Photo Credit: Maureen Gilmer

Zinnias and marigolds are the quickest of all annuals to produce seed. Stay on top of them every day or they’ll go to seed before you know it.

It isn’t rocket science, yet year after year gardens fizzle in midsummer. This annual decline is too often written off to the heat. But if that’s really the case, then why do high-end professionals manage to keep the beds at botanical gardens and fancy theme parks looking great all season? They apply just three simple fundamentals – and yes, they’re ones that can keep your home garden color-perfect all season, too:

Never Let Seeds Form

Most colorful plants are annual flowers, which must sprout from seed, mature, bloom and set seed for the next generation. All this activity occurs in a single season. The moment a flower is pollinated it begins to create seed, which signals the plant to stop new bud production because it’s the end of the season. But if no seed is allowed to form because you’ve nipped off the spent flower, your plant will continue to produce new buds in an ongoing effort to reproduce itself.

The chief cause of annual decline is seen after the first flush of blossoms begins to fade. This coincidentally occurs just when temperatures rise. If your plants are left to form seeds, they won’t produce new buds to carry on the next flush of color. Instead, they’ll concentrate energy on seed production.

Beginning with this lull, great gardeners are out in their yards early morning and late evening when it’s cool. Drinking coffee or sipping cocktails, they leisurely nip off the day’s faded flowers. This ritual helps trick their color plants into thinking its May when it’s really late August, so the annuals bloom continuously.

Feed Continually

Photo Credit: Maureen Gilmer

Color gardens as dense as this require a great deal of fertilizer to maintain their blossoms all season long.

Humans don’t do well on yo-yo diets and neither do heavy-feeding annuals. They need a lot of nutrition when producing new buds on a continual basis. Problem is we forget to feed them when we’re in the middle of barbecue and beach season, leaving our flowers to languish on a Spartan diet. As a result, they don’t produce much color or maintain enough strength to resist pests, disease, heat and drought.