoes that might produce if I potted them up and moved them to the greenhouse.

It has been the strangest of strange years, and I'm now operating with a "believe anything" frame of mind. I have Texas bluebonnets sprouting in the veggie garden where I don't grow them, and the wild onions that bloom in spring are now blooming in the pasture. The Methley plum continues to have a few more flowers bloom daily, and the fall fig crop is beginning to ripen while new figs are trying to form at the ends of the branches. The weedy native mallow plants are sprouting everywhere. I wonder what odd flower or veggie will appear out-of-season next?

I am always delighted to see Laura Bush petunias sprouting at this time of the year because they'll live and bloom until we hit about 15 degrees, when they'll freeze back to the ground. However, they often regrow quickly and are blooming again within a couple of weeks. Although it is not advertised as being particularly cold-hardy, these petunias flower as well in winter for me as pansies do, so they virtually a year-round plant.

Dawn

I am anxiously watching this thread because this will be the first year I grow flowers. I am excited to have something new to worry about :). I plan on winter sowing, but flower gardening is a whole new world.

I know I want to edge my garden with salvia and certainly some Russian sage. The rest I don't know, drought tolerant plants that is for sure.

Has anyone started these from seed? What time? Is the timing similar to vegetable gardening?

Thank you so much. We have decided to wait. I will learn about winter sowing. I have tried to start seed in the late winter indoors and have not had any luck. So I hope I can be successful with winter sowing this year. Yes, they are perennials that I plan to plant, such as, blanket flowers, gaillardia, echinacea, etc. We have great soil here. We have a farm south of the canadian river with rich, dark soil and we haul the soil to our garden. Again, thanks to all for the information. I will continue to watch for more threads about flower gardening.

Ezzirah, With the salvia, starting it from seed is generally pretty easy, particularly with the annual salvia varieties. Some of the perennial ones may be a little bit trickier to start. Texas Hummingbird Sage (which is Salvia coccinea) reseeds easily in my garden so it is the main one I grow. I only started them from seed once, and now they reseed on their own every year.

Debsnest, You're welcome. Winter sowing works because it provides the seeds with the cold-stratification they need in order to germinate. It is great for perennials. This ensures you get good germination at the right time. Some flowers need a prolonged cold stratification period with consistent moisture, but others need alternating periods of cold/warm in order to induce germination. By using winter sowing, you're giving them conditions similar to what they experience outdoors in the ground. Growing perennial flowers indoors from seed under lights is trickier than winter sowing, in general, because the house may stay too warm to meet their cold-stratification needs. One way to get around that is to pre-chill seeds in the refrigerator for a few weeks in that specific variety only needs cold but dry stratification. Some perennials need cold or cool wet stratification so you have to sow those seeds in a soil-less growing mix and put it in the refrigerator for the specified number of weeks. For perennials like that, winter sowing in milk jugs or other plastic containers outdoors is certainly easier than putting a container of soil-less mix + seeds in a refrigerator for a few weeks.

Ezzirah, With Russian Sage, cold stratification is required in order to get good germination. This is true of most perennials being grown from seed. Often the cold stratification is required in order to get the seeds to break dormancy. With the Russian Sage, just put the seeds in a plastic bag and put them in the refrigerator for 4-6 weeks to cold-stratify them. When you plant them, moisten the growing medium before you sow the seeds. Then sow the seeds on top of the growing medium and lightly press them into the surface of the growing mix, but do not cover them with soil. They germinate better with some light. Grow them on indoors under lights until it is time to harden them off prior to transplanting them into the ground.

With each type of flower, the timing of the seed starting is specific to the needs of the flower. With warm-season annuals, the timing is similar to the seed-starting timing for warm-season veggies like tomatoes or peppers. However, some types of flowers that can be grown from seed (begonias are one) have incredibly tiny seed that gives you incredibly tiny sprouts and it may take a minimum of 12 weeks after they germinate to get them large enough to harden off/transplant outdoors, and by large enough, I mean an inch or two tall. They are very slow to grow early in their lives. Generally you can find the details on the back of the seed packet in terms of when to sow seed. Or, go to the website of a good seed retailer like Johnny's Selected Seeds or HPS Seeds and follow their seed-starting/planting directions for each type of plant you're starting from seed. Some perennials will take a month or longer to germinate even after you have cold-stratified them, so keep that long germination period in mind when starting seeds for spring.

I normally start veggie seeds indoors, but am more prone to start flower seeds outdoors because there's only so much space indoors on the light shelf.

Dawn