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Grow annual vines for quick cover

© Lorraine Flanigan

Looking for a quick fix for that chain link fence at the back of the garden? Try an annual vine. These colourful and often fragrant plants mature in one season, producing lots of foliage and flowers to brighten up the summer garden.

10 good reasons to grow annual vines

1. Fill in bare spaces until perennial vines mature.
2. Splash the garden with colour and often fragrance.
3. Give colour when perennial vines finish blooming.
4. Provide height in container plantings.
5. Grow easily and quickly.
6. Flower all season long.
7. Withstand the heat of summer when other plants poop out.
8. Require little maintenance once they're on their way up.
9. Make a young garden look mature.
10. Allow for experimentation - find the right look or change it each year.

Here's a sampler of annual vines and tender perennials to grow this season - from old garden favourites to the new and unusual.

Sweet on sweet peas

It's impossible to open a gardening magazine lately and not find seductive pictures of old-fashioned, cottage garden sweet peas, lathyrus odoratus. We've seen them scrambling over split cedar fences, gracing Martha Stewart's gathering basket, and weaving amongst cosmos in a traditional cutting garden. All this attention seems to be well-deserved. Sweet peas are available in a wide palette of colours from palest creams and apricots to clear pinks, romantic lavenders, bright reds, and deep burgundies and magentas. As broad ranging as their colour is their fragrance. Varieties bred for scent have been described as spicy, delicate, sweet, heady, and delicious. And, the fragrance of the grandmother of all modern hybrids, 'Cupani's Original', has been likened to "a freshly opened beehive on a hot, sticky day " Hmmm, maybe I'll pass on that one. Sweet peas also come in a variety of sizes from the very dwarf, early blooming 'Snoopea' that grows only two feet (60 cm) high, to the bold 'Mammoth' Mixed that can grow to as much as six or eight feet ( 120 - 240 cm) tall.

Sweet peas love cool weather. Plant seeds early in the season as soon as the ground can be worked, or start them indoors and transplant to the garden early in the spring. Whether sowing indoors or out, soak seeds at least overnight to encourage germination. In the milder regions of the west coast, seeds may be sown outdoors in the fall. When seedlings are about four inches (10 cm) high, pinch them back to encourage side branching.

Grow sweet peas in rich soil against a string, plastic mesh or wire trellis, along a chain link fence, or up a bamboo teepee. Plant dwarf varieties in pots and other containers. Because they hate hot weather, place sweet peas in morning sun to encourage flower production but where afternoon shade keeps them cool.

The copyright of the article Grow annual vines for quick cover in Southern Ontario Gardens is owned by Lorraine Flanigan. Permission to republish Grow annual vines for quick cover in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.