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Planning For Fall Flower Gardening

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Fall is an incredibe time to admire every aspect of nature. The changing and warm colors of the trees, the intoxicating perfumes of the fruits and flowers all enhance the hypnotic beauty of autumn. For lovers of flower gardening, fall represents a major and crucial moment, as there is an incredible number of plants that are ideal for fall flower gardening.

These flowers will give an important contribution to the landscaping of your yard as well as diffuse natural perfumes in the air and even offer small pleasures for your appetite. An example of these is represented by ornamental cabbage, kales and peppers. Ornamental peppers will offer beautifully colored fruits and flowers which will be delightful to see and can also become a natural addition to dishes. Other very common plants that are a part of fall flower gardening are pansies and asters. While pansies are plants that bloom all fall into winter and in the spring (with bulbs), asters are perennials and will flower every year in the fall.

To start your fall garden, you have two options. You can choose plants that have a late bloom period that you know will bloom in your garden before the first frost hits (do some research on this). In this case, these flowers will have been growing all summer and have accumulated lots of foliage. You'll need to either stake these plants or prune them. Remember, though, you delay bloom time when you prune plants.

A second option is to newly plant a fall flower garden as soon as you can before the fall. If you go to your local garden center at the end of summer, you'll find a number of plants whose price has been cut to unload what wasn't sold in the spring. Even though these plants look kind of shabby, don't despair. If there are no bugs, take some of these cheap plants home and nurse them back to health in containers. Then, when temperatures are consistently cooler, transplant them into your garden and voila!

This last option leads to the inevitable question as to when you should start your fall flower gardening. If you live in a very warm climate, you could get away with planting your fall flowers, the annuals that is, the same fall you'd like them to bloom. But if you live in cooler climates, this isn't going to work, because you won't have a lot of time to enjoy what you've planted.

The answer is that there is no fixed answer. The opportune time to plant your fall flower garden varies from year to year, and you're just going to have to try and take advantage of whatever small window of opportunity presents itself. For example, some summers are relatively mild and see a rainy period at the end of August, and this would be a great time to plant your flowers. Other years, you're just going to have to wait until September.

A wide variety of plants can be included in your fall flower garden, from tender annuals to hardy perennials. Obviously, the hardier the plant, the more likely it will survive the first frost and sustain a prolonged bloom. But even the tender annuals can be a wonderful addition to the garden, though their presence will only be felt briefly.

Marigolds are always a lovely addition to your fall flower gardening endeavor, blooming with classic fall colors, such as orange, yellow and gold. To continue with harvest colors, you could display orange and yellow nasturtiums and reddish-purple plumed celosia. For something slightly different, you can choose silver king artemisia and bronze coleus. You can deviate slightly from the traditional autumn hues and go for some pinkish-purple mums or the New England aster, or something even more eccentric, the reddish-purple love-lies-bleeding.

Finally, some other good perennials which bloom in the fall include aconite, autumn crocus, black-eyed susan, goldenrod, phlox, ragged coneflower, sunflowers, Russian sage, tall verbena, and yellow wax bells. To complement your fall flower gardening experience, you can also add shrubs, vines, and ornamental grasses with striking foliage.