Pacific Beauty Calendula Mix

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Edible flowers is shades of yellow, gold, apricot, and orange. Easy, quick, and hardy--blooms all year in zones 8-10, early spring to hard freeze elsewhere. Beautiful planted with the equally easy (and edible) blue Cornflowers (Bachelor's Button) or with other hot shades. Not at all fussy about soil, makes a nice spot of color in the herb garden, pots, in amongst vegetables, flowerbeds, or anywhere you want fast, easy color you can also use for food and medicine. Calendula is a flower, a homegrown substitute for saffron in cooking, and a medicinal herb. It was commonly called marigold (until Tagetes marigolds arrived from the tropics) and blooms all year in mild climates, sprouting best in spring and fall. Plants to about a foot tall. Needs dark to sprout, so plant 1/2 inch to 1 inch deep. Perennializes in mild climates. Calendula officinalis 60 seeds.

Calendulas are easy-to-grow flowers that can be direct-sown in the garden. But they do have some special quirks you need to know. They have germination inhibitors--compoounds on the seed surface that prevent it from sprouting until there is plenty of water available. You need to either wash off the inhibitors, or keep the soil very moist after planting. They will bloom and handle direct sun all summer, but the seeds will not sprout in hot soil, so plant in the spring before the soil warms up too much. Or, if planting in hot weather, put them in pots in a cool moist shady spot until the plants are up and going. Also, the seeds need dark. Many seeds won't germinate unless they get enough light to tell them the soil surface is near. But calendulas are big seeds with the oomph to make it to the surface from 1/2" to 1" deep, which is where they want to be. That's it--Just sow the seeds in cool soil, at a good depth, and you should have lots of lots of sunny blooms over a very long period.