Plant These Self-Sowing Flowers for a Low-Maintenance Garden – Lifehacker

Perennials are a popular option for flower gardens, and for good reason—they come back on their own. But there’s another option to bring flowering annuals into your garden that don’t need to be replanted every year. You can choose flowering varieties that reseed themselves and keep blooming for years.

Choose the right annuals

There are lots of self-seeding annuals to choose from: Marigolds, sweet alyssum, petunias, calendula, and cosmos are just a few of the many flower varieties that will self seed in your garden under the right conditions. Even sunflowers will self-sow if the squirrels don’t get to them first.

It’s important to keep in mind that there are varieties of self-seeding flowers that will spread very quickly. If you’re not sure how aggressive a flower is in your area, ask your local university gardening extension. The last thing you want is to be overrun by your own garden.

Pick the right spot for your self-seeders

To start with, make sure the area you choose has soil conditions that are good not only for the fully-formed plant, but also for the seeds. Usually mulch or another weed barrier can help keep your garden beds looking tidy, but self-sowing flowers need a good place for their seeds to germinate. That means that they’ll need an area where the seeds can drop into healthy soil, and then germinate and take root.

Don’t deadhead your new flowers

If you want your flowers to drop their seeds, it means you can’t deadhead them. Although some gardeners don’t like the look of dried out blossoms or seed pods, don’t cut back your self-seeding plants if you want more next year. The dried out blooms are where the seeds come from, and cutting them off will keep the seeds from reaching the soil.

Hold off on weeding

Once the seeds from your flowers have dropped in the late summer or fall, they’ll go through a natural dormant period before sprouting again in the spring. To avoid killing off your future blooms, hold off on weeding until you can tell the difference between plants that look like annuals from last year’s garden and weeds. Weeding less and getting flowers from last year’s crop is a win-win.

Keep your flowers where you want them

Because seeds will drop or get blown or carried by rainwater or wildlife, self-seeding plants can spread from their original location. You’ll need to thin out plants you don’t want and keep the ones that are in the right place as the sprouts mature.

Self-sowing perennials and biennials

It’s important to note that some perennials and biennials will also self seed. These are also a low-maintenance option for those hoping to skip the digging part of spring flower gardening. Some of these self-seeding varieties of perennials include nasturtium, butterfly weed, bachelor buttons, violet, and sweet william. Note that these varieties can spread aggressively, so if you don’t want to pull lots of stragglers, sticking to annuals and biennials is a better choice. Foxglove, poppies, and forget me nots are all biennial flowers that will reseed themselves so you don’t have to.