FLOWERS: Late bloomers

Here it is, mid-October, and I'm still getting enough flowers from the cutting garden to fill every vase in the house. True, the snapdragons are finished, and the sunflowers have gone to seed, but the zinnias, dahlias, celosia, blue salvia, cosmos and ageratums are still going strong. It could be that I didn't plant the garden until very late because of the wet spring. Also, many of this year's flowers (the purple ageratum and the pink, maroon and yellow celosia) were welcome volunteers from last year and didn't appear until later in the season.