Annual Plants—What Most Gardeners Grow

Annual plants are those that generally germinate, flower, and die each year or season. True annuals survive more than one season only if they're kept from establishing seed. Several seedless plants are also regarded as annuals despite the fact that they cannot develop a flower.

Throughout the gardening world, the world "annual" usually describes a plant grown outdoors during that area's usual growing season, and living only for one season.

Numerous food plants are, or are grown as, annuals, such as practically all domesticated grains.

Many gardeners grow a few perennials and biennials only as annuals for simplicity of use, especially if those plants aren't cold hardy to the local weather. For example, tomatoes are a perennial crop in warm climates, but are grown as annual plants where the temperature drops below freezing.

Bell peppers and sweet potatoes are also tender perennials generally grown as annuals.

Carrot, celery and parsley are biennials, typically grown as annual crops because of their delicious roots, petioles and leaves, respectively.

Decorative annual perennials generally grown as annuals are coleus, impatiens, petunia, snapdragon and wax begonia.

A single seed-to-seed life cycle for an annual can take place inside a month in a few species, although many last many months. Numerous desert annuals are therophytes. Their seed-to-seed life cycle is just days. However, they may spend a lot of the year as seeds to make it through dry periods.

True annual plants consist of corn, wheat, rice, lettuce, peas, cauliflower, watermelon, beans, zinnias and marigolds, and many others

Work is in progress to develop perennial grains that don't have to be planted every year. This would save considerably on production costs, and also reduce compaction problems during early spring when fields are very wet.

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