Teddy Bear Sunflowers

High Scent Sweet Peas

So seeding this year has been a dismal failure except of course the darn beans that the whiteflies feasted on.    Those are now safely protected with those yellow cards with icky, sticky stuffy on the outsides that reminds me of rubber cement.  But it's a little too late.  Close the barn door after all the horses have escaped except the ugly old hags that are only good for eating your oats.  They've become our friends so we keep them around and talk to them and feed them because we consider them family.  :)  So, this meant it was time for a visit to Burpee Seed Company's website.  I chose Burpee because they've been around forever and cater to the home gardener and I believe them when they say they are not in the pockets of the GMO monsters like Monsanto. What did we get?  

Sweet Basil

Common Chives

Double Curled Parsley

Bushsteak Hybrid Tomato

Old Spice Mix Sweet Peas

Hopefully, we'll have some good luck with these seeds when they come.  I saw an interesting planter for sweet peas that I want to try.  It's just a basket with a bunch of bamboo-like supports for the sweet peas to climb up.  It's not much to look at in the beginning, but I bet it's gorgeous once it has a blooming plant growing all over it.  I'm just tickled about sweet peas because I love fragrant plants.  For about 3 weeks while I was walking my dog, there was a fragrance that had my nose leading me all over the place trying to find this scent that was so wonderful I just HAD to find it.  Every day, twice a day I was hunting and hunting trying to find the plant that owned the aroma.  The dog just couldn't understand why I was acting like a dog, sniffing here and there, up and down.  The neighbors must have thought I'd lost my marbles.  I never did find the source of the scent so I expect next spring I'll go through it all again.  As always, before planting these seeds I looked it up.

 

The directions said to plant in November or early spring.  We'll plant them right away when they get here.  I also noticed that it was recommended to nick the hard outer coating with nail clippers to get more of the seeds to germinate.  Be careful to nick only the outer coating and not the seed though.  My daughter soaks her seeds overnight before she plants them.  I'm not sure how that would work with these.  I might try that with some of these as an experiment and see which works better.  These seeds are planted the old fashioned way; make a furrow and put the seeds in the furrow.  Then, cover the seeds.  Remember we talked about gardenias? They like acidic soil.  These are opposite.  These like alkaline soil.  Sweet peas take 3 - 4 weeks to germinate my friends so be patient.  Be sure to give them something to climb up and protect those seedlings from birds, snails and other predators.  Morning sun and afternoon shade suits these flowers to a tea!  As they grow, be very gentle when training them up their trellis or whatever they are growing up, the stems can break easily.  Like all other blooming plants that we love to talk about lately, deadheading is necessary.  Remove those spent blossoms if you want new ones and unlike petunias, don't wait until they are all the way dead, do the dead heading just as the blossom is beginning to fade for the best results.  It is said that the more flowers you cut off the plant for bringing inside to enjoy, the more the plant will produce.  So remember to enjoy some of these blooms inside your home too.  
As always, I want to share a couple of wonderful sites for sweet peas reference that helped me.
http://www.selectseeds.com/sweet_peas05.htm
http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/swp-direct-tips.html