Love life every day!

I bet those little bachelor buttons make Bill feel like a king for a day!! Ha

I heard someone say or write "If you get to work and you can still feel their little kiss on your check by the time you get to work, you've got ....." I forget the rest, but it is true.

I couldn't get by without annuals! I never had any luck with the marigolds because they always got red spiders, same problem with ageratum but I really like yellows and oranges. I love bachelor buttons.

My newest rave is cockscomb, the red ones with the deep red torches or the yellowish ones and the single flower types of zinnias because they fit in visually with my native plants. I'd do grain amaranth but am afraid of it being too aggressive with seeding for that red. Cockscomb seemed safer choice and compromise. If I had the room I'd have a whole area of amaranth.

There used to be a swath of bachelor buttons on 36th & Classen Blvd at that white house that sits diagonally but they don't have them anymore. I miss seeing them. Outside OKC over by Macklanberg Duncan is a whole field of them. Its fabulous.

Don't laugh but I collected a few seed this week off some orange annual cosmos growing in a yard down close to the street and now have them sowed in pots on my kitchen cabinet, I thought its too hot outside for them to germinate. I never tried this late sowing before but I'm hoping to get a nice flush of orange late season and maybe into fall. You should've seen these, each plant a solid mass of orange. I'm definitely going to have them next year if that doesn't work.

A whole field! Wow. I'd love to see that. In our rural area this year the rains exposed entire fields of Indian Paint brush. I've never seen them 'live', before.

I'm jealous. I've never been able to get them to germinate.

I got them to germinate this year, but they all died after transplant.

The catalog says they really resent transplanting, next time sow them where you want them to grow preferably in a wild grassy area, they have parasitical roots that need grass to attach to.

Bon, I'm glad you and little miss are enjoying annual flowers so much. I always fill every nook and cranny in my garden with annual flowers. They add so much beauty to the garden and also attract pollinators and beneficial insects. I have some perennial flowers in several areas, but only put those where I never intend to plant veggies because I don't want for them to compete with one another. I use the annuals in the raised beds filled with veggies so I can plant different flowering plants in different parts of the garden each year. I like the flexibility of having new things in new areas each year. Some of the the annuals, (actually, many of them) reseed abundantly so that each year I have a lot more annual flowers than whichever ones I chose to plant that year. When I get volunteers in the spring, I just dig them up and transplant them to any area that has room for a few flowering annuals.

TexasRanger, It has been a battle to repopulate our fields with flowers ever since the drought on 2011. This year I sowed Wildseed Farms' native wildflower mixture in the front pasture, and I added to it various cosmos seeds I had leftover from planting cosmos in flower beds. I didn't do any sort of proper soil prep as it was raining at least weekly all winter long, but just cut the dormant field plants short with the mower and broadcast sowed the seeds back in either January or early February. We've been rewarded with a lot more flowers in the field than we've had in many years, and some of the prettiest ones are the cosmos. I mostly planted white ones and pinks, but there's a few orange ones in there. I'm not sure how many of the wildflowers are from the seed mix versus how many might have sprouted and grown in this nice wet year anyway, but I know that the cosmos are from the seeds I sowed because we didn't have them in that pasture before. Of course, the dominant plant in the pasture now is Mexican hat, which is not necessarily as showy as some wildflowers, but it thrives in horrible heat and drought, so I'm happy to see so much of it this year.

I like to grow the very short cosmos, like Cosmic Orange, Cosmic Red and Cosmos Yellow in the veggie garden. The larger cosmos get almost too big and too vigorous in the irrigated garden and then begin falling over when they get too tall and too heavy, so I mostly sow their seed just outside the garden or in the pastures where they rarely get enough rainfall to get so big and heavy that they cannot stand up. I also have grown Pink Popsock cosmos in the veggie garden a couple of times, and really like the dark, rich color of Rubenza. Most of the seed I sowed in the pastures along with the wildflower mix was Psyche White and mixed Sonata seeds in mostly red, pink and white.

We have Indian paintbrush in our pastures. In our early years here, I tried repeatedly to transplant it into the veggie garden, carefully bringing grass with it because of its parisitic nature, and it never survived being transplanted, so now I just leave it alone in the fields. Down here in southcentral OK, it tends to bloom most heavily in April and May and then fade away as the weather gets increasingly hotter. Most years the paintbrush is in bloom at the same time as the native yarrow that blooms most often in white (occasionally in pale pink) and the Texas bluebonnets and blue star grass, so that we will have a patriotic mix of red, white and blue flowers in bloom together all spring. This year the paintbrush was gorgeous at times, but died back a lot in May's flooding rainfall. While the paintbrush performs well in unimproved clay, it is less happy in the years when the soil waterlogs.

Dawn

My stolen orange cosmos seeds are up, took less than a week. Maybe I will get a late season show. I don't like the tall pink kind if thats what Okiedawn is referring to but these shorter dense plants of the orange kind I collected a few seeds from are a different matter completely. I bought some more single flower orange zinnias at the farmers market today. I am on an orange kick. I have some type of orange lantana going on its 4th year thats low growing, small leaves with thorns on the stems that I started from a cutting and its covered in orange blooms, obviously there is some Texas Lantana in that one going by the thorns but it doesn't produce seeds. I started 3 more and they are already blooming from tiny plants. Its the earliest and most prolific bloomer of all the hardy ones I've ever tried. There's a lot of people who don't like orange or yellow for that matter. I hear that a lot. If you ask me, there is no bad color but there is no such thing as too much yellow or orange ---- orange flowering plants are not very numerous compared to yellow, pink, purple, red or white.

How can people not like yellow and orange flowers? I like all colors and grow them all together. The more the merrier, and a nice mix of many colors seems to attract tons of butterflies, bees and other beneficials.