October gardening tips: sow hardy annuals for a vibrant spring in France

If you were brought up in the UK, chances are every autumn you belted out “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the ground” in school assembly for Harvest Festival. The hymn refers to spring sowing, of course, but harvest time is also a very good time to sow seed. 

In much of France, except the colder areas, October sowings are ideal. You can make careful plantings of soaked sweet pea seeds in pots, toilet roll tubes or root trainers or mark out wide flat drills for broad beans in the vegetable plot, but in the flower bed you could try being a bit freer. Some annual seeds can be scattered now to give you earlier flowers next year with no root disturbance.

Preparation is key. You could just fling seed into the bed and you might get some success. However, if you weed around your perennials, mulching around any that require protection, and lightly fork over the soil between the plants – leaving that clear – you will get better results. Lightly rake the ground. The soil is still warm. With a bit of luck there will have been some rain to soften the ground and there won’t be any bad frosts for some weeks yet. Choose your varieties paying attention to one main criterion – is it a “Hardy Annual”?

In southerly places you will probably get away with using what are called “Half Hardy Annuals” too. On French seed packets there is usually a handy graphic showing the months for planting if you are in doubt. Or you can collect your own seed from plants in your garden or beg from friends and neighbours. 

Every year in June or July, I cut off the tall seed spikes of the foxgloves and shake them over the bed and I do the same over the strip edging the drive with the wall flowers. These are biennial plants so need the summer to germinate, grow and then they flower next year. If I sowed them in autumn, it would be too late. 

The nigella, ammi visnaga, pale cream Eschscholzia and cerinthe which also flourish along the drive are re-sown now. The ammi won’t come into its stately own until July but the cerinthe, with its glaucous leaves, in a normal year will grow fast and produce early nectar for the odd bees that emerge into winter apricity. The flowers are a purply inky blue black, with a thin yellow band. The frost doesn’t bother them and I allow them to sprawl and flop through other plants until they tip over into untidiness. Like forget-me-nots, I just pull them up and shake out the seeds before adding them to the compost pile.

Nigella, otherwise known as Love-in-the-Mist, needs to be successionally sown, like lettuce in the vegetable garden. I love the fine pale green foliage, the mass of different blues (and occasional pinks, purples and whites) and then the round, bubble-like seed  pods. Over the season I allow the pods to dry and ripen and then pull the whole brittle  browned plants up, storing most of them in the dry barn. Some I crush and add back to the bed during May, June and July. 

If we get rain, the seeds can germinate and there will be more flowers in August, September and October. In October I run the dried plants, seed heads and all, through the shredder and scatter the resulting mix onto the bed, in the ditch and in any other corner that needs cheering up.

Marigold magic

Calendula or Pot Marigold is a very cheerful flower. It is known as souci in French. It is edible and can be used in salads and other dishes. You’ll often find it planted in the potager alongside herbs and vegetables. It is used to make creams and salves too. Usual colours are a clear orange or yellow but there are some fabulous variants for the flower garden: doubles and frilly blooms that come in all shades of fiery colours, creamy white and almost pink.

Eschscholzia, the California poppy, is a half hardy annual but I found it comes reliably from autumn sowing in my garden in the south west. I use E. Ivory Castle down the drive. Its elegant pale petals contrast well with the dark Old Warrior wallflowers. And the early ones mingle with spring bulbs of daffodils and iris whilst the later flowers pop up through the old gnarled lavender bushes. 

The shining orange ones which carpet hillsides in California sometimes edge my hot bed. In a previous garden I grew E. Art Shades and was reminded just how beautiful they were whilst researching this article. New varieties like E. Thai Silk and E. Red Chief are very tempting too.

The Ammis – visnaga and majus – are umbellifers like cow parsley and angelica.

Their flower heads are made up of plates or domes of tiny lacy flowers held high over ferny foliage. They fill gaps with a froth of white or pale green. They provide landing spots and shelter for lots of beneficial insects and pollinators.

I just can’t grow delphiniums here but sowing Larkspur is the next best thing. Larkspur, often sold in France as an annual delphinium, is more properly called Consolida ajacis. It absolutely hates root disturbance so you get far better results scattering seed in situ. When I have sown in spring, in trays, I have only been disappointed with really weak plants that flower too soon when transplanted. A friend has a patch where it’s a sea of deep blue that comes back every year – she just leaves the seed heads to ripen and fall.

A bit of laissez-faire this autumn can bring a harvest of new blooms next year.