How to Sow Forget-Me-Not Seed for Flowers Next Spring

You are sowing for next spring, not for this year

Forget-me-not is a biennial. Seed sown this year makes a flat rosette of hairy, spoon-shaped leaves, sits through winter as that rosette, and flowers the following spring. Nothing you do to a first-year plant will make it flower early, and a plant that has flowered is finished. Once you accept that rhythm the whole plant becomes easy, because it means you are always working one year ahead: the seed you scatter as this year's plants go over is the display you will be looking at twelve months later.

That also means the first year is the only year you ever have to sow deliberately. From the second spring onward the plants seed themselves so thoroughly that the sowing question changes into a weeding question, and you spend your effort deciding where to allow seedlings rather than trying to raise them. Treat this first sowing as starting a colony rather than growing a crop.

If you want flowers in the coming spring rather than the one after, buy rosettes in autumn instead of sowing. A rosette the size of a saucer going into winter flowers reliably; a seedling with four leaves does not.

Late summer is the sowing window

Sow from midsummer to the end of summer, aiming for plants the size of a coffee cup saucer by the time hard frost arrives. Sown too early, in late spring, the plants grow large and soft, sit through winter as a crowded mass and rot at the crown in a wet season. Sown too late, in autumn, they go into winter with four or five leaves, survive but never bulk up, and give you a thin scatter of flowers on short stems instead of a sheet of blue.

Germination is quick and needs no heat. Seed goes in around 65F (18C) soil and is up in eight to fourteen days; below 50F (10C) it slows to three weeks or more, which is the real reason autumn sowings disappoint. In a hot climate, sow in the shade of taller plants or wait until nights drop below 65F (18C), because forget-me-not seed germinates poorly when the surface stays above 80F (27C) all day.

Sow shallow, because the seed needs light

The seed is tiny, hard, glossy black and shaped like a flattened teardrop, and it germinates best with light on it. Press it onto a firmed, raked surface and leave it uncovered, or sieve the barest dusting of fine soil over it, no more than an eighth of an inch (3 mm). Buried half an inch (1.5 cm) down, as you would sow a larger flower, most of it never comes up, which is why a deliberate sowing often fails while the same seed shed naturally onto bare ground carpets the bed.

Keep the surface damp for the first two weeks. A shallow sowing dries out in a day of wind and sun, and seed that starts to swell and then dries is dead. Water with a fine rose or lay a single sheet of damp newspaper over the patch and lift it the moment the first green shows. Once the seedlings have true leaves the plant is drought-hardy enough to look after itself.

1. Clear and firm a patch of open ground Rake out weeds and lumps and press the surface flat with the back of the rake. Forget-me-not seed needs contact with soil it can grip; it rolls into cracks in rough ground and germinates in useless clusters.
2. Scatter thinly, at roughly one seed per square inch Mix the seed with a handful of dry sand to see where it lands. Sowing thick is the commonest mistake and it produces a mat of drawn seedlings that all mildew together the following spring.
3. Do not cover, or barely cover Tap the surface with the flat of your hand so the seed is pressed in but still visible. A dusting of sieved compost is acceptable; a spadeful of soil is not.
4. Water with a fine rose and keep the surface damp Water daily in dry weather until seedlings appear, then every second or third day for a fortnight. After that, water only in a genuine drought.
5. Thin to four inches (10 cm) at the four-leaf stage Pull the surplus in damp soil so the roots come cleanly away. Crowded rosettes going into winter are the single biggest cause of gray, mildewed plants the next spring.

Where to put the sowing, and what it is for

The classic use is as an underplanting for spring bulbs, and it is worth planning the sowing around that. Tulips and daffodils come up through the haze of blue and the combination hides the bare ground and the bulbs' own untidy lower leaves. To get it, sow the patch directly over the bulb area in late summer, before the bulbs go in, then plant the bulbs through the seedlings in autumn with a narrow trowel or a bulb planter. Disturbing the rosettes at that stage does not matter; they close over the holes within a few weeks.

Forget-me-not also does what almost nothing else does well, which is flower in dry shade under deciduous shrubs and at the foot of hedges. It flowers before the canopy closes, so the shade in high summer is irrelevant. Sow it there rather than in full sun in a hot climate, where the plants finish quickly and mildew badly.

Note where you sowed, because you will not recognize it later

Write down the date you sowed, the patch you sowed it in, and the date the first seedlings showed. The rosettes are unremarkable and hairy and look very much like several common weeds, so a season later it is genuinely hard to tell what you sowed from what arrived on its own. A sketch of the patch, or a photograph taken from a fixed point such as a path corner, settles the argument the following spring.

The record worth keeping longest is the first flowering date each year and the spread of the colony. Once the plant starts seeding itself, comparing this year's spread with last year's is how you decide whether to keep pulling plants after flowering or whether the colony is already dense enough to stop sowing entirely. Most gardens reach that point in the third spring.