I learned to winter sow years ago. Where I used to live, the winters were long, cold and snowy and winter sowing produced fantastic results. Now I live in an area with very mild winters (2019 doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, though) and last October was rather warm. I kept hearing that, in this climate, plants can be started year-round. I had several seed packets and, by the end of the first week of October, I was looking at 48 cells with basil, zinnia, alyssum, peppermint, chive, and cosmos. To my surprise, the seeds sprouted within a couple of days with one exception, the peppermint.

A few weeks later, I potted the basil and put all the other seedlings in the ground. The little plants were growing so nicely and then, one morning, the squirrels ate most of them. The basil plants were left with three or four leaves each and the cosmos had been chewed up almost completely, 4 of the 12 plants had only one leaf on. The squirrels missed one cosmos plant that was growing between snapdragons.

By early November, the cosmos and the basil plants had recuperated and were looking good again and the squirrels had another feast. I bought hardware cloth and made protectors for the cosmos and a month later the plants were in good shape again. The one that was protected by the snapdragons bloomed for the first time in January:



The other cosmos plants were growing very slowly because the weather cooled down considerably in mid-January but they will be blooming soon:





Now, this is what moved me to write this post: Back in late October, after the first squirrel attack, I put two containers with very damaged cosmos seedlings out of sight and I totally forgot about them. Three weeks ago I was surprised to see two cosmos plants still growing in those containers. They were so very tiny... And yesterday one of them bloomed!



Those plants are barely two inches tall.





It's been cold here, we've had night temperatures of 34 F and nonstop rain since early January, with one or two days of clear weather between torrential rains. And these tough little cosmos plants seem to be saying "bring it on!" 😃

Hello Bleu,

Cosmos, morning glories, and zinnias are quantitative (facultative) short-day plants. Actually, it is the night length that is the important controlling part of plant photoperiods. So quantitative short-day plants bloom quicker if they have long nights.

Your tiny blooming cosmos probably had long nights encouraging them to bloom, despite being on small plants. I have seen a similar thing with my zinnias, which I grow and breed as a hobby. I grow my zinnias year round, by growing them indoors under lights in our basement utility room during the Winter months.

It is going to go below zero tonight here in east central Kansas where I live, but I will be tending my zinnias, and possibly cross-pollinating some of them, in the morning. Working under bright lights can make Winter a cheerful time. I can control the photoperiods simply by setting the timers on my fluorescent lights.

ZM

Well, that tiny cosmos' bloom is still there, looking exactly the same as it did when I took the photo on Feb 21. Somehow those two tiny plants are doing everything in slow-mo and I would love to know why. Usually, cosmos blooms don't last ten days. Then, again, the little one is no ordinary cosmos plant. 😀

And an update: The cosmos in the second photo has not yet bloomed. The bud is pretty much the same size as it was in that photo I took on Feb 21.

Hi Bleu,

" Well, that tiny cosmos' bloom is still there, looking exactly the same as it did when I took the photo on Feb 21. "

Well, your weather in Southern California is enviably mild. It has "warmed up" to zero degrees here in central east rural Kansas where I am, from negative overnight lows, on the way to a "high" of 15 F later today.

Cosmos blooms probably don't last as long as zinnia blooms, but 11 days or so isn't an awfully long bloom age. My individual zinnia blooms routinely last 30 days or longer. Morning glory blooms are more ephemeral--they rarely last out the day they open. Cosmos blooms last long enough to be qualified as cut flowers. Admittedly, your little Cosmos guys are really unusual. A lot of my home-hybridized zinnia blooms have forms that aren't available in seed catalog zinnias.

I continue to make crosses between my different zinnia flower forms, in order to get still new forms. If I weren't breeding zinnias, I probably would be breeding cosmos, because cosmos also have an enviable variety of flower forms. I particularly like the "Sea Shells" cosmos, and hope to get zinnias in that flower form.

ZM