7 easy tips for planting vibrant annuals

Keep these seven helpful tips in mind and your annuals will bloom beautifully.

• The right place for most annuals is a sunny location with good drainage and average garden soil.

Repeating the same annual in different parts of your yard, such as in a flower bed, along a walkway and tucked into pots on your porch, will give your yard a magical feeling of unity.

A few are made for shade.

• Impatiens, coleus, begonias and wishbone flower (torenia) tolerate more shade than other annuals, so they're great for bringing colour to areas near trees or buildings.
• Remember that light colours tend to show better in shade than darker ones.

• While you're waiting for small shrubs to grow, fill in the spaces between them with annuals.
• You can also use annuals to cover places where early-blooming bulbs and perennials have come and gone or to add colour — and attract beneficial insects — to your vegetable garden.

Create container bouquets by growing bushy or trailing annuals in pots or window boxes.

• Petunias, verbenas and lobelias are old window box standbys, but there are many new annuals you can add to the mix.
• Scaevola (fan flower) and silvery gray helichrysum or dusty miller are ideal annuals for bringing shimmer to pots and window boxes.

As summer winds down, you can pot up some of your favourite summer annuals and enjoy them for a few more weeks as blooming houseplants.

• Some of the best bets include begonias, coleus, impatiens and geraniums.
• For best results, pot them up a few weeks before your first fall frost is expected. That way, they will recover from the trauma of being dug up and transplanted by the time you bring them indoors.

• While you wait for perennials to take hold, dress up the garden with annuals.

Since they germinate, bloom and die within a single season, there's no need to dig them up once the later flowers are established. You can also plant them at the base of a trellis while you're waiting for a perennial vine to flower.

• If there's an old bed in your attic, why not move it outdoors and turn it into a bed of pansies?
• Fill an old wheel barrow with nasturtiums or let petunias spill out of a pair of old boots filled with potting soil.