🌧️ April Showers Bring...🌱 A Great Opportunity to Pull Unwanted Vegetation 💪🧤🪴

Happy Spring!  Are you ready to plan your design and prepare your garden beds?  If so, keep reading!

But first, let’s review.  In Jan, we started to pay attention to how we feel in outdoor spaces.  What spaces feel good?  What spaces don’t?  How do you want to feel while being outside in your own home?  

With that in mind, in Feb, we categorized which kind of space feels best to us: Forest?  Grassland/meadow? Shrubland? Edge? Remember, a forest has a tall canopy of trees and is shady and peaceful.  A Shrubland has pockets of trees and pockets of grasslands and flower beds- there’s a lot of variety and contrast.  A meadow is open, sunny, colorful, and moves with the wind.  And an edge is manmade: like a pool, basketball court, patio- it is utilitarian (though also beautiful). 

Finally in March we started thinking about design.  Given the constraints of sun and water on your property, as well as the constraints of time and money, what will you actually create?  Will you create a forest in 1 area, and a grassland in another, with a patio in a third area?  And what do you gravitate towards?  Straight lines?  Plant diversity?  Do you want order? or whimsy? I suggested several places to shop online and several plants to get.  

Now: let’s get our hands dirty!

I’m going to separate this first part of the newsletter into 2 different categories: 

Improving upon an existing bed vs Creating a new bed

Creating a New Bed
There are many ways to create a new bed, but I’m going to stick to a few principles to keep in mind:

1. You need the area to be free of grasses, weeds, and roots
   
2. You need the soil to be workable.
   
3. At this time of year, if you want to create a bed by getting rid of grass, I recommend you simply dig it out.  Ideally, you would use a sod cutter, but those can be expensive and hard to find.  So instead, you can simply put some muscle into it.  After a rain when the ground is soft, grab a shovel and completely remove the grass.  This is hard physical work.  The key is that you have to really remove all the underground roots, or the grass will grow back.  If you have the misfortune of Bermuda grass, you will likely need to apply Round-Up (glyphosate).  The most important part is not to partially this.  You must remove all the grass and roots. Get down on your hands and knees after shoveling.  You want fresh, clean dirt :)   
   
4. If you want to create a bed by removing vines, shrubs, and trees, there are many ways to do this, depending on how large the plants are.  First, try to pull it out from the root after a rain regardless of what you have.  For example, if you have invasive Japanese bush honeysuckle, and it’s a small plant, you can just grab and pull out.  But if it’s too large, get a chainsaw and hack it off at the base.  Then with a paintbrush, apply Round Up (glyphosate) to the stump.  The ideal is to use as little poison as possible when removing unwanted plants, but sometimes, it needs to be done. If you need further specific advice on how to remove unwanted plants on your property, I’d be happy to consult your particular situation.   
   
5. Next, you need the soil to be workable.  This doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of clay soil.  In NWA, we have clay soil occurring naturally, and many plants thrive in it.  What I mean is that the roots need to have a place to go.  So if you’ve got giant rocks underground or a web of impenetrable tree roots, you have to loosen all that up.  Remove massive rocks, and use a tiller to loosen tree roots and compacted soil. Even cut out parts of tree roots (remember from the March newsletter: trees are strong, so you will not kill a mature tree by cutting off a few baby rootlets).  Again, do this after a rain, as it will be easiest.
   
6. If you are planting native plants, you will not need to amend the soil.  If you lost a lot of soil in the process of removing unwanted plants, you may want to add in a tiny bit of ordinary topsoil (the cheapest stuff).  But most people will not need to do this.  
   
7. Apply a thin layer of wood mulch.  THIN.  Not 3 inches.  Just a top layer- no more than 1 inch.  And do not, for the love of God, put in landscape fabric.  More on that later.
   

Edge it out with a rock border or store bought edging.  Voila!  You have a garden bed.  This work is simple…but not easy :)  You will get an intense workout.  You will be sore.  You may even lose weight and get ripped.

Improve an Existing Bed

Most of you will probably start by filling in a bed you already have.  But before you install your new plant babies,  here’s what I recommend:

1. Remove landscape fabric.  That’s right.  Builders and traditional landscapers love to install this stuff.  And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.  I think they believe it keeps weeds out.  Trouble is, landscape fabric clearly doesn’t do that.  Weeds will simply grow on top of the landscape fabric.  And stronger weeds: ie: baby trees, will root through the fabric.  What’s more, landscape fabric restricts growth of the plants you install.  Which you do not want!  You want your desired plants to have strong roots.  So please, take it out!  This is a pain, but a must do if you want a full, healthy garden.
2. Remove weeds.  After you have pulled out all that fabric from under your mulch, you will need to clean the area up.  Take out any and all weeds and unwanted vegetation.  You should be left with a melange of dirt and mulch.
3. If you want (not required), add in a thin layer of mulch.  Again, THIN.  Just surface.  This is for tidiness only, and is not necessary. And voila: your garden bed is ready for plant babies!

The Plants

I hope you have had a chance to look through books and websites, both that I have provided in past newsletters and that you have discovered on your own.  Rest assured, there is always time to do this if you haven’t gotten around to it yet.  

However, your actual planting season is very limited.  While you can technically plant any time between April and October, the best time to plant in NWA is April and May, and maybe October (if you don’t have squirrels).  So let’s get started.

(Note: I will not discuss fruit and vegetable gardening.  While beautiful and useful, that is farming, and is very labor intensive.  It is an activity well worth pursuing.  It’s just out of my area of expertise). 

Last month, we discussed the plant hierarchy: evergreen, deciduous tree, shrub, forb/grass, bulb, annual.  It’s useful for you to remember that evergreens, deciduous trees, and shrubs are woody plants, and forbs, grasses, bulbs, and annuals are herbaceous.  Herbaceous plants die down to the ground every year.  If they are perennial, they come back every year.  But they grow new foliage every year.  Woody plants can be irreparably harmed if cut at the wrong time.  

I mention this because: when it comes to maintenance, you will likely want to group your woody plants together and your herbaceous plants together.  Herbaceous plants are cut every winter/spring. And it will be easier to do so if you don’t have to distinguish too carefully between a woody stem and an herbaceous one. Having said that, I will still recommend a very low ‘green mulch’ around shrubs.  But it is difficult to manage a bed that has 3-4 ft plants with a random mix of herbaceous and woody plants.

Regardless of whether you are re-creating a forest, shrubland, meadow, or edge, you’ll want a combo of structure plants, seasonal interest, and groundcover.

For example, in a forest, the trees are your structure.  You’ll want a mix of shade and drought tolerant plants that will provide color and variety throughout the growing season.  Take a look at these hyperlinked above. I especially love big leaved aster, maidenhair fern, wild strawberry, wild geranium, alumroot, mayapple, and violets (see pic below from Carolyn's Shade Garden.

In a shrubland, you have lots of structure with both trees and shrubs (see pic below taken from White River Nursery).  So you’ll want repeating patterns of seasonal color with grasses and forbs so it looks intentional in its design. For example, you may want virginia bluebells and pussy toes in the spring, butterfly weed and coneflowers for the summer, and liatris and goldenrod for the fall. 

In a meadow, you’ll likely want to start with what is called a matrix plant.  These plants tend to be background plants that will serve as the “mulch” for the bed.  Sedges and sedums are great choices for your matrix.  Then, you can dot in the seasonal interest, keeping in mind that grasses make excellent structure plants, and perennial forbs provide color and variety at different times of year (see pic below, Iowa State University Extension Office). 

How Many Plants?

A lot.  This is where most people go wrong.  They under-plant.  They maintain way too much space between plants.  They mulch.  

Instead of wasting money on mulch, use plants as mulch.  Weeds will only grow if they have space to do so.  They will grow on top of mulch.  But if the bed is dense, they will not have space to colonize.  So as a rule of thumb: for herbaceous plants (regardless of what the tag says), install 1 plant per sf.  (For woody plants, it depends how thick the trunk will get.)  Plant densely…you’ll have a happier, healthier bed that way.

Water

Many people erroneously approach decorative gardening the way they approach interior design.  They buy the plant as if it were a chair.  They might give it some water here and there, but then the plant just fades into the background of their minds…and it eventually either dies or gets unruly or with a stroke of luck, it thrives on neglect.  

But while you may use your outdoor garden like your indoor living room, they are not the same.  Think of your garden like a baby or puppy.  It is alive.  It is vulnerable.  And just like any newborn, it will need a lot of attention the first year.  As the years go on, it will require less attention, but never NO ATTENTION.  Just like you wouldn’t get a puppy and leave it to its own devices, you shouldn’t expect a newly planted baby flower to thrive on its own.  It will need a strong start to do well.  

This is why, if possible, I suggest the following:

1. Hand water daily for 15 minutes a day, thoroughly soaking the bed.  Do this for 1 week (unless it rains…rain is the best).  Then on week 2: water every other day (again, unless it rains), and on week 3, water 2-3 times.
   
2.  Around week 3-4, I recommend you snake in a soaker hose through your bed, and put the hose on a timer to water 1-2 times a week for 15 min straight.  Ideally in the am. 
   
3. That’s it. Okay, it's easier than having a baby or puppy….but still. You need to really devote time and attention to it that first month.
   

Next month, we’ll talk about weeds. And other stuff that’s more fun than weeds.  

As always, let me know how I can help,