Our Best Annual Flower Combinations for 2026 Battling the Rabbits

In this video, we're going to cover how we create our flower beds here in the garden. Steph is going to go over some of the design ideas for this year that she had in the layout of what we did here, which was mostly started from seed here at the house. And we're also going to talk about dealing with rabbits here in the Raleigh garden. The neighborhood is kind of overrun with rabbits right now. I think when you visit the open garden, I think somebody else said that they visited the garden last year. I said, they couldn't believe how many rabbits there are in Raleigh. But if I walk Griffin around the block in the morning, you just have every yard has a rabbit or two in it. And it's kind of hard to deal with. So we'll talk about that as well. We do, we have basically this front border along the front path here and along the path coming in, which is under reconstruction right this minute. We have a dedicated spaces for some annuals, and then we have two spots basically back around the back patio that are dedicated for annuals. Everywhere else we use annuals, which are just, you know, seasonal plants. Most of it we do from seed. A few things we do by the rest of the places we have in the garden that have annuals in them are basically filling a space until something else fills that space. We like to keep the roots shaded on lots of our plants. We don't like to have big open gaps around plants for the most part in the garden. This is about as one, that's about as much mulch as you'll ever see right over here, behind this area right there. That's unusual for us. Most areas in the garden, we would kind of fill a few things in there while these shrubs are growing. Helps to shade the roots on those plants, keep them in better shape while they're growing. But this is a dedicated spot, and when I say dedicated annual spot, that could be your vegetable garden, or that could be a space where you're growing flowering things, or some mixture of the two, which this is actually some mixture of the two because there's actually some eggplant growing in the mix out here. What we do is, since you only have about six months with your annual flowers, maybe a little more in some places, a little less in other places, we've got to get as much out of them as we possibly can. So if I throw something in the clay soil, you know, over here, you know, some shrub, well that plant I plan on having there for 20 years or something, it's no big deal if it's going to take a minute for it to overcome the fact that it's not in its ideal conditions. That's not going to be the case with my zinnias, and my gomphrena, and celosia, and other flowering things, and patients, and terrenia, and all kinds of things that we'll list on the screen that we've put into the garden this year before the video's over. All of those things, I need them to hit the ground running, I need them to fill out as quick as possible, and I need to get as much out of them as I possibly can. So we go all in on prepping these bed spaces and our vegetable garden back there, and it is a combination of soil cube compost, whatever compost you have in your area will be fine. We get the soil cube compost because it comes in a big giant bag, it's linked down below the video if you're interested in soil cube compost, and it comes, if you use our link down there, it comes with a discount, that's why I'm pointing it out. And we use some pine bark to help with some drainage as well, some pine bark soil conditioner. You can probably buy some sort of bagged product that has a chunky pine bark combo with some sort of compost in it, and that's what we use. So if you're carving out an area and you're saying, hey this is going to be my entry space to my sidewalk, and I want this to be colorful, I'm going to change it out every year, maybe I'm going to do pansies in the winter if you're in the south, you go all in on that particular little spot. And every time you flip them out, or every other time you flip them out, add some additional compost to it and get all you can out of them. We don't fertilize all that much out here, we fertilized the entire garden back in February, but I like to say on these annuals that I'm fertilizing them by observation. We plant, Steph and I planted these together about, has it been two weeks now probably, something like that, a little bit longer than that, and you know for the first week they were tiny, you know, for the first week they just kind of sat there, the second week they started to grow, now they're really growing. And I'm going to go through and tip prune them now. So this little gonfrina plant has three or four flowers on it, but I don't, I'm not trying to get flowers on a plant that size really. So I'm going to take, I'm going to take these flowers right off the top of this, this celosia, I'm going to do the exact same thing. I'm just going to come under, tip prune it right there. I'll leave that cutting in place in the bed, it's going to, it's just, I'll just leave that in place. And any of this material that's started to grow or is thinking about flowering already, I'm just going to give it just a tiny bit of a haircut, and that will cause branching down in the plant that will fill them out. What we want is to make them bigger, better, fuller, so that later in the season, if I wasn't talking, I'd have this whole bed done already. This just takes no time at all, even this eggplant. I'm going to come right up in the top of it and take that off. But anyway, that's, that's how we do that. Just go through that first time, that first round or two, and take the flowers right off the top, and that's going to make them bigger, better, fuller. They got roots under them now, and so they'll fill that in pretty quickly. We're going to jump over to Steph, and she's going to talk about, a little bit about the combos we use this season. Each year there's sort of a different concept that we use with our annual plantings, and this year it was a combination of practical considerations and aesthetics. The practical considerations, first off, so we tend to accentuate these annual beds with large salvias, like the skyscraper series. Absolutely love them, but this year decided to put less pressure on some of the plants that are next to the annual plantings, because those large annuals, they tended to cause a little bit of dieback in things like the abelia right there. We would get some, a little bit of dieback, and certainly we don't want to do that to the conifers that we planted. So I sort of pulled, reined back the large salvias, which I miss. I'm thinking that I need to add some somewhere else, because they are such great pollinator plants. So that's the first consideration. That impacted the choices, not only of not having salvia, but picking some shorter plants for the annual beds, so they don't encroach on the bottoms of the shrubbery. So we have dwarf things, like buddy gomphrena, and a dwarf ageratum, a little bunny tail grass, which you'll note, as an aside, I will mention that Jim did not cut the grasses back, because that would have been, it sounds like that's obvious, but just to make sure people know, we're not doing things like cutting back grasses or this drumstick plant, because that would just not look very good. Anyway, there's a shorter basil, and things like that. There's a short celosia, and I will say that short celosia doesn't appear to be as short as I wish it was. And it also appears to be, it was supposed to be a blend of pastel colors of celosia, and I only see one color. So I'm a little disappointed in that part. It was kind of like the stalwart of the whole thing was going to be the pastels of the different celosias. And that's what it is this year. We've had hot colors one year. We had all cool colors this one year. The hot being the reds, and the orange, and the yellow. We had sort of patchworks of that. That's when we had really large beds, but it's decreased. And then we also had just all cool colors. Some of the pinks, and the blues, and the purples. This is a combo this year, and it was supposed to be a pastel combo. So hopefully it'll work out. We've got pastels of the perfusion zinnias, which we love being shorter, and disease resistant. Apricots, and salmons. Some whites. Some great colors, but all pastels hopefully. Accentuated with a couple of hot, not hot, but bright purples and such. Just to sort of be a combo of both hot, and cold, and pastel colors. So hopefully it'll work out. Hopefully you can come see it at the open garden as well. Other than that, we have done little snippets of different annual beds throughout the landscape. I've got sort of more hot colors of the perfusions in one section, and then cool taller colors in the back. It's sort of changing into a shadier landscape back there. So trying to use more perennials that like the shade, and more annuals that like the shade in the back. Here's the section of annuals that carries over from this side on, you know, to the other side of the sidewalk. I like to, when I'm doing design, this is one thing I've always done, is to try to carry something from one side of a sidewalk to another. Act like sidewalks, and driveways, and things aren't there, kind of a little bit. And so, you know, it's not one thing's over there, and one thing's over there. Something, at least carry something to one side, or the other, to just make it seem like, make it seem like there was a plan. This, two things out here before, I'll talk, we're about to talk about bunnies, but I'm noticing all of the annual seed coming up from last year, and previous years. When we rework these beds, we're pulling weed seeds to the top. This is a lot of conversation on the channel around how to prevent weeds in a garden. Well, you know, anytime you turn soil over, you're going to get weeds. These are interesting weeds, in that they were, they are desirable plants, if we wanted to leave them. But unfortunately, they're not going to fit with any kind of color, or theme, or any, you know, anything like that. But when we flip soil over, that's what happens. And when we allow soil to get completely bare, that's what happens. When we allow, we don't allow squirrels, but squirrels do a lot of it as well, and they dig little holes in the mulch, and that allows light, and water, and everything to allow seed to germinate. But that's all old annuals germinating. We need to get those out while these things are still small, and they don't out-compete the ones that we planted for this year. Okay, our biggest issue in this garden overall, we do have a deer again, but our actual biggest issue is rabbits. When we plant small, we plant a lot of small plants, as you've seen in this video, in the b-roll here in this video, there's just a ton of annuals in the garden. Some things they won't eat. They just, the rabbits have never bothered the vinca. They don't typically bother the impatiens. Deer ate back the Beacon impatiens one time last year. That one was kind of surprising, but the rabbits tend to leave them alone. The terinia, they tend to leave alone in the back garden, but we have had them eaten before. So again, sometimes, sometimes the main thing we need to get out of this is to get them big enough, and then we can take these little fences down. So we have these, this inexpensive little fencing. I'll link this down below the video. All we do is put this around with these little bamboo posts, and we keep these posts year over year. These are the same ones we used last year. Just ram them into the ground and attach this inexpensive netting, and then we use sod staples to staple this down to the ground to keep them from going under the netting. All we need to do is get these annuals to go from when we planted them this big to something like this, and as soon as they're this big, we're cutting them back today, and then we'll wait another week or two, and then we'll take this netting down, and then once they're this big, they can overcome being eaten a little bit at that point. So if we hit a rabbit in here and it's eaten a little bit here and there, it's okay. They can kind of out grow it, but when they're this big, you know, if the rabbit comes and takes the top out of them frequently, they can just be flat out killed, and this has helped a little bit with the squirrel menace as well. Normally, when we first plant the annuals in the ground, they dig them up, and I'm sure you guys have had this experience where you walk out the next day and go, I'm pretty sure I planted that. Why is it just laying there? You know, the squirrels will kind of do that. This is, I guess they're annoyed enough with it or it just, you know, it's just not fun for them to get caught up in this or whatever, but it has prevented that little digging from the squirrels as well, so it's overall helpful. We just need to get some size on them, so this is how we combat rabbits out here. We also, in the areas where we can't net off, we do have some deer and rabbit repellent that we use around those annuals in the back. We just got to get a little bit of growth on them. Once we get a little bit of growth on them, they can at least absorb some of that, you know, herbivory from, you know, absolutely destroying the, destroying the plant. So, there you go. There's our 2026 annual plan. Some of the ones that are in the ground, how we're maintaining them right now, which was just a little bit of a cutback, and we'll observe for fertilizer later. We'll probably, we'll refertilize them at some point, but it'll be on observation, and how we're dealing with our actual biggest menace here in the garden, which is a rabbit attack, a constant, near constant rabbit attack. We have hawks, owls, you can hear owls in the background of our videos. We have all kinds of things. I don't know why they're not taking care of our biggest problem. They're after the chipmunks and the squirrels and not after the rabbits for some reason. The rabbits get, you know, I guess they're just too big for these owls to help us out with, but there you go. Thank you guys so much for following along with the channel. We've been updating all of the new plantings in the garden, and we're, Native Garden will be up next in that string of videos. We're kind of excited about the progress that we've made over there, so make sure you're subscribed to the channel to follow along with it. Thanks for watching.