Growing Perennials
Now that the preliminary details have been discussed it is time to move on to the actual growing of your plants in your perennial garden. Successfully raising your perennials will be the most rewarding aspect of the whole perennial endeavor.
Planting Perennials
There are two basic rules to keep in mind when planting perennials. If you follow these, your perennials should thrive.
1. Read the tag on the plant. These tags are not merely decoration. If the tag says the plant needs sun, don’t plant it in the shade! This seems obvious, but we have seen novice gardeners and landscapers alike ignore the tags and kill many perennials! As you gain more experience, you may want to experiment with divisions from your established perennials. However, the important thing to remember is to wait until you have grown perennials long enough to have plants to divide before you experiment.
2. Make sure the soil is loose and crumbly, and plant the new perennial at the same depth they were in the container. Planting it too deep will drown, and suffocate it. Planting a perennial too shallow will dry it out and kill it. The key idea is to plant the perennials at the same soil level at which it was growing before. Put the plant in the hole and firm the soil gently around it and water it until a small puddle forms around the plant.
Care Through the Year
The following list of suggestions of “chores” to do throughout the year is one containing only the essentials. We assume you do not need to be burdened down with a thousand meaningless tasks each season. We are assuming that you are not looking for a source of busywork, but that you want to enjoy your perennial garden year after year.
Spring
In the spring you have to initiate the “spring cleanup.” The “spring cleanup” consists of removing dead foliage from the perennials and all of the mulch put on the previous fall, weeding, and loosening the soil to encourage new growth.
Removing Mulch
The mulch should be removed in two stages. First, once spring has arrived, but there is still danger of a hard frost, remove mulch from around the crown of the plant. Approximately two weeks later, remove the rest of the mulch from the plant.
Removing Dead Foliage
Basically this means to remove any brown, yellow, or withered foliage from the plants. The earlier you do this, the better. You are less likely to disturb the plant if you remove the dead leaves before its new growth begins in force.
Weeding
Weed now and get it over with. The longer you wait, the worse it will be. And when you weed, do not just pull them out of the soil and then throw them in a pile in your garden thinking they will decompose, because they will just reroot themselves in your soft, crumbly soil. Throw them in a bag. Try to weed after a rain-they will come out easier.
Loosen the Soil
Using your pitchfork, lightly cultivate the soil. This means to just loosen up the top few inches of the soil. This has two benefits.
First, loosening the soil will allow air and water to penetrate to the roots of the plant and cultivating will expose weeds.
As for applying new mulch, hopefully you will not have to do that after the first few years. If the soil has been properly prepared and the perennials were planted properly, they should spread to take over the entire area, leaving you no room to mulch. If you do mulch, stay away from nuggets and large bark as it will attract al kinds of slugs and other bugs. Grass clippings, compost, or shredded newspaper covered by a thin layer of topsoil are the best types of mulch.