2025 Winter Sowing

bloomhjelm I'm starting my winter sowing next week. I decided I'm too chicken to do lisianthus from seed this year. There's a local flower farmer that offers plugs for pick up for less than Farmer Bailey and I ordered some trays from her: Roseanne Terracotta, Voyage Apricot and Voyage White this year. I reallllly want to try Roseanne Black Pearl and some other colors too but held back. Which colors are you growing this year?

I think I'm just doing Voyage Champagne. I have a very very few floral packs to try, since the dahlias get all the premium real estate.

Other trials:
Sweet peas (Royal Wedding, Spring Sunshine Champagne, Winter Sunshine Opal), Stock (Iron Cherry, Vintage Brown), Cosmos (Apricot Lemonade), Viola ("Antique Shades"), Snapdragon (Madame Butterfly Ivory, Orange Wonder), Gomphrena "Qis Cream," Celosia "Flamingo Feather."

Bessie You are totally right about that! I didn't realize winter sowing lisianthus was a thing so I may try some next year. I try to keep my indoor grow space primarily for dahlias, since that is my main focus. I'm sure I could easily sell my florist customers lisianthus too, but that would mean actually putting together a list of available flowers instead of just asking what dahlias they'd like weekly. Essentially I just bought the lisianthus because I want the lisianthus and I should probably go the less expensive route (starting my own) or grow fewer of them if I don't have a plan in place for selling them. That said, I grow 500ish tulips like that each year with zero business agenda, and it is really nice to have loads of blooms I can use to spoil my friends, family, myself, and experiment with drying them!
Here are some tulips I dried last year just to see what would happen. They are incredibly fragile and shatter at the slightest touch but I love how they look.

As someone who has started lisianthus from seed the last serveral years I can confirm. Yes it takes MONTHS! I start mine the beginning of Dec for planting out the end of April. They r fussy about the right conditions to germinate so not a plant for the faint of heart to start. Here in zone 4 with our short season if I winter sowed they would not be big enough to bloom by the time frost came along and killed them off.

I start my own because I’m an outdoor girl at heart and winters get depressingly long for me. I need an excuse to start growing something green inside awhile. plus if you tell me it’s to hard to grow indoors now I need to figure out a way to prove I can

Fun fact: you can save lisianthus seeds. You may not get exact replication of the parent plant but the first generation is most likely beautiful! Attached pic is a lisianthus from seed. Saved from the voyage series. It has the form of the voyage parent but the coloring of the white and purple “father”

bloomhjelm I just set out a jug of mixed color Canterbury Bells. I have not been successful with regular spring sowing of them so I hope the freeze/thaw method will work.

Our temperature fluctuates so dramatically in spring recently that I’ve been nervous to winter sow, even though I used to have great success with it. Maybe I should stick a few roasting pans of sunflowers out there though. Winter sowing is the only way I’ve successfully been able to start sunflowers - they always get eaten otherwise!

I have a tray of Lisianthus plugs on order for spring. This will be the first time I’ve tried them - I’m excited!

Juliarugula Yes, I have winter sown a lot of seeds in the past, but with a much smaller garden now I kind of let it go. I am going to try just a few this year of the trickier ones, like some of the cool season perennials. And I only need or want a few plants of each, just enough for some household vases.... so if I can get 3-6 seedlings of them going then that will save a lot from shopping for growing perennial plants. If I could only constrain myself to those number of plants gardening would be so much easier, LOL. My beds seem to keep being taken over with whole seed envelopes of cosmos, phlox, zinnias, etc.

calico20hill good luck!! I have found some of the seeds I could not get to germinate or grow well from starting inside under grow lights I did have success with winter sowing. Icelandic poppies; & delphinium I wasted soooo many seeds trying to grow inside under lights but had way better germination rates with winter sowing. I even did the fridge/freezer wet paper towel thing before trying to sprout inside for some batches with terrible success rates

Justafewdahlias Oh thank you for the reminded! I really want to get some of the poppies growing and have had only a few seeds sprout on them when started as seeds in the garden. I'll start up some of the Shades of Gray and some Shirley poppies today in my jugs. (I can picture Ted's face at the idea of gray poppies).

I've never had good success rates with there following the recommendations on the packages...Maybe it works in some other climate.....

calico20hill just set out a jug of mixed color Canterbury Bells

Those were my mother's favorites! I bought a few packets of the double pink and blue ones this year- we will have to share pictures!

This is my first year winter sowing in a way that should hopefully work. A few years ago I got the dumb idea to do it in trays with humidity domes with holes cut in them. Of course the wind blew those off and no kind of tape I tried actually worked to hold them in place. I decided to try again this year and actually use gallon jugs. I looked around some winter sowing groups on Facebook to get ideas and saw someone who tied the jugs shut with twine. I did the same and 4 (windy!) days later they're looking good. I am doing 2 types of stock and 2 types of poppies. I ordered around 400 lisianthus too, so I better cool it on other flower seedlings or I'll have to cut back on dahlias.

MissyWeitzel tied the jugs shut with twine.

I love this, looks great! I’ve yet to dive into winter sowing but I’m taking note of this method for when I do!

calico20hill overall I have had terrible success with all types of poppies. I am sure a lack of cold time is a big factor that worked against me. The other method I used that worked was direct sowing and then covering the area I sprinkled the seeds with some small makeshift humidity dome with some small holes in the top. I think my poppy seeds get washed away or eaten by birds. I will use a rock on the top/edges or kinda scoop soil around the edges of the humidity dome to keep it in place. The pro of this method is no transplanting, or you can thin/transplant some while some are already wheee they need to be. I used this when just adding some poppies here and there along borders.

Thanks for the reminder to get my poppy seeds out in the jugs to freeze...We hare having a great series of freezing nights and sunny days right now that ought to make those babies germinate!