How to plant petunias in Phoenix, Arizona

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Petunias do great in the Phoenix, Arizona area, but there are a few tricks that you have to keep in mind.

First of all, you have to wait until the weather cools down. It never, ever, gets too cold for petunias in Phoenix, but it definitely gets too hot. If you're thinking of planting them anytime between April and October, stop. Don't do that. The time to plant petunias here is November through March. Go check your calendar, if it's the right time, go buy a petunia plant.

Yes, you read that right, a petunia plant, not a six-pack of petunias. I've tried that before, and the air is just too dry in the desert for such a tiny plant to survive long enough to look like anything in your garden. Yes, a few will survive, but I'd rather have a 100% survival rate. So I buy them in a full-sized container. That way they won't spend the next month struggling to just survive, it will continuing growing just as it's always been doing. Because you aren't really so much transplanting the plant as moving it to a new spot. Please let me explain.

I just bought this petunia plant from a Home Depot just a few blocks away. It was sitting out front (always look for the plants sitting out front!), soaking up exactly the same amount of heat and sunshine as my backyard. It didn't just come out of a truck, from the dark, from a nursery, it's outside, where it will live the rest of its life. And when I got home I dug a hole just slightly larger than the pot, slipped out the plant, and firmed soil around it - no more than 1/2 inch all of the way around. In my opinion, it still thinks that it's over at Home Depot, nothing much has changed.

I water it before I plant it, and very generously afterwards with Miracle-Gro. I also put slow-release fertilizer and moisture crystals in the bottom of the hole before I put the plant in. And then I water it again, and again. And then some more water. When I'm finished writing this, I will give it more water. Over at the Home Depot it was used to being watered several times a day, so I'll do that for the next couple of weeks. Once the weather really starts to cool down, it will only need to be hand-watered every week or so, and less when the "Christmas Rains" begin, in December.

Of course petunias are annuals, and they will die when the summer heat starts to come back here, in April. But throughout the winter they will grow and bloom and be absolutely glorious! They're worth the trouble.

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