Last spring I started most of my garden vegetables and flower annuals from seed. We purchased a grow table from Gardeners Supply , which overall worked really well to start the seeds. I knew going into it that some of the seed experiments would be successes and some failures. I used seeds from at least 3 different companies and I also found that seeds from certain companies were more successful than others - here's one of the successes. When we moved into our house in 2010, some beautiful purple flowers began blooming in August - they had a unique structure to them in that the blooms were nestled under the leaves. We really liked them, and my husband called them "Underflowers". I researched and found that they were Balsam. Here's a previous blog post on those pretty purple ones. Balsam is a species of Impatiens, and they are a delightful, easy to grow annual. At first I didn't realize they were an annual, because the next couple of years they appeared as well...