How to Grow Summer Flowers in Central Florida Garden

The foxgloves and delphiniums have withered despite the deadheading and extra care given to keep them vibrant. Summer in central Florida gardens is pretty brutal for most of the cottage garden variety flowers. The trick here for the foxgloves and delphiniums is to make sure they don't dry out in the very sandy soil. We regularly add mulch, fertilize, and, I think most importantly, we try to put these northern beauties in places where the midday or afternoon sun is cut by the tree canopy. But by the midsummer time when the sun is the highest in the north, even our shaded areas are reduced. So we have replaced the delphiniums and foxgloves with zinnias, salvia and the small trailing petunias.

Hollyhocks, though, are another story. They seem to thrive in almost anyplace we put them. In fact, they drop seeds and sprout volunteers in some of the most unlikely places. We look at these baby plants as a windfall and carefully transplant them to areas where they can grow. We did find that they like areas of the yard that are on the dry side, but they still need some watering if we don't get rain for a few days during the heat of the summer. Otherwise, these hollyhocks require nothing, not even staking due to their tap root. We had heard over and over that hollyhocks don't grow in Florida. We can easily prove that wrong!

Florida Garden Pics

As promised, here are some pictures of what we've been up to. These are of the liners in our "nursery." Top left picture in the foreground are teeny hollyhocks. Next step up and behind are rudbeckias. Top right shows the New Guinea impatiens already transferred to 4" pots, and the lower left is some azaleas in the front.

We have them on a timed sprinkler to get watered once a day early in the a.m. That's the best time to water here in central Florida. Watering at night does not give the foliage and mulches time to dry which promotes disease and fungus. By watering in the early morning, the plants' leaves have the opportunity to dry and not be as susceptible to moisture-caused problems. This area where the plants are "staged" gets early morning shade, dappled shade in the very late afternoon, but full sun during midday. This gives them an opportunity to grow strong but gives them a rest just after the peak sun of the day. It's really been working for us. Next post I'll include some of the other pics from the flower garden that includes Iceland (yes, in central Florida!) poppies.

Busy, but still in our Florida Garden!

Been busy in the garden, and on the roof. We’re re-roofing the house, including a tear-off, adding skylights (the house was dark, dark, dark!), and improving rain-shed with a cricket on the chimney. Rain-shed is extremely important in Florida where it may rain everyday in the summer months. We had to take off gutters and rain has absolutely pummeled the flowers beneath the drip edge. But I do have some pictures anyway of what we’ve been up to in our Fabulous Florida Garden.

We’ve been ordering liners (baby plants, really no more than seed starts) of hollyhocks, calendula, New Guinea impatiens, rudbeckia, to name a few. We’ve also ordered rooted poinsettia cuttings for a holiday display that will knock your socks off! We did them for the first time last year which was a learning experience. Hopefully we’ll do better with them this year.

We’ve also started a weekly garden journal where we keep track of when we prune, fertilize and all that Florida garden stuff that keeps the place from looking like a jungle. More pics to come, and maybe even post the weekly journal notes (hopefully with pics) for sharing successes of varying degrees. Notice there is no mention of “non-successes!” There are no non-successes; there are only varying degrees of attempts at new growing ideas in our Florida Garden!