Garden maintenance includes all the tasks that keep your garden
beautiful and prolific. Contrary to popular opinion a perennial garden isn’t
low maintenance because the plants come back year after year, and gardening
isn’t just about admiring beautiful flowers and eating organic produce. There
is a fair amount of hard work involved in having a garden.
Another misconception is that after the third year your garden will be
established and you won’t ever have to do another thing. Wrong! There are always chores to do in a
garden. Some of the tasks may differ
from year to year, but a well maintained garden is always changing and
something will always need your attention and perhaps your labor to improve the
situation.
Some of the routine garden maintenance tasks include planting of course, raking, weeding
(everybody’s favorite), mulching, staking, deadheading, watering, pruning,
training, plant division, and propagation.
Early Spring and Fall are times to rake, and my husband and I started raking both the yard and the gardens today. It is amazing how many leaves collect around the base of my plants and in corners of the garden over the winter, but it is also very rewarding to rake away a clump of leaves and find tiny green shoots underneath just starting to pop out of the ground.
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| This morning I could see hardly any green at all in the garden, but 3 hours later and two garbage bags full of sticks and leaves and this is what I saw. Isn't nature amazing? |
Weeding is a garden maintenance job that could probably be done every
day. If you really hate weeding (believe
it or not some people do), plant a small garden, hire some neighborhood
children to help you, or change your attitude about it.
The earlier in the season you can get out to do some serious weeding the
better your garden will look all season. Now in early spring it is easy to pull
out grass that has seeded close to the crown of your still sleeping
perennials. Later, your perennials will
hide the pesky things and it will be much harder to find the roots.
Weeding is a garden maintenance job that could probably be done every
day. If you really hate weeding (believe
it or not some people do), plant a small garden, hire some neighborhood
children to help you, or change your attitude about it.
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| Most stuff is barely out of the ground, but this dandelion was already growing well! |
I have found if I weed about 15 minutes a day, it never gets out of hand
and the smaller the weed the easier it is to remove. Avoiding the task does not make it go away
and actually can make the job a lot more tedious.
Using a weeding tool makes the job almost painless and actually a little
rewarding, but you can use a hoe also for a faster job on bigger weeds or
bigger areas that need weeding.
Once you have done a good job of early weeding, apply a layer of
mulch. Mulching is important for a
couple of reasons. It reduces the amount of weeding that needs doing, and helps
the earth retain water so you’ll need to water the garden less frequently. It also gradually breaks down and provides
nutrients to the soil.
A good time to mulch is soon after planting, but it can be done
anytime. Sometimes I wait until
midsummer to mulch. This is especially
true in my cottage garden and where I’ve planted seeds. Self seeding plants need a few weeks yet for
seedlings to germinate and a thick layer of mulch would suffocate them. Mulching is a garden maintenance chore that only needs to be done once a
season. A three to four inch layer of
mulch is usually a good measure of how much mulch to lie down.
Some plants like tomatoes and peonies always need support and the best
time to do that is in early spring before the plants get too big and
unwieldy. Put your peony cages up as
soon as you see new plant growth and add tomato supports when you plant your
garden.
Other plants like delphiniums send up slender flower stalks that are
easily damaged by excessive wind. Stake
these plants whenever you notice they need it.
A little preventive staking is always a good idea because nothing is
more disappointing than watching a plant grow and develop a beautiful flower
stalk only to have it destroyed by wind within hours of having it bloom.
Deadheading like weeding can be a daily garden maintenance job later in
the season. I like to go out every
evening with my garden shears and just snip off any wilted flower I see. This promotes new bud growth on many of your
flowers. The later in the season it gets, the more plants you will need to dead
head.
This is especially important to do to keep some of your annuals
constantly blooming, but not all plants need it. In fact some newer varieties are sold with a
tag that says “No dead heading” needed. Sometimes I still do it though because
it keeps plants neater and at a lesser risk of disease, but if you’re hoping to start some new plants from seeds, then you can skip the deadheading. Instead, let the seeds ripen
and dry out. Leave them on the plants
until you can gather the seeds or let them seed themselves in your garden.
Some other plants like poppies have beautiful seed heads and you may
want to leave them to dry on the plants just because of that. In fact, there are many plants that have
interesting seedpods which can be saved and used later in dry flower
arrangements.
The plants that I dead head the most are all my annuals, coreopsis, red pincushion, rose campion, rudebeckia, cosmos, and false sunflowers. These all produce more flowers if I
consistently deadhead them.
Unless you have automatic sprinklers, there will always be some sort of
watering to do in your garden. This is
especially true if you have container plantings. Anything in a pot or hanging basket is going
to dry out faster than things planted in the ground.
In hot dry periods these may need watering a couple a times a day. There are a few things you can do to lessen
this situation, though. First of all
look for plants that can withstand a little dryness. If you’re in love with tropical jungle plants,
then I hope you realize they will need lots of water to thrive.
Look for water retaining granules to add to your potting medium,
too. There are mixes that are especially
designed for container plantings and it’s probably worth the investment to buy
a bag.
Using mostly native plants in your garden is a good way to reduce your
watering tasks and soaker hoses on timers are awesome, but you still have to do
some watering occasionally if you don’t want to lose precious plants to a hot,
dry summer.
Some people have the opposite problem- they water too much and this can
kill container pots rapidly, also.
Containers should always have drainage holes and if you get a lot of
frequent rain, try to protect your plants by putting them on a covered porch or
under an eave of the house so that they don’t drown.
Pruning is a garden maintenance job that needs doing once or twice a
season. The reason you can’t do it all
at one time is because spring blooming bushes and trees usually develop buds on
year old stems and branches. If you
prune them before they flower in the spring you will have no flowers that
season. Others that bloom later in the
year or don’t flower at all can be pruned in early spring. Regular pruning helps a bush to maintain
shape and healthy vigor.
The most economical way to increase the size of your garden or the
quantity of plants in it is to grow your own. This is a garden maintenance task
that may take a little more know how than other gardening tasks but is very
rewarding if you’re willing to experiment and have patience to try again if
your first experiment fails.
Plants can be propagated by many methods, some from seeds, some from
divisions, and some from cuttings. As
this differs with the plant you best recourse is to research each plant individually. Many biennials will reproduce from seeds and if you want them to be
blooming every season, you have to make sure that you have seedlings in the
garden every season. You can help this
process along by deliberately planting seeds yourself in the vicinity of the
mother plant if that’s where you want the plant to stay or elsewhere if you
want it in multiple places.
Perennials can also be started from seed, but it is a slow process and requires
patience, and perhaps a greenhouse (just joking, but you get the point.) If you don’t have a good place to raise your
seeds, you’re better off buying established perennials in pots that can be
immediately set out into the garden.
Plant division is done on an as needed basis, but it is another task
that is easier to do in the early spring.
Perennials that have died out in the middle need dividing. It’s easy to see this now when everything is
cut down. It is also easier to remove
a chunk of a perennial when it hasn’t started a lot of new seasonal growth.
After you divide a perennial, and until it reestablishes itself, you
will need to water it more frequently.
That’s another reason to do this kind of maintenance in the Spring as we
tend to get more rain and the temperatures are milder.
Although perennials can be divided almost anytime during a growing
season, I would avoid the hottest weather, and maybe wait until flowering is
over.
If you are interested in increasing the number of perennials you have plants
can be propagated by many methods, some from seeds, some from divisions, and
some from cuttings. As this differs with
the plant you best recourse is to research each plant individually.
So as you can see garden maintenance is never ending and we’re just
talking about the growing season. There’s
a lot of clean up at the end of a season, too, but that’s a discussion for
another day! In the meantime thank you
for gardening with Julie, and now go out and tackle those weeds. Happy
Gardening!
