When a dacha appears, housewives are often in difficulty: how to decorate its territory, what flowers to plant, so that it is easy to care for them, but they bloomed for a long time and beautifully. Pay attention to annuals, among them there are exactly those that you need.
Annual flowers for a summer residence
Annual marigolds are ideal for summer cottages. They bloom beautifully for a long time in double bright monochromatic and two-tone colors – from yellow to maroon. The height of the plants is also different, you can choose low-growing varieties for the borders, but at the same time with huge inflorescences. For individual flower beds, plant tall marigolds, they will stand out from other plants with bright color spots.
Marigolds calmly tolerate heat or prolonged rains without harming their flowering, so you do not have to worry that they will wither during your long absence from the country.
To grow such beauty in the country, you need to plant seeds for seedlings 2 months before planting in the ground. At the same time, remember that marigolds are afraid of frost, at sub-zero temperatures they immediately die and take on an ugly appearance. Therefore, correctly calculate the time of sowing seeds and the time of transplanting young seedlings of these annuals to flower beds.
In addition to their decorativeness, marigolds are beneficial – they perfectly scare off Colorado beetles, so plant them along the beds with potatoes, and in the fall, do not throw away dead plants, but bury them in compost to disinfect it from pests. Also marigolds can be used in cooking.
A colorful blooming carpet in the flower beds will give you zinnias. They are unpretentious, decorative and very easy to grow. Zinnia seeds sprout very quickly, so you can sow them directly into the ground, since they are not afraid of light frosts. And also a short-term, up to several days, cessation of watering in dry weather, these annuals will survive without loss, except for a slight decrease in the diameter of new flowers.
Zinnias are not affected by almost any diseases and pests; they bloom for a very long time in group plantings. Their colors are very different: red, yellow, white, pink, yellow, lilac. This annual flower is also suitable for cutting.
Asters are recognized as one of the best annuals for summer cottages. There are so many varieties of them that you can get confused in front of a showcase with colorful seed packages. Asters are magnificent, for all their luxury and extraordinary long flowering (until late autumn) they are very unpretentious. You may not water them for a long time if you have to leave the cottage or if you come only for the weekend.
Asters are grown through seedlings, but the process is very simple. At the end of March (for the middle zone of the country), sow seeds in seedling boxes, cover with glass or place in a plastic bag. When shoots appear, thin them out, leaving only the strongest ones. You don’t even need to dive the seedlings, but it’s still better to do this, because in separate cups it will be easier to plant asters on a flower bed right with a clod of earth. And they will take root better if you do not disintegrate the lump of substrate on their roots.
Asters are not afraid of small frosts in spring, but still cover young plants with acrylics or jars at night if the Hydrometeocenter predicts freezing temperatures: there is no guarantee that it will not be so low that immature asters will die.
Asters bloom until late autumn, and if you have a long summer, sow the seeds directly into the open ground, only germinate them in a damp cloth beforehand. Asters can be cut for bouquets.
Pay attention to kosmeya, this is a tall sun-loving plant with highly branching stems and flowers in the form of white daisies, shades of red and pink. There is also terry kosmeya. This annual successfully fills the space, so plant it where you need to cover something – a wall, a fence, or some ugly object.
Kosmeya is unpretentious to soils, the main thing for it is the sun, since in the shade it loses its decorative effect. It is grown through sowing in open ground in April-May, and inflorescences will appear in the middle of summer, which will delight until October.
To make the kosmeya thicker, be sure to pinch the growth point of the main stem when the plant height reaches half a meter
Kosmeya herself throws seeds on the flower bed, and next year new plants appear in this place. Since the flowers are pollinated, the color can be very diverse, as well as the shape of the flowers: both simple and double.
This annual plant is not as unpretentious as zinnias, marigolds and kosmeya, but how many petunias have colors. Monochromatic and two-colored delicate inflorescences almost completely cover the leaves and the stem from the eyes, so that they are completely invisible, it seems that you have a fancy blanket in front of you.
Petunias are good in borders, in flowerpots and individual color spots on flower beds. The main thing is that they have enough light, because there are not so many flowers in the shaded areas and the plant itself is stretched. But it is important that in containers with a limited amount of soil, these annuals need to be watered frequently.