I just love the brilliant color of ‘Park’s Pick Coral zinnias. This series grows 40 to 50 inches tall and is perfect for the back of the border. This zinnia is just one of only a handful of my annuals that is behaving normally this year.
I’m not sure if it’s the excessive rain or the 3-day stretches of ridiculous heat we’ve been having every other week lately, but some of my plants are acting really weird. I’ve got agastache (licorice mint) plants that are 5 feet tall already and climbing. They usually peak at 30 inches. They are drowning out foot-tall coneflowers and asters buried behind them.
And some of my third row zinnias that should be 24 inches tall have rocketed taller than my back row zinnias that reach 50 inches:
Next to our screen porch where I don’t map anything out and just throw leftover plants in willy-nilly (but I still pay attention to height!) I’ve got cosmos in rows two and four towering around my supposed-to-be tall marigolds in row 3 who are starting to wonder who turned out all the lights!
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to which plants have decided to have an enormous, out-of-character growth spurt and which ones have been left behind to fight for sunlight.
It was also supposed to be a light Japanese Beetle year because of so many cold nights with no snow cover this winter, but that prediction was a complete swing and a miss. I present Exhibit A:
The little beasts are bad this year. They are chomping on all my zinnias and hanging all over my tall marigolds as they wait for the first blooms to open. Then they’ll chow them down in a matter of hours. I go out with a bucket of soapy water several times a day and pluck as many as I can, but more just keep hatching or flying in from other locations. Blechhh.