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FEEDING

I feed my annuals and biennials every two weeks with a seaweed foliar feed or a homemade comfrey feed (see below), to keep them producing. It’s really easy to make your own.

A HOMEMADE FEED FOR YOUR PLANTS

I recommend you find space to plant some comfrey (Symphytum). It makes a brilliant high-potassium feed for your plants, which will encourage blooms. Comfrey can be quite a thug and difficult to get rid of – it grows back from the tiniest bit of root if you leave any in the ground – so make sure you really want it where you plant it. Symphytum × uplandicum ‘Bocking 14’ is a non-seeding strain so it won’t self-seed around your garden.

MAKING COMFREY TEA

Chop up the leaves and put them in a bucket or container – you’ll want to use something with a lid as this “tea” becomes quite pungent once it starts rotting.

Cover the leaves in water – using a brick or a stone to weigh them down.

After 4–6 weeks the leaves will have broken down and the liquid will be brown in color. Drain off the liquid through a sieve into a container

Dilute – 1 part comfrey tea to 30 parts water – to feed your plants every two weeks. It’s not an exact science – the darker the liquid is, the more you’ll need to dilute – you’re aiming for a weak tea color.

Top up with fresh leaves and more water for another batch of feed.

WATERING

Regular watering is up there with good soil in terms of plant health and maintaining flower production. Water at the base of the plant rather than from the top. In an ideal world, install a drip-irrigation system or a leaky hose. If you can’t do that, use a hose with a long arm so you can get the water to where it needs to go.

SUPPORT

Most annuals and biennials require support to help keep stems upright. It’s not about keeping the stems poker straight. It doesn’t take much for stems to start to flop about: in a heavy shower of rain, the stems will be pushed toward the ground and then develop an elbow-like, 90-degree bend as they try to grow toward the sun again.

For annuals, I find the best support is wide-gauge netting stretched horizontally over the plants at the start of the season; the plants grow up and through the netting, eventually covering most of it. This works best when you’re growing in a straight border in rows. In my mixed borders, I’ll use twiggy pea sticks or a series of canes with a zigzag of string between them to create a spider’s web of support.

Harvesting zinnias – cutting toward the end of the stem to a pair of sideshoots - I’ll come back for the those two flowers another day.

Honeywort seedlings planted at 9 in (24cm) spacings.