10 Tips for Planting Petunias in your Flower Garden

We love gardening and we have 4 flower beds and 2 small vegetable gardens that we have been working on this year. While our gardens started off small, they are all coming along nicely now.  In our one flower bed we planted nothing but beautiful Petunias. When we bought them they were quite small and none of them were even close to blooming.

Today, I wanted to share some Petunia planting tips with all of you that we learned along the way.

1. When buying petunia plants always buy healthy ones! Inspect them carefully and if you see any signs of disease, don't buy them! It is perfectly okay to buy them with no blooms and it's okay to buy them with blooms as long as they look healthy.

2. If the plants you are considering buying look wilted or have any funky odors coming from the plant or the soil the plant is sitting in...refrain from buying them! A flower plant should smell just like the flowers they are...any musty or moldy smells could mean that it's a diseased plant.

3. Your plants should be planted as soon as you get them home. If you can't get them into the ground right away, mist them with water so they stay hydrated. You do NOT need to flood them!

4. We buy our petunias in multi-packs and to make separation easier we like to lightly mist them and the soil with a water bottle. Wait a few minutes and they should separate for you a lot easier than trying to do it with stiff hard dry dirt.

5. We dig a hole that is about 4" to 6" deep and we place the petunia down into the hole along with the dirt it came in. We then use our regular soil on top of that. (the dirt they come in is very nutrient rich).

6. Once we have all of our plants in the ground we immediately water them with some Miracle Grow which helps them get off to a great start. We don't overly saturate ours with water but we do make sure that they get nice and wet.

7. We water our flowers and the vegetable garden every 3 days when we don't get any significant rain. Every week 7-10 days we water them with the Miracle Grow which keeps them nice & healthy and growing quickly.

8. Keep your flower bed weeded! We mulch around our flowers and then pull the weeds on the weekend which takes maybe 5 minutes since the mulch keeps the weeds at bay.

9. Keep animals out of your flower beds....if need be, put a small fence around the flower bed. Animal feces and urine can damage your flowers, especially the urine which contains ammonia.

10. If you notice your flowers are not doing well...try to solve the problem as quickly as possible. If you can't figure out the problem, dig them up and move them to another area before they get too shabby looking. Just make sure you dig around them, taking great care to not damage any of their roots.

Well there you have it...our favorite 10 tips when it comes to planting Petunias in your flower garden.