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South Dakota Home Garden Coneflowers

 

Hi, I'm Eric of Landscape Garden Centers and today we're gonna talk about echinacea or better known as cone flowers. Cone flowers, as you can see, come in a myriad of different colors and they are just absolutely beautiful right now. You will start to see them bloom. These are all cone flower. And basically, a lotta people saw many years ago, is that the purple cone flower was basically the very beginning of all of these different colors. And since then, they've been able to genetically or hybridize a lot of different colors, getting different colors, vibrant colors, muted colors, and just different size flowers too. Cone flowers are awesome because what they will do is they will continuously flower from June, July, August, and continuously flower. 

 

You cannot beat the colors that the echinacea can provide for your landscape. From reds to purples, to oranges, to different, to other oranges, yellows. There's whites, there's pinks. There's just lots and lots of different types of colors that are out there of the echinacea. Echinacea are very, very simple to grow, very easy to grow. If you want them to have lots and lots of blooms and buds, then what you're gonna wanna do is put them in a very full sun area. This is something that needs to have full sun. Basically sun up to sun down would be the best to get the most potential out of your echinacea. Or at least six to eight hours of well-drained soil. Again, stressing well-drained soil. And then making sure that its roots or its feet are kept cool by using some mulch around the base of the plant after you plant it.

 

 Now, the one awesome thing about echinacea in general is that they're very, very easy to propagate. At the end of the season, you will see that the middle part, these become the seeds and the seeds will just dry out. The flower petals will bend back and everything dries out. And then, at some point, you'll be able to tell that the seed head is ripe for basically sowing more seed. And then those seed. Basically they'll just seed right on top of themselves. Or you can take those seeds and sprinkle those seeds up and around. That way you have, the following year, you have a thicker and thicker patch of cone flower. But, what I would recommend doing is, as your patch of echinacea becomes bigger, is to divide those. After about every three to four years, we recommend is that you take maybe a chunk of that flower or that plant, and then spread it out. Share it with a family or continue to make that bed bigger. Echinacea do very, very well in full sun, well-drained soil. They provide awesome color. It's a great, great accent to your landscape. There's lots of different colors that you can match up with other colors that are in your landscape. But really, makes sure to remember this is that once you start planting them, you're gonna fall in love with them, and then you're gonna want to plant more of them. And they are an awesome, very easy plant. And it's a great gift plant because anybody should be able to grow these. I'm Eric with Landscape Garden Centers. Keep it growing.