"Eigenvector" wrote in message
. ..

"Paulo da Costa" wrote in message
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JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
"Eigenvector" wrote in message
. ..
I tried growing Echinacea in my patio area and they seemed to take off
quite nicely, but knowing nothing about them, I left them alone to do
their own thing.

I read somewhere about deadheading them, but didn't do that as I am not
familiar with the practice.

So right now I have the plants in my little plot, looking perfectly
dead and wondering if they will come back in the spring or did my
ignorance turn what should have been a perennial into an annual? How
do echinaceas seed and grow - by the flowers, like marigolds, or some
other mechanism?


Where do you live?

Even in California, my Echinacea are totally dead-looking right now, and
they will come back strongly in a couple of months. If you're planting it
in a colder climate, it may take longer, but they will come back.

Echinacea has a rhizome and spreads out bigger and stronger every year,
after dying back in the fall. You can also grow it very easily from the
seeds that are in the "cone" that remains when the flowers die out.

Paulo

Okay, that's certainly reassuring. I was about to clip off the dead
flowers but wasn't sure what effect that would have on them. I was also
going to pull weeds from around them, but not knowing what an echinacea
looks like when just starting out I didn't want to take the wrong thing.
It's been rather warm and wet here (Seattle) lately and the weeds are
coming out in force. I wanted to tag them before they had a chance to
establish, and since I have the day off I can do it at my leisure.

I made the mistake of buying compost from a landscaping yard that
apparently doesn't filter their soil very well - I have more weeds growing
up than I know what to do with.


But hang on a moment. Leave the flowers in place if you want them to produce
seeds. On the other hand, if you want the largest number of flowers for
ornamental reasons, you need to deadhead the faded ones. A google search
using the words "deadhead echinacea" will produce 4890 results. You won't
need to go any further than the first page of results to learn more.

By the way, the plant is a perennial, so unless you kill it somehow, it'll
come back each year after its dormant period. Without knowing where you
live, nobody can tell you any more about the nature of that dormancy period
in your specific garden.