Easily Grow This Long-Blooming Blanket Flower From Seed

If you're looking for an easy to grow flower that even the worst gardeners can handle and is known to cover the ground with lots of brightly colored blooms, the mesa gaillardia is the plant just for you. This flower comes from the daisy family and is a herbaceous perennial, commonly known as the blanket flower for the way it spreads across the ground, like your favorite quilt on a bed. While gaillardia is the general name for the blanket flower species, mesa gaillardia is one of the varieties most commonly seen in gardens. It's a hybrid of two other gaillardia flowers and is also known as gaillardia x grandiflora. The bright blooms are rather showy, pollinator friendly, and you can grow this flower from seed. 

Mesa gaillardia is typically hardy to USDA zones 3 to 9, with some varieties also being hardy in zone 10. It's drought tolerant once established in the soil and while growing them from seed may appear to be as simple as scattering them over the surface of your soil, it's actually important to plant them mindfully because of how much light they require, their soil moisture preferences, and the time of season the seeds need to be sown. 

Mesa gaillardia is one of many wildflowers you can grow in your garden from seed and you can start by selecting a sunny location for the flowers to bloom. They will need full to partial sun once they grow, so the last thing you want to do is plant them where they won't receive enough light. Fall is the best time of year to sow these seeds to get a blooming period that lasts from summer to the time of your first frost. Lightly till the soil of the planting area where the seeds will go. Then, scatter the seeds across the surface of the soil and cover them with a little bit of dirt, since blanket flower seeds need light to germinate. The same applies to seeds you'll be starting indoors.

In a container with cells, fill with seed starting mix or soil. Plop three seeds in each cell, and lightly cover them. If sowing outdoors, consider planting 1 oz of seeds per 250-sq-ft, spaced 15- to 18-inches apart. For the indoor sown seeds, mist the cells with water consistently to maintain moist, but not soggy soil. Similarly, outdoor sown seeds require consistently moist soil that isn't overwatered. Seeds should germinate within two to three weeks and reach a height of 16-inches by 20-inches wide when full grown. 

As a series of flowers, mesa gaillardia comes in a variety of colors and characteristics so you can pick and choose the cultivar that matches your preferences and the aesthetic of your garden. You'll find the blooms growing in shades of red, peach, yellow, and bicolor. Mesa red features deep red petals whose center shares the same color, but with a subtle touch of yellow. Mesa red is hardy to zones 3 to 9. Mesa peach, on the other hand, has peach-colored petals with yellow tips, accompanied by a yellow middle. It's hardy in zones 3 to 8.

Similarly, mesa yellow looks just like it sounds with cheery, yellow petals and center. This mesa variety is particular to zone 5. Lastly, the bicolor type is known as mesa bright bicolor and has red and yellow petals with a dark red center. Bright bicolor is hardy in zones 5 to 10. Whichever variety you choose to plant, you'll be sure to enjoy a sea of fiery flowers in no time.