My Flower Bed All done in for this year

[sheepdog 10]

Yesterday I finished laying the flower bed to rest for this season. All the canna bulbs are dug and drying now, they will be bagged up in a week or so and stored in the basement again till spring. I have some flower seeds still drying that I need to get shelled out and jarred up, hopefully I can get to that today before they get scattered everywhere. This is no minor task, I am so sore I can hardly move. My flower bed is well over 100 ft long, 3 feet wide and runs the length of my driveway. I did manage to get all the cannas dug in 2 trys, pretty good for an old fat lady! My flower bed is my major landscaping project every year. Actually, I work on it one way or the other nearly all year long. Now that the flowers are done, I will still work on it this winter, hauling wood ashes from the wood furnace and manure from the rabbitry and goat barn and spreading them out over it. Of course, the main work is the spring tilling and planting. I plant the canna's at the back of the bed, along the fence. Then broadcast a flower seed mix in front of them on the drivway side. The mix is predominantly zinna's, in all sizes and colors, and of course, the aformentioned cosmos. I have always added marrigold seed, but for some reason it does not germinate well, I usually only get a small scattering of marrigold plants. After seeding, I have to hand water the bed every day until the flowers germinate and get a good start, then the soaker hose I lay in the bed after the seeding can pretty much supply the water, though I am not overly pleased with the way it works, it doesnt' cover the width of the bed like I would hope for. After the plants get established well enough that I can recognise them all, I make several hand weeding trips down the bed. Of course, this year there wasn't much weeding, I definately got enough flower seed down to choke the weeds out. Then about mid summer I start harvesting seed to dry and save for the next year. This is a very time comsuming project, flower heads have to be picked at just the right time to have fully mature seeds and not be allready shattering and spilling the seed. I also like to try to harvest them when they still have just a touch of color so I have better control over the variety of color and flower size in the bed. This year I was really pleased early on in the spring when it first started growing. It was the first time I have ever seen flowers choke out weeds! I really got a great start on it this year. It was well up in the season though, when I realized I had gotten my seed balance WAY off and had planted far too much cosmo's. It was still pretty, but I like the color variations of the zinna's better, the cosmo's I have is either light or dark purple, or white. Does anybody know if cosmos comes in any other colors? I would also appreciate some sugestions on other flowers that I could add to the mix. They would need to be annuals, and not hybreds, so I can save my own seed. (the cost of seed for a bed this size would be well up in the hundreds of dollars if I had to purchase them.) I have a smaller flower bed in front o fthe kennel where I start new plants and try to get seeds from them in smaller quanities to add to the big bed, so far I haven't found a lot that works out, the main 2 flowers, zinna and cosmos pretty much take the bed over. This winter I am also going to work on gathering up supplys to make a railing along the front edge of the bed, the cosmos get very tall and tend to fall over. I am cutting long cedar poles out of the dozer decks and fence rows where we opened up some goat pasture. I am hoping to get enough to run the length of the bed, with long thin poles, setting on top of heavier stump size ceder logs. I think it will look pretty nice, but I will have to wait till the planting and the weeding is done before setting it up next summer. I also would like to make some stepping stones. I need an opening where the water hydrants are. I was thinking about pouring a concrete mix into some old dog water pans, and setting some aggates I have in the top of them before the concrete sets up. Does anyone know if there is something that you can mix into concrete to give it color other than the ugly gray it comes in? So....if anyone has some sugestions on flowers to add or anything else, I'm all ears!