Dreams™ Red Picotee Petunia Seeds

Days to Maturity: 70 to 84 direct sow; 35 to 40 transplant

Dreams™ Red Picotee Petunia, a single grandiflora type variety, is a tender perennial (Zones 10-11), often grown as an annual, offering spring through summer interest. Free flowering, this petunia sets large, showy red blooms with a white picotee. The fragrant flowers attract bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds.

An herbaceous plant, Dreams Red Picotee Petunia has an upright, mounded, well-branched habit. It's perfect in containers, window boxes, and hanging baskets but makes great edging or ground cover in beds and borders. Planted alongside perennials and vegetables, petunias repel asparagus beetles, leafhoppers, tomato worms, a range of aphids, and many other pests.

Easy to grow, Dreams Red Picotee grows best in sunny to light shade locations with average, medium moist, well-draining soil but tolerates poor soils. It is virtually disease and pest free and deer resistant. Although petunias are low maintenance plants, pinching off the tops of established plants results in bushier plants with a heavier bloom, and deadheading regularly encourages and prolongs flowering. Cutting back plants that have declined in summer heat promotes a later bloom as temperatures cool.

Direct sow petunia seed after the last frost and as soon as the soil is warm in spring or start seeds indoors 10 to 12 weeks before the last frost and transplant after all threat of frost has passed.

This seed comes as a pellet. Pelleted seeds are small seeds that have been clay-coated to make them larger and more uniform in size and shape, making them easier to handle when planting.