Gardening How-To – Tips & Growing Instructions: Allium

Easy-to-grow Alliums provide one of the most effective ways to ensure continuing color and beauty in your garden after spring-flowering bulbs have faded. While you wait for the cheery blooms of summer flowers, it¹s easy to enjoy the outstanding features of Alliums:
- Exceptionally easy to grow with little concern for soil conditions.
- Intriguing, unique character of blooms that are a delight to behold.
- Great ornamental value after flowering because the flower heads continue to provide an interesting display even after the colors have faded.
-Great in dried arrangements.
- Ability to naturalize exceptionally well by multiplying year after year for increased beauty.
- Distasteful flavor for animals, so they won¹t eat any part of them.
- Attractive to hummingbirds!

Alliums come in all shapes and sizes and are lots of fun to grow. They fit into almost any garden setting and provide a much-needed bridge of color between spring and summer flowers. Sometimes called “ornamental onions”, Alliums do best in full sun with well drained, fertile soil and good moisture. Plant them in September or October about 8-10” deep. Allium really look best in the company of other summer bloomers. Sweet alyssum, rock cress, bachelor's buttons, coreopsis, sweet William, foxglove, baby's breath, daylily, iris, red hot poker, coralberry, barberry, Japanese Maple, Deutzia rosea, weigela, and Geranium pretense are just some of the companion plants that look fantastic with Alliums.

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