Good morning, gardeners! I'm a huge fan of flowers, from the mysterious and intricate flowers of the orchid variety, that can look like dancing ladies in long, full dresses,
or aliens hatching from their pods.
Let's look below the tangled hose for two of my favorite summer flowers to grow.
I'm a huge fan of easy to grow flowers like petunias, because all they need is water and some nice flower booster fertilizer. I may have gotten carried away with the fertilizer when I had this combination in my front planters!
I found that petunias can make your containers look good without a lot of effort. They come in many varieties and colors, and any habit, from upright grandifloras, to the perfect hanging basket type, the Wave petunias. There are solid colors, striped, and the veined variety, one of my favorites.
Another of my favorites is sunflowers, also very easy to grow and enough varieties to satisfy any gardener!
Here are some Maximillian sunflowers, that bloom late summer into fall, and are very popular with migrating monarch butterflies.
And here are commercial sunflowers (used for bird seed and human food)- these are grey striped seed sunflowers, but they also grow the black oil sunflowers here. After they harvested this field, my dog and I spent several Saturday mornings gathering the seed heads missed by the combine, and I fed them to the birds and squirrels all winter.
So those are some of my favorite flowers in the summer garden.
What's growing in your flower garden?