Talking About Green

Tired of the green upon green upon green of a vegetable garden or the replanting of bulbs every year for the annuals garden? Try a perennial garden.

Perennial flowers are strong, local flowers that grow back yearly without having to be replanted or do any extra work other than a little weeding. During non peak times of the bloom season, the flowers and stems die back and you can hardly even tell the plant is there. Whereas other types of flowers will sometimes just die and then sit there as unsightly brown clumps in your garden. When it’s time to bloom again entirely new flowers shoot up where the old ones were.

If you wish to try your hand at perennial gardening you need to make sure that your soil has proper drainage. To check this you can dig a hole in your garden area and fill it with water and let it sit for a day. Then fill it again and wait 10 hours to check to see if the water has drained. If it hasn’t then the drainage may not be good enough for a perennial bed on the ground and you should use a raised bed for your plantings.

Perennials are local flowers that thrive in your climate and grow back year after year all on their own. You don’t have to replant perennials, but you may need to thin them out every year for those flowers that spread rapidly. When a perennial has passed its growing season it will dry up and break down. Sometimes you won’t even be able to tell it was there, until the next year when it pops back up to begin the cycle again.

You can order perennial seeds online but there is very little help that way. If you are new to perennial gardening I recommend buying your seeds from a local florist or nursery. You might be able to find a custom seed mixture designed for the growing conditions of your area. This takes the really tough research part out of the job. If one of these pre-made mixes isn’t available, you can ask the employees what they think would be a good mixture. They are usually very knowledgeable about what thrives in your climate, that?s their job.

With careful planning and some help from an expert either a book or local gardening expert, you can have beautiful blooms nearly year round in your garden. You can plant your seeds in groups and place different seeds in the group that have different growing cycles. That way there is always at least one plant in bloom in that section of the garden at all times. When one plant dies, another is just starting to bloom and so on.

When planting the seeds, you should space them out in small separate clumps according to the directions. Perennials tend to spread out and if you have too many too close together then they will end up trying to share the water and nutrients in the soil and will choke each other out. As you plant them, throw in a little bit of weak fertilizer to help the seeds get started. With a little bit of care in the beginning you should start to see flowers blooming up that will return year after year.