Are you surface sowing them? They need to be surface sown with nothing covering them because they need to have light to germinate. It is easier to start them indoors or at least in flats outdoors because one good rainshower will wash away the seeds in the blink of an eye. You also need to have fresh seed to get the best germination. The seeds' viability drops pretty quickly after that first year.

The year I started my first Laura Bush petunias from seed, I grew them the way I start any petunias from seed. I filled a 72-cell flat with a lightweight, sterile, soil-less seed-starting mix and wet it down good so it wouldn't dry out too quickly. Then I surface-sowed the Laura Bush Petunia seeds on top of the mix in the flats, and just used by fingers to gently pat down the seeds to make sure they were making good soil contact. Because the seeds are so tiny and regular watering likely would wash away the seeds, I sprayed them with a mister bottle to water them. Within a week or two I had hundreds and hundreds of teeny-tiny seedlings. I transplanted them as hunks of seedlings into 3 oz. paper cups filled with a soil-less mix and grew them on for a couple of weeks, then hardened them off and planted each paper cup, cup and all, right into the soil. I bet I had at least 200 paper cups, each with a dozen or more plants per cup. I figured the strongest plants would crowd out the weaker ones and didn't bother thinning them. I planted them in veggie beds all over my garden and that year we had Laura Bush petunias growing like a ground cover everywhere. They bloomed their heads off all summer long in a miserably hot and dry summer when most of my other flowers couldn't take the heat and looked sad, pathetic, miserable...and, finally, dead. They are the most heat-tolerant petunia I've ever seen and their foliage doesn't yellow in the heat like that of fancy and expensive hybrid petunias (which also lack their heat tolerance). Mine have reseeded for me ever since...and I mean they pop up everywhere---in garden beds, in containers (maybe insects, birds or wind carries the seeds from the garden to containers 200' away), in the gravel driveway, in the lawn, etc. I love flowers like this one that really want to grow here despite the heat and a nearly-constant lack of rainfall.

I haven't had to grow any more from seed except when I wanted to add the Pink Laura Bush petunia to my garden (for those who don't know, the original one is a violet-purple shade) and then a couple of years after that I bought a packet of the formula mix to get the white and the pink/white streaked ones. Mine reseed to the point of being a problem some years but the seedlings are easy to yank out, so I yank them out when they pop up where I don't want them and leave them everywhere else.

If you're direct sowing them outdoors, it may be those tiny seeds blow away or wash away before they can sprout or you're covering them with soil which prevents them from getting the light they need to germinate.

My poppies and larkspur have looked great, but the heat is getting the poppies now. However, they've been blooming since early May, so they have had a long time to put on a great show. We hit 99 degrees a couple of days ago, which likely is the nail in their coffin since they are cool-season plants. I am going to deadhead them again today---I try to deadhead them at least once a week in order to keep them going for as long as possible--and see if I can get another round of blooms out of them. My larkspur was really slow to sprout and grow this year. I guess they didn't like the weather. I probably should have watered that area since rain wasn't falling, but they are in bloom now, so all's well that ends well. Usually they bloom right along with the poppies (and sometimes ahead of them) but this year the poppies bloomed at least 3 weeks ahead of them. Both the poppies and larkspur self-sow every year so at some point I stop deadheading them to let them set seed. There's also zinnias and verbena bonariensis in that bed, and Malva sylvestris on one edge of it, and all three of those are up and just beginning to bloom so they'll fill in that area and replace the poppies and larkspur after they are done. I love the way the larkspurs and poppies look together, and I love that we have a bed of red, white and blue flowers in bloom every year for Memorial Day.

Now, for anyone wanting to see more info about the Laura Bush petunias, I'll link the website that sells the seed. It is my favorite wildflower seed retailer. The page I link will have all three of the seed types available--the original violet purple, the pink and the formula blend.

Here is a link that might be useful: Laura Bush Petunia Seed at Wildseed Farms

I haven't had any luck either. I need to get back to starting seeds in containers instead of just broadcasting seeds and hoping stuff comes up :)

Dawn, when you say they come up like ground cover, do they crowd out weeds too? I have been having zinnias reseed but the weeds get prolific while I'm waiting for them & it takes all my time to get the weeds out of there. Also, the website said $30. per ounce but $1.50 for a seed pack. Do you recall how many (sort of) seeds would be in a pack? Thanks, Patty

Lisa, I don't have tremendous luck with broadcasting seeds and hoping either, although that's how I got the poppies and larkspur to grow...and bluebonnets and Indian blankets. I blame the lack of success on our darn clay.= which is not very friendly to seeds.

Patty, Oh wow, it is hard to guess how many seeds were in a seed packet, but definitely hundreds. The website said 200 but it seemed more like 600.

You might have to weed the Laura Bush petunias a couple of times while they are small, but then they get big and sprawl and shade out anything that attempts to grow too closely to them. In my garden they shade out crab grass. It doesn't die, but it stays small and weak and is easy to remove.

Dawn

Thanks, Dawn. Every year I say I'm going to do something different than the zinnias, tho I love them when they are grown, but then never do. Next year, it's Laura!

Patty, You're welcome. And, you know, you could grow both. I often plant Laura Bush petunias in a bed with some of the tall zinnia varieties. They function sort of like a living mulch or ground cover in the zinnia bed, shading out the weeds that sprout as the young zinnias are growing taller and gaining size. My main flower area of the big front garden sits significantly downhill from the neighboring property (a cow pasture that never gets mowed) and every time it rains, it seems like weedy grass seeds flow down into my flower area with the rain runoff. Since weeding is no fun at all, I use Laura Bush petunia to reduce how often I have to weed the zinnia bed.

Nothing much grows better for me in hot summers than zinnias, verbena bonariensis, cosmos, datura and moss rose. Unfortunately, with moss rose, the voles have discovered they can eat those succulent plants to get water in summer, so I lose some to them every year, but the voles (so far) do not bother the petunias, zinnias or tall verbena. It isn't voles that mess with daturas---it is deer. When the weather is really hot and dry and there isn't much to eat, I've had deer eat daturas grown outside the garden fence, which just goes to show that deer will eat anything. Oh, and cannas. I once told a friend that "Anyone can grow cannas. They won't die and you can't kill them." I had forgotten that her cannas had died the year before, so now I am more careful about saying 'they won't die and you can't kill them' but Laura Bush petunias really are in that category. I had some die back to the ground in the drought of 2008 and again in 2011, only they weren't dead--only dormant. As soon as it rained again, I pruned them back almost to the ground and they quickly sprouted new stems and were blooming within a couple of weeks. It was pretty amazing.

Dawn

Okay, Dawn - you really, really have to post some pictures (current, old, even ancient) of your flower beds and gardens. Everything you have posted in so many posts just rolls around in my mind, so now I need to see pictures! And darn it girl, you need to write a book.....just sayin'.