Care of the Flower Garden

Creating your own garden is not a project that will be accomplished in a day or two, unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money to pay for landscape designers and a landscape crew.

These professionals do beautiful work, but in my mind the finished product will only reflect their own ideas, concepts and personality. It will be their dream garden, residing on your property.

Knowing how to manage for your flower garden may make a big difference in the look and over-all health of your plants. Here are a few simple suggestions to make your garden blossom with health:

1. The essentials must always be given major consideration.

Your flower garden must have an enough supply of water, sunlight, and fertile soil. Any lack of these primary requisites will greatly affect the health of plants. Water the flower garden more often during dry spells.

While planting bulbs, make certain they go at the correct depth. When planting out bushes and perennials, be sure that you don’t heap soil or mulch up around the stem. If you do, water will drain off besides sinking in, and the stem could develop rot through overheating.

2. Mix and match perennials with annuals.

Perennial flower bulbs need not to be replanted since they grow and blossom for many years while annuals grow and blossom for only one season. Mixing a few perennials with annuals ensures that you’ll always have blossoms coming on.

3. Deadhead to boost more blossoms.

Deadheading is just clipping the flower head after it wilts. This will make the plant grow more flowers. But be sure that you don’t discard the deadhead on the garden or mildew and other plant disease will attack your plants.

4. Know the good from the bad bugs.

Many garden worms do more good than harm. Butterflies, beetles and bees are known pollinators. They fertilize plants through unintentional transfer of pollen from one plant to another. 80% of flowering plants rely on insects for survival.

Sowbugs and dung beetles together with fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms are necessary to aid in the decomposition of dead plant material, thus enriching the soil and making more foods available to raising plants.

Other insects like lacewings and dragonflies are natural predators of those insects that do the actual harm, like aphis.

An occasional application of liquid fertilizer when plants are flowering will keep them blossoming for longer.

Always clip any dead or damaged branches. Fuchsias are particularly prone to snapping when you brush against them. The broken branch can be potted up to give you a new plant, so it won’t be wasted.