June 2024

At this point in the season, all of the flowers have been in the ground for about a month now and require much less care/attention (in comparison to the seed starting stage). The direct sown seeds began to grow into established seedlings and we even started to see the first of the zinnia blooms at the end of the month!

The Transplants:

The nursery transplants (zinnia and gomphrena) really took off the second they were in the ground. In order to maintain their health, I would give these plants ~10 seconds of direct water every 2-3 days if there was no rainfall. Thankfully, this June in Ohio was decently wet, so this only resulted in a few watering sessions throughout the month.

Zinnia’s

The Zinnia’s started the month going strong, growing about 12″ additional inches since being planted in May. We saw our first small blooms (above) mid-June (~6/16 ish). They really started to produce after these first few stems popped up. By late June the flowers were producing at~30%-50% capacity (below).

We even got our very first (small) bouquet from the zinnia’s this month!

Gomphrena

The gomphrena certainly took their time the month of June. The buds started showing around mid-June and just started to open at the end of the month. These slightly slower growers did still double in size throughout the month, branching off naturally needing no additional pruning. We were able to grab a few stems for our first bouquet at the end of the month!

The Seedlings:

This year was a learning experience for us and our seedlings. We unfortunately only saw a 50% success rate from the ~50 cosmo seeds originally planted. The garden almost looked as if some animal had dug up the seeds for themselves…rude! In order to remedy this, we decided to start additional flowers from seed in a seed tray on the back patio. This allowed us to monitor the water content and growth much better while also deterring the nearby pests. After the seeds sprouted and grew for about one week, we transplanted them into the garden. This worked quite well, and we were able to still end up with a good number of cosmo plants. Just at the end of the month we started to see our very fist sign of budding from these guys, so here’s to hoping for some blooms in July!