Gardening for many younger homeowners or renters conjures up images of old ladies with too much free time in silly-looking shorts and floppy hats bent over their flowers for hours obsessing over weeds and bugs and goodness-only-knows what else.
However, gardening does not have be a hobby reserved for the obsessed — it can be a great way to spruce up your home, and it can be done with relatively little effort, if done correctly.
Lee Oltmann is the general manager of the Old Heritage Garden Center in Pekin and he spoke with the Daily Times in early April to provide some tips for the beginner gardener — a sort of “Gardening for Dummies” tip sheet.
Basically, in order to save yourself time in the long run, a beginning gardener should put in the bulk of the time right at the start. If you take nothing else from this article, at least take these three tips:
Prepare your soil
Get some fertilizer mixed into the soil before you plant a thing. The soil is the building block of a garden. Have a good, nutrient-rich base and your plants will get a good start on life and will adjust quickly. With good soil around their roots, a lot of plants will grow strong and require little to no other maintenance.
“When you initially plant, we always recommend the root stimulator. It’s a mild fertilizer with a rooting hormone that gets the plants adjusted quickly and stimulates that root system,” Oltmann said. “Most plants pretty much go on their own — especially if you use the compost on the soil. Prepare the soil ahead of time and it will save you time in the long run.”
Also, get some wood mulch on the ground around those plants once they have been planted.
“Use wood mulch over your landscaping, because that’s going to both keep your weeds down and that’s also going to keep the moisture around your plants — it’s going to do double duty. Any weeds that get started in there will be easily pulled out through the mulch.”
Oltmann said to get the mulch right up to the plants’ stems, and to make sure it is at least 2 to 4 inches deep. It would also be wise to apply a product to the mulch that would prevent weeds from even germinating. Again, put in the effort to halt weeds right away, and it can save plenty of time that would have been spent weeding later on.
Know your area
“Before you pick out any plants, you need to determine how much sun you’re going to have in that garden — because that will determine what kind of plants you need to get: full sun or shade plants,” Oltmann said.
Just knowing this simple fact will help you avoid a lot of mistakes when picking out your plants. Some plants love the sun and some prefer some time in the shade, but unlike people, flowers that get too much of one or the other for their own good cannot just move. Instead, they die.
Have SOME idea of what you like when you go plant shopping
At least have a color that you like in mind.
Oltmann said that with all the endless options available, you should have some kind of starting point to zero in on. Garden shop professionals will have a much easier time helping you out if you have preferences or some kind of plan. Basically, give the pros some place to start when you are picking out plants.
Another thing to realize is that you are probably going to want to go with planters, rather than seeds. Seeds should have been planted already — as early as February — and they require more patience. For the casual or beginner gardener, planters — those little plants that are already in those plastic pot-type things, for the layman — are a better fit.
To provide structure for the garden, use shrubs. Shrubs require little maintenance after being planted besides the annual pruning, and some of them — like Knock Out Roses — can provide great color while providing the boundaries for your garden.
“Shrub roses will give you lots of color all summer long, like Knock Out Roses,” Oltmann said. “If McDonald’s and Taco Bell can do roses — and they do no maintenance whatsoever — then the average homeowner can do it, so people do not need to be afraid of roses.
“The roses I always do (a) one-time cutback in the spring, because that encourages growth and that’s where your plants come from.”
Also, shrubs are woody plants that do not die into the ground every year, like perennials, Oltmann said.
Speaking of perennials, these are going to be the backbone of the garden for a casual gardener. Perennials keep coming back, so if one plants them one year they will come back the next year, and the next year, and the next year — provided you keep them alive. And, according to Oltmann, “There’s tons of perennials that are nice and easy.”
The Firewitch dianthus produces bright-pink flowers that bloom the entire summer. Several types of Coreopsis produce different colors that bloom all summer long, as well. And Veronicas produce blue flowers that attract butterflies and are low maintenance.
Even grasses can be a low-maintenance way to beautify a garden.
“Ornamental grasses are always nice, because they give you a lot of texture in the garden. They’re very low maintenance — they come up, they do their thing. I leave them up during the wintertime. You cut them back around St. Patrick’s Day. You do the same the next year. Very low maintenance.”
The final piece to a complete garden is annuals. These plants die at the end of every year but they bloom for 100 percent of the time during the summer, according to Oltmann, so they are a good way to complement the perennials and add some color, plus new ones can be chosen every year to give you a way to change things up a little bit while maintaining the same basic structure.
You will be happy to know that science and engineering have also made many plants more easy to deal with, such as the historically picky hydrangea. Oltmann said there are now hydrangeas that can be grown just about anywhere — which did not use to be the case.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is to not pick everything that blooms at the same time. Oltmann said all the signs at Old Heritage show the bloom times for the plants to help with this.
“Pick things that bloom at different times of the year so that you have something out there all the time,” Oltmann said. “It’s always nice to go in and pick everything that looks nice right now, but you’ve got to plan. It might look all nice when you first plant it, but four weeks from now what’s it going to look like?”
Then, in the fall after the first frost, Oltmann recommends going out and cutting back the perennials after they have gone dormant.
After this has been done and all the colorful flowers have disappeared for the gloomy winter, you will see the wisdom of having planted a dwarf juniper or dwarf spruce earlier.
“Always try to put something that’s evergreen in there so there is something nice to look at in the winter.”
Vegetables in pots
For those with limited space or who rent an apartment with nothing more than some balcony space, vegetables can be grown in pots, rather than in the ground.
As with flowers, it is all about the soil. Prepare the soil with some compost and make sure to use potting soil, not topsoil. Potting soil drains better and “that’s the key thing in a pot, you want the drainage,” Oltmann said.
Tomatoes do better in a more acidic soil, so Oltmann said he always adds sphagnum peat moss to the soil when he plants tomatoes.
Cherry tomatoes or a specifically bred patio tomato work best in a pot. The Husky Cherry Tomato has a sturdy stem that stays upright in a pot, which is important. Basically, it is all about size when it comes to pot-grown vegetables.
“Some of those really big ones, they don’t really do as well,” Oltmann said. “It’s a medium-sized fruit that you probably have to go for for growing in a pot.”
Oltmann added that peppers are great for growing in a pot, and with peppers you can always plant herbs around the edges of the pot.
Speak Your Mind