Double Click Mix Cosmos Flower Seeds

Well, here's the most exciting cosmos to come along in many a year—a lively, very large-flowered, long-blooming mix of white, pink, and rosy-red DOUBLE flowers. We don't know about double-clicking, but you'll certainly do a double take when these blooms begin opening above the airy, fern-like foliage on tall, well-branched plants.

With frazzled petals and a sunny yellow center, these flowers are crying out for use in vases—they have all the charm of daisies with a more interesting form. And they appear so profusely that you'll still have plenty of color in the garden after you've picked your fill for indoor use. Besides, Cosmos is a cut-and-come-again bloomer, meaning that the sooner you cut the blooms, the quicker new buds will pop up to replace them. (And if you don't cut the flowers, be sure to deadhead them as soon as they fade, to stimulate new bud production.)

The flowers begin in midsummer in most climates and continue right through mid-fall, soaking up the heat and sun in any well-drained garden soil. Cosmos is a fine choice for the vegetable patch, too; a member of the Aster family, it does a good job of repelling "bad bugs" and attracting beneficial insects and wasps to help your veggies grow and bloom their best. There—you have the perfect excuse to buy TWO packets of this super-easy, beautiful mix.

Double Click comes to us from France, and we feel lucky indeed to be able to offer it to Park gardeners this season. It's just as easy to sow and grow as the older types—direct sow the seed into the warm spring soil, or to get an even earlier start on those blooms, sow the seed indoors a few weeks before last frost using your Bio Dome or seed flats. If direct sowing, thin the seedlings to 2 feet apart when they are a few inches high. That's all there is to it.