Selecting and Growing Perennials

Selecting and Growing Perennials

If you have been raising a vegetable garden for a while, you might be feeling slightly dissatisfied at how featureless it is to look at. I too started out my horticulture career with a vegetable patch, but I decided that it wasn’t quite as delightful to view as I would have wished. I learned from a acquaintance that the use of perennial flowers could be a great way to enliven my garden without adding any additional work for me.

Perennial flowers are tough, local flowers that return each year without having to replant or do any additional work. During their off times of year, the flowers and stems die back and you can hardly even tell the plant is there (instead of just dying and looking like ugly brown clumps in your garden). When it’s time to bloom, entirely new flowers shoot up where the old ones were.

Prior to choosing whether to put in perennials or not, you need to make certain that your ground has suitable drainage. Whenever the water remains saturated for long periods of time, you should construct a raised bed. To test, dig a hole and fill it with water. Hold off a day, and then fill it with water once again. All hints of water should be gone within ten hours. If the hole Is not completely dry, you will need to construct a raised bed.

Picking your perennials can be a complicated process. The goal should be to have them flowering as much as possible during the year, so you should create an outline of the year. Research the different types of flower you want, and create a timeline of flowering. If you plan it right, you can have a different type of flower blooming at any point in the year. Getting just the right mixture of seeds can give your yard a perpetually changing array of colors.

When you go to purchase the seeds from your local florist or nursery, you might be able to discover a tailor-made seed mix for your region. This takes the really tough research part out of the job. Usually these blends are optimized for the local climate, and do great jobs of having flowers always grow in your yard. If one of these isn’t available, you can ask the employees what they think would be a good mixture. They should be happy to help you put something together which will be best for whatever you desire.

You should emphatically use mulch when planting perennials. This will reduce the overall amount of work you have to do, by cutting back the amount of weeds and raising the water retention. Bark or pine needles work great, I have found, and depending on the rest of your yard you might have them on hand at no charge. As for fertilizer, you should use it sparingly once your plants start to come to life.

When you actually go to plant the seeds, you should put them in small, separate clumps according to the directions. This is because they tend to spread out, and if you have too many too close together then they will end up doing nothing but choking each other out. As you plant them, put in a little bit of extremely diluted plant food. In no time at all you should start to see flowers blooming up.