[ It's an age-old quandary: whether to plant annuals or perennials in

It's an age-old quandary: whether to plant annuals or perennials in the flower garden.

Perennials usually have to be planted only once, which helps keep the cost down. But perennials generally bloom for only a couple of weeks each year. Annuals, on the other hand, typically have long booming periods, often until frost, but must be replanted every year. That's expensive, not to mention the labor involved.

Enter the self-seeding enthusiasts --- the garden gamblers. These are the people who grow flowers that sow their own seed so that they don't have to:

- Buy so many expensive perennials.

- Stare at the same perennial garden year after year.

- Do the back-breaking work of digging and dividing perennials.

- Buy and put out quite so many annuals every year.

A number of flowers self-seed in our area. In my own garden, the most common self-sowing species are snapdragons, zinnias, gomphrena (globe amaranth), cleome (spider flower), sweet alyssum, morning glory, dianthus, melampodium (African zinnia), nicotiana (flowering tobacco), sea lavender, columbine (a perennial) and lemon balm.

Here are some tips that can make self-seeding a lot easier.

If you are going to self-seed, don't deadhead every seed head, especially toward the end of the season. Leave a few to replant themselves for next year.

Mulch is not a friend to the self-seeding enthusiast. The seed can fall down between the particles where sprouts fail to reach the sunlight. Bare soil is better, and once your sprouts are up, you can use a little crabgrass pre-emergent as long as it is labeled for whatever you are growing.

Also, seeds will sprout wherever they fall or get blown, so be prepared to transplant volunteers to where you want them.

Get to know your seedlings: You will have to be able to tell a gomphrena sprout from a young dandelion. And weeding in this situation can be delicate, so you might want to invest in a hoe with a pointed tip so you can reach into tight places.

A few words of warning: Some self -seeding varieties can get out of hand. If an overly generous seed thrower turns out to be something that you really don't like, you could have annual headaches along with your annual flowers. Morning glories make copious amounts of seed, and they sprout over an entire season. Under the right conditions, lemon balm can spread rapidly. Melampodium is so prolific that you might have to hoe most of your crop to keep it from dominating the flowerbed.

When self-seeding, the starts that you get may not be what you expected. The offspring of hybrids often don't look like the parent variety. It is hard to predict how much of something you will get, how tall, what color, and so forth. Even so, the results are often quite acceptable, and sometimes they are delightful, and free. It's like winning the lottery.

Which brings us back to what I said about self-seeding being a gamble. I've been a herbaceous high roller for some years now, and every year I hit some kind of jackpot.

Mike Dixon, Topeka, is a Master Gardener with Shawnee County Extension.

Flowers: Letting garden go to seed can be good thing

See FLOWERS, page 11

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