Make Your Garden Grow

Photographs: Gerard Pampalone

This is the time of year when gardening enthusiasts begin to get a little stir crazy.  We’re sick and tired of winter and anxious to get outside and into the garden. To address this pent up frustration, here are a few learned lessons in dealing with design and maintenance in the spring and summer garden. Hopefully, these ten easy steps will save time, money and frustration — and make the transition to spring and summer a little less traumatic.

  1. When planning a garden, keep it simple. Don’t be obsessive about planting every inch of ground. Given time, the plants will fill in and take the garden in a direction on its own.
  2. Look at your garden from the inside out. You should consider the views from inside when planting a tree, planning a border or structuring a garden. At what angle are you looking?  How is the perspective – does it need to be exaggerated or manipulated? Is the garden view framed nicely? Remember your garden is an extension of your home — it should work in sync and style with the house and ancillary buildings.

  1. Buy plants for their foliage, not for their flowers, since most flowers last only 2-3 weeks but foliage lasts all season long.

  1. Fertilize your garden in early spring. Late March/early April. An easy to remember rule of thumb: Plantone for perennials and plants that lose their leaves: most perennials, peonies, and smoke bush. Hollytone for acid loving plants, and woody plants that retain their leaves: magnolia, evergreens, boxwood and juniper. Two applications a year in early spring and late fall.  For an added boost, once the magnolia flower and tulips open, usually the first week in May, add triple or super phosphate to the perennial borders.
  1. Mark the bare spots in the bulb border. In April, when the tulips and daffodils open you’re bound to have a few clunkers. When you see gaps in the border where bulbs did not come up, cover those bare spots with landscaper’s stones. Then in the fall, you’ll know exactly where to plant replacement bulbs.

  1. Rose resilience. Shrub roses from David Austin, rugosas and floribundas come through our winters much better than hybrid teas, which while gorgeous are expensive and heart-breaking when they don’t survive the wrath of winter.
  1. Spring trimming of Roses. It is safe to trim back roses, once the forsythia flowers, usually the first or second week in April.

  1. Feed the wisteria in late April or early May, once the buds appear swollen. Use super or triple phosphate to reduce leggy foliage and increase the production of flowers.

  1. Summer feeding for Allium. A nursery owner in Ireland had a display of the most impressive alliums I had ever seen. I asked her how she got them looking so good. She told me to feed the alliums in June, after they have faded, with tomato fertilizer. They come back the following year with even sturdier stems and fuller globes.

  1. Feed the lilac after blooming. For the most part, ignore the lilacs. They prefer a once yearly feeding just after blooming. Use a mild fertilizer like 5-10-5 or a basic garden food like 10-10-10. Trim and feed them after they have flowered in June. Do not trim lilacs after July 4 or you’ll be taking away essential new growth.

 

 

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