Drought tolerant and low maintenance, echinacea, or coneflower, is among our favorite native flowers. Once established, it offers tons of color and great food for songbirds and pollinators. Unfortunately, it’s not always the easiest to start from seed.

Echinacea seeds must go through a cold, moist period in order to break dormancy. Thankfully, winter is the perfect time to start this process so you can enjoy bright echinacea blooms in your garden for years to come. 

Growing Requirements

Echinacea is a hardy, drought-tolerant perennial that thrives even in poor soil. When considering echinacea and selecting a spot for plants, keep these features in mind.

Perennial. Echinacea is perennial in zones 3 through 9 and will readily self-seed.

Full sun. Echinacea thrives in full sun but will tolerate partial shade, though it may not bloom as often. 

Soil Requirements. Echinacea is exceptionally tolerant of nutrient-poor soil. It thrives in well-drained areas. It won’t tolerate excessive moisture, and will often rot in poorly drained, soggy areas. 

Water Requirements. Once established, echinacea is low-maintenance and drought-tolerant. It grows a large taproot. 

Bloom period. Depending on your variety and location, echinacea may bloom any time from late spring to fall. In zone 7a, we typically see blooms from midsummer to fall. 

Deer-Resistant. We’ve found that deer typically leave echinacea alone. While they may occasionally grab a bite, deer typically prefer more palatable plants. 

In favorable conditions, echinacea can self-sow and spread. Keep this in mind when sowing in or near beds you typically use for annuals. You may need to divide or contain echinacea to keep it from taking up too much of your garden. However, the large taproot on mature plants can make them difficult to move.

Echinacea Varieties

We currently carry three echinacea varieties. 

Echinacea Pallida (Pale Purple Coneflower)
Drooping flower petals are 1½-3½ in. long and may range in color from pink, purple, or white, but are typically rosy purple, with a purple-brown flower disc. Long, narrow leaves. 

Echinacea Angustifolia (Narrow-Leaved Coneflower)
The plants are the smallest of the echinaceas (8-18 in.) and the spreading pink ray petals are the shortest (¾-13⁄8 in. long). The leaves are long and narrow.

Echinacea Purpurea (Purple Coneflower)
The flowers are 3-4 in. across with pink-orange cone-shaped centers and purple-pink rays. 

Many garden centers also offer hybrid varieties, and our friends at Prairie Moon Nursery, who specialize in native seeds, also offer Tennessee coneflower, Bush’s coneflower, and Ozark coneflower. 

Cold Stratification

For good germination, you must cold stratify echinacea. This means you need to expose the seeds to a period of moisture and cold temperatures about 40 °F or below. You can do this by starting seeds indoors or outside.

Cold stratification is how plant seeds adapted to stay dormant over winter before germinating in spring. The cold, moist period followed by warmth signals the seasonal shift to the seeds.

Longer times are better, but as little as 3 weeks of stratification will give some germination for Echinacea pallida and Echinacea angustifolia. Echinacea purpurea, needs less cold stratification than other species. For it, just 7 days of stratification will increase germination rates so you can spring plant it if needed.

Starting Echinacea Indoors

Sow your echinacea seeds in flats or pots of moist soil in fall or about two to four months before your desired planting date. Place your pots or flats into a refrigerator over the winter. Check your flats regularly, spritzing them with water occasionally to ensure they don’t dry out.

Remove the flats from the fridge in late winter or very early spring. The seeds may take two to four weeks to germinate after you remove them from the refrigerator.

Sow extra seed. Echinacea typically has only a 50% germination rate.

Starting Echinacea Outside

Sowing seeds outdoors in the fall is an easy way to cold stratify them. Sow your seeds in a clean, weed-free bed or in flats in a cold frame in late fall or early winter. They’ll stay safe and dormant through the winter until the warm weather in spring signals them to germinate. 

Harvesting Echinacea

You can harvest echinacea as a cut flower or for tea and herbal medicine. Herbalists often use the flowers, leaves, and roots of echinacea in immune-boosting teas, tinctures, and other herbal products. 

Wait to harvest roots until your echinacea plant is at least three years old. Like many perennials, it needs ample time to get established before it will tolerate a major harvest.

When you’re ready to harvest roots, do so in late fall after a killing frost. Gently lift the soil with a fork and harvest a small portion of the roots. If you’re growing a large patch, you can also use this opportunity to thin the patch and sacrifice a whole plant. 

Our fall frosts always sneak up on us. It still feels like summer now, but autumn is right around the corner. If you’re like us, when Jack Frost comes knocking, your garden will still be full of green tomatoes. Thankfully, it is possible to ripen many of these tomatoes indoors. 

What Happens If My Tomatoes Get Frosted?

Unfortunately, tomatoes are highly frost-sensitive. If you get a good frost, your plants will wilt, and the fruit will darken and turn mushy. Watching the weather for frost is critical. 

Harvest all your tomatoes before frost threatens and bring them indoors for sorting. Those that are ripe or almost ripe are ready for quick use. The green tomatoes will need to be stored, ripened, or processed. 

Will My Green Tomatoes Ripen?

Many of the green tomatoes on your plants will ripen if picked and stored properly indoors. For tomatoes to ripen, look for those that are at their mature size and light green. It’s tough to tell, but compare them to other tomatoes on the plant and those you have previously harvested.

Tomatoes that have already reached the breaker or blushing stage with tinges of pink or yellow on the bottom, are also perfect for ripening indoors.  

Picking green tomatoes is a great way to have fresh tomatoes further into the autumn. Did you know that there are storage tomatoes bred specifically for this purpose? Storage tomatoes produce fruit that reliably ripens off the vine. Typically, we plant storage tomatoes one to two months after the main tomato crop, timing the harvest for fall.

Storage tomatoes aren’t quite as tasty as a summer tomato fresh from the vine, but they are far better than their grocery store counterparts.

How to Store and Ripen Green Tomatoes

To ripen green tomatoes, begin with unblemished fruit. Store the fruit somewhere cool so that none of it is touching, and it’s out of direct sunlight. We’ve found that old apple boxes with their fruit dividers are great for this. Some folks also have luck with wrapping them individually in newspaper.

Never refrigerate your tomatoes.

Check your tomatoes at least once a week to look for ripening and remove any bad ones that have begun to rot. Turning tomatoes often can also help them ripen more evenly. 

How to Speed Up Ripening

If you have a lot of tomatoes, you probably want to ripen them slowly over time, but if you need some tomatoes to ripen quickly, there are a couple of steps you can take. First, move your tomatoes somewhere warm, like your kitchen. They ripen well between 68°F and 77°F (20°C to 25°C).

The second thing you can do is take advantage of the tomato’s natural ethylene gas. Tomatoes produce ethylene gas as they ripen, and the gas speeds up the process. Large growers typically harvest under-ripe tomatoes and will ripen them when needed by exposing them to ethylene gas so that they’re red when they hit the grocery store shelves.

You can increase the ethylene gas around your tomatoes by placing them in a paper bag or lidded cardboard box. Just remember to check them regularly. 

What Do I Do With Immature Green Tomatoes?

Dark green tomatoes that haven’t reached their mature size won’t ripen well indoors. For these tomatoes, we recommend using them green or preserving them. You can make fried green tomatoes, chow chow, pickles, and more. Find our five favorite ways to preserve and use green tomatoes.

You’ve probably seen social media posts asking gardeners to avoid raking leaves or tidying their gardens to protect beneficial insects, and they are true. Removing plant material can destroy the shelter and food sources for many of our garden visitors, but it’s also important to strike a balance. Tidying can help reduce disease issues and prepare your garden for next spring. Here’s how you can give your garden a fall tidy while still protecting songbirds, pollinators, fireflies, and other wildlife.

Leave the Leaves

You’ve probably heard it, and it is important. Fall leaves are a key habitat for beneficial insects and add organic matter to the soil as they break down. 

If you want to remove the leaves from your lawn, consider just moving them into the garden, around perennials, or on garden pathways. There they can still provide some habitat and act as a mulch. They’ll protect beneficial insects in the garden, insulate the soil, and add nutrients and organic matter to the soil as they slowly decay.  

Leaves also make excellent additions to the compost pile.

Reduce Your Mowing

Leaving your grass a little long in the fall can also help wildlife. The pupae of some fireflies, butterflies, and moths will overwinter in the soil beneath a nice thick thatch of long grass. If you want fireflies to light up the lawn next spring, leave it long this fall!

You can discontinue mowing a bit early or set the mower to its highest setting for the final cut. It’s good for your lawn too! Leaving grass a bit longer helps protect the soil and can create a healthier, lusher lawn next season.

Leave Flower Stems

It may not look tidy, but dead stalks bring their own beauty to the winter garden. Flowers like sunflowers, Joe-Pye weed, goldenrod, tithonia, rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans), and marigolds will all attract seed-eating songbirds to your winter garden. Leaving the stalks will also help them self-sow and spread. Songbirds are messy eaters! They will drop some seeds as they eat and spread others through their droppings. Think of it as low-effort seed-bombing.

The stalks also provide a winter safe-haven for pollinators and other beneficial insects. Butterflies may pupate hanging from dense clumps of plant material. Small native bees like leaf-cutter bees, mason bees, and carpenter bees will also overwinter in hollow flower stems. 

However, not all perennial flowers thrive without cutting back. If you notice pest or disease issues throughout the summer or have flowers like peonies, bearded irises, or bee balm that are prone to fungal issues like powdery mildew, you should still trim them in the autumn.

Remove Vegetable Crop Material

We also recommend that you remove all vegetable crop material. Old squash and cucumber vines can harbor diseases like powdery mildew, tomatoes carry diseases like late blight, and asparagus stalks can harbor asparagus beetles. We like to burn any diseased or pest-ridden vegetable material before winter to help mitigate these issues. 

Doing a final round of weeding can also help you get a head start on spring. Many cool-weather weeds germinate in the fall, stay small all winter, and then take off in the spring right when you’re trying to get crops into the ground. 

Sow Cover Crops or Add Mulch

Don’t leave your soil bare. After removing vegetable crops and weeds, you want to place a protective covering over the soil for winter. This will insulate the soil, protect against erosion, and provide critical habitat for beneficial insects and fungi.

Fall-planted cover crops are great for this. You can sow nitrogen fixers like clover and Austrian winter peas, daikon radishes to help bust hardpan and loosen the soil, or winter wheat or rye to help build up organic matter. 

If you don’t have the time or energy to plant a cover crop, mulch is a suitable alternative. You can cover the soil with leaves, grass clippings, straw, wood chips, or other natural materials that will break down over the winter.

Fall Plant Native Flowers & Perennials

Once you have a tidy garden, you can also do some fall planting for wildlife. We carry a few flowers suitable for fall planting.

One of our favorite native plant and seed organizations, Prairie Moon Nursery, offers a wide selection of native plants for fall planting that ship in September and October, like wild leeks (ramps), rose milkweed, false indigo, Culver’s root,  and common ironweed that are perfect for attracting and supporting wildlife. They also offer native seeds and seed mixes depending on your needs.

You can also fall plant native trees and shrubs. The Arbor Day Foundation is a great place to get affordable native species like eastern redbud, eastern red cedar, hackberry, and American elder. 

Growing a mix of native plants that offer a range of heights, textures, fruit, flowers, and growth styles will provide habitat for songbirds, pollinators, and other wildlife for years to come.