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Obtaining Annuals and Perennials for your garden

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When you are first establishing a perennial garden you will probably buy all of your plants from a nursery, garden center or an online mail order gardening company. However, one of the great advantages of perennials is their ease of propagation. By the end of the first season you will have quite a few large plants ready for dividing.

I’ve divided my Hostas, Rudbeckia (Daisies), heuchera and astilbes several times. Some perennials, such as peonies, will grow for many years without needing to be divided. Some, such as peonies, will grow for many years without needing to be divided, and may not recover quickly once broken up, but to maintain their vigor most perennials need dividing at least every three years.

Many perennials can also be grown from cuttings, usually of the fast growing spring shoots.

Annuals must be raised from seed. You can do this for yourself or buy ready to plant seedlings from a garden center. I’ve found that by growing several of my annuals from seed I tend to have access to a wider variety of types of annuals and or colours as opposed to the offerings at most garden centers and nurseries which tend to sell the most popular varieties of annuals.

For small quantities, raising your own seed is seldom cheaper than buying seedlings, but if you have large beds to plant out, raising your own plants often represents a considerable saving.

Seed sowing and germination are usually fairly straight forward. In many cases the seeds may be sown directly where the plant is to grow in the garden bed. Some annuals need to be started in late winter or very early spring indoors in order to be large enough to plant out come late spring or early summer.

Most perennials and bulbs are planted in early autumn or early to mid-spring, whereas annuals are often started indoors in February or March and planted as seedlings from mid-May through June; or purchased as seedlings in late April and May and planted out after the last frost.

Enjoy your lovely garden.






Neglect

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I’ve been off work since the beginning of December due to a Crohn’s flare. I thought that since I was home I’d be able to putter in the garden and that it would look just lovely this year. However, I’m still not feeling all that well and I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been in my garden anywhere near as much as I’d like to be.

I purchased a number of annual flowers to plant in the garden at oh, the beginning of May. These plants are to fill some baskets – hanging and otherwise, containers and a few are to fill some empty spaces in my flower bed boarders. I purchased well over 300 plants! Just little ones, you know the ones that come in containers of four? Yep …. 300+ in total.

I managed to plant 9 hanging baskets, and put some marigolds around the border of our boulevard garden bed but that’s it. I still have many containers of plants to be planted.

My garden also needs some tidying. The roses are going wild since they are so much bigger this year due to our mild winter. I have to get out there and put some stakes in the ground and tie those unruly plants so they look tidier and straighter. I also have some red cedar mulch that I want to put down on the beds.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me and I hope to get most of it done this week before it starts to get too hot.

Wish me luck!

2006 garden winter protection

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I haven’t really begun to work on this site. I had planned to write in it daily and I do still plan to do that, but I’ve been busy with securing the domain name that this site will be placed under and I’m still looking for a good theme that I can convert into a wonderful garden layout.

It’s been cool this week so I haven’t been doing much with the garden. After last weeks blast of heat, then rain and now the slightly cool weather the garden has really taken off.

Actually since we had a very mild winter with very little damage to the plants I’d say that the garden is about a month ahead of itself. Many of the roses are already 6 or 7 feet tall. I’m used to having to prune many of the winter damaged branches down to one or two foot stubs but I didn’t have to do that this year.

Ironically, this past winter we winter protected better than we ever had before. We gathered leaves from our neighbors as we usually do but this year we must have gathered twice as many as we normally do – perhaps 50 bags of leaves! The garden beds had an approximately 3 foot cover of leaves on them. On top of that we had mounded soil around the base of the roses as usual, and we put up a long burlap fence that surrounds the garden beds on either side. Overkill even in a very cold winter.

When we uncovered everything in the spring the strawberry plants were already green, the rose branches were tall, green and only a few had slight damage. The rest of the plants were doing well too. It was amazing!

Well I must go and see if I can muster up some energy to get into the garden and do some work or else keep working on finding a nice theme for this site.

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