CHAPTER II
ANNUALS

By annuals we here mean flowers that bloom in summer from seed sown in early spring. Out of a long list we shall choose twelve that are all easy to grow and last in flower a long time. From these twelve you must choose again, for there would not be room for many in a small plot, and if you crowd them none will do well. It is a great mistake to think that people who can grow nothing else successfully can manage annuals. All the good seedsmen know how often they are blamed for failures when the amateur, or even the professional gardener, should blame himself. He has sown on ill-prepared soil, or too deeply; he has let birds eat the seed, or slugs and snails the seedlings; or he has sown too much seed, and been too lazy to thin out properly. Small birds are dreadful thieves in some gardens, and if you find them in yours you should put little twigs where you have sown your seed, and stretch a maze of black cotton from one twig to the other. They soon get to know that the cotton is there and keep away.

JANUARY.

The twelve annuals we have chosen for you are:

For most seeds that are sown in the open ground you must wait till the end of March in the South of England, and till the first or second week of April in the North. The old saying that ‘a peck of March dust is worth a King’s ransom’ will teach you something about sowing seeds. It means that you want your soil to be in a workable state, not hard with frost or sloppy with heavy rains, but friable and just moist with a light spring shower. When these pleasant spring days come, your work in the garden begins in earnest, and so does your pleasure. Some of the bulbs you have planted in autumn will be flowering; others will be pushing their way up towards the light; and your herbaceous plants—those that died down in the autumn—will be coming up again, and making delicious young green leaves. The part of your garden that you have saved for annuals must be carefully hoed and raked now, so that all the weeds are destroyed, and the soil made fine and powdery for your seedlings. Their little roots could not strike down and get any hold in hard, big lumps of earth, and it would be a waste of money and time to sow seed there. You should remove all stones and weeds, and break up the lumps of earth with your rake. The surface of your seed-bed, when ready, should be quite smooth and fine. If the seed to be sown is small, mix it with double its own quantity of sand, or dry sifted earth, as that helps you not to sow too thickly. Do not choose a windy day if you can help it, or your seeds would blow away. For a big patch of seeds it is best to take your hoe and draw shallow trenches, one inch deep and twelve or fifteen inches apart. When these are ready, take the seed in your hands and carefully dribble it in as evenly as you can. When you have finished, rake the earth smoothly over the trenches again, and pat it gently in place. You should always put a stick or a label where you sow seed or set bulbs, as it is easy to forget what one has done, and put things on the top of each other.

In favourable weather some of your seedlings will show their seed-leaves in ten days or a fortnight, but others will take longer. The first pair of leaves are what botanists call cotyledons, and those that come after are unlike them. You will soon get to know both the cotyledons and the other leaves of the plants you grow. You can often tell your seedlings from weeds by observing a whole colony of new-comers exactly alike, where you have placed a stick or a label. As soon as you can handle them they will want carefully thinning, and when you find out how troublesome it is to thin a patch of Poppies properly, for instance, you will understand why we advise you to mix all your small seed with sand, and only to put a pinch into the ground. Firms that sell penny packets of seed tell you that there are two thousand seeds in some of their packets. Poppy seeds nearly all come up, and a well-grown plant should have a foot of soil to itself. So if you made a hedge of poppies all along one side of your border, you would use seven seeds out of two thousand. All gardeners sow more seeds than they mean to use, because they must allow for accidents and insects, and they expect to do some thinning. But the ignorant gardener invariably sows his seed too thick, and leaves his seedlings too close together; so he gets a crowd of starved, stunted plants that do not flower well, and are soon over for the year. You should begin by leaving three inches between your seedlings, and end by giving most of them a foot apiece. Some will require more room, some rather less, and the best way to please them is to watch them constantly, and make sure that each little plant has room to expand. In thinning seedlings you must be most careful not to disturb the roots of those you wish to leave, and when you have sown too thickly this is difficult. Some seedlings will bear pricking out in another part of the garden; some, such as Wallflowers, actually like it; while others will not stand it at all. You should do your pricking out in showery weather.

Pricking out means taking up all your seedlings and planting them in rows to grow bigger. We will tell you as we go on which flowers should be raised in this way. Seed that is to be pricked out is usually sown in a box or a shallow earthenware pan with holes in it, or in the ground under a bell-glass. Any grocer will give or sell you an empty soap or sweetmeat box that will do for seeds. It should have one or two holes bored in the bottom, and a few potsherds or bits of broken brick for drainage. The soil should be sifted and moist. A bell-glass is a dome of glass with a knob at the top, and should be about twelve inches across and ten inches high. You can get one for eighteenpence at a china-shop, and you will find it useful if you have neither a frame nor a greenhouse. You may put it on half-hardy plants at night to keep the frost from them, or on newly-sown seeds to hurry them on. In very cold weather you would leave it on plants all day, but slip a bit of wood under one side to let air in for an hour or two at noon. When you use it for seed, you do not move it until the seedlings appear. You should not prick out your seedlings until they have made four leaves besides the cotyledons. When you grow seed in pans or boxes, you do not thin out the seedlings, so they will probably be close together. If they are dry you should begin by watering them with a fine rose; then take your hand-fork, put it in close to the plants you wish to remove, dig it well down, lift gently, and a whole group of plants will come up with a lump of earth.

Break the seedlings gently apart, each singly. Great care must be taken not to bruise the plants or tear the tender roots. When you have separated about a dozen, plant them out, and as you do this consider how much space will be required for each. Snapdragons and Marigolds should be a foot apart, but Lettuces can do with nine inches, and Violas with rather less. Sometimes seedlings are pricked out into neat beds in a reserve part of the garden, and transplanted later to the borders where they are to flower. Sometimes they are put out at once into their permanent situation. This is partly a question of habit and partly of room. When a plant is not going to flower till next year, you would rather keep it out of your show border this year, so if you have a nursery border you let it grow up there. If it is going to flower in a few weeks, you may as well give it a good place at once and leave it alone. Then, again, some things are the better for the check of transplantation, while others recover with difficulty or not at all. In gardening it is easier to make general rules for the gardener than for his plants. He must be as wise as a good doctor, and find out what treatment different plants require, what food, what surgery or medicine, and what stimulants; and he must even learn, just as a doctor must, to apply his general knowledge to his special case. For instance, the very Geranium that he has taken into his greenhouse every winter in Yorkshire may be planted against the south wall of his house if he lives in Cornwall, and trusted in a few years’ time to reach the roof, and give him flowers for his Christmas dinner-table. All that he knows about gardening must be influenced, and sometimes considerably altered, by his own local conditions of soil, aspect, and climate. You must remember this when you buy your seeds in the spring and your bulbs in the autumn, and choose those that do well in your neighbourhood. You should always observe what plants other people near you are growing in their gardens, and what conditions they give them. In that way you can learn a great deal about the management of your own.