Too
often we start out developing our home's landscape by thinking too small.
We cut a little circle in the front yard and put stuff in it. We take
a little patch in the back and plant flowers, or vegetables. We buy a
tree in the fall because it was on sale, and plunk it in a sunny spot,
with no thought of the tree as a design element.
This "divide and conquer" approach always leads to a disastrous landscape, nothing more than a disjointed production of little pockets of garden here, little pockets over there. At no time does the landscape unify as an attractive whole.
You must always begin landscaping your yard – even if all you are after is a perennial bed – by doing a whole yard plan. I've written about this process in numerous articles on this site (Mistakes to Learn By is a good one).
Don't stomp around in, dig up plants from, or rototill garden beds, in April.
What's the big hurry? Working the soil in April does more harm than good.
We've just received over an inch of rain in central Minnesota/Zone 4, with nighttime temperatures hovering around forty degrees. The soil is wet, cold, and still in winter mode, with no warm-up in the forecast.
Sure, perennials are popping up. Just about everything is showing new spring growth, and I have Bleeding Heart up six inches tall. But plants are just shaking off winter, and to divide now shocks the pants off the poor new divisions. Plunge them into chilly soil, and they are shocked again.
Biggest problem is what happens to the soil. Never work wet soil – don't dig, divide, or rototill. Working wet soil destroys the soil structure, it compacts it so harshly that by July, those areas that you worked are hard pack. And it's not just the tools and machinery. Stomping around in your beds this time of year compacts the soil with every step.
Wait until we've had a nice warm period in May, where the soil temperature has risen and the sun has evaporated some moisture. New divisions will adapt to the soil and root more agreeably, and the soil you till will remain friable.
Don't put mulch down around perennials until June 15.
Short and sweet, the rule is, in the north, wait until June 15. This is one of many facets of gardening in the north that is always ignored by national gardening magazines and books. They tell you to put a nice one- to two-inch layer of cocoa bean shells, or dried grass, shredded leaves, peanut husks, whatever, down around your plants "in the spring." Mulch keeps weeds down, keeps roots cool, and curtails evaporation so we don't have to water so often.
But this is the north. We need to wait until June 15 because it takes that long for the sun to get high and hot enough to sterilize our soil. Powdery mildew and a dozen other funguses aren't killed by our cold winters. They remain atop the soil. You want that soil blasted by sun before you mulch for the summer.
I know it's tempting to mulch right now, when perennials are small and it's easy to get the mulch down on the soil surrounding the plants. Sorry. June 15.
Don't water your garden beds with a lawn sprinkler.
Throwing
the old lawn sprinkler on to water our shrubs and flowers is taking the
easy way out, and you all know how I feel about that.
It's important to avoid any unnecessary moisture coming in contact with the foliage of all plants you grow, perennials especially. Wet leaves cause fungus. So how do you control the rain, and the dew, and the daytime humidity? You don't, it's natural, and in wet years you have more fungal disease than dry years. But the one thing you can control is your ability to not make matters worse.
Water your gardens in the early morning, with a watering wand attachment. Water the soil around the base of the plants, not the plants themselves. This applies to everything we grow. As the sun rises higher and temperatures increase during the day, water that does get on the leaves will dry away.
This sprinkler was on at 8:00 p.m., just approaching sunset. Poor guy got home from work late, realized his garden needed watering, opted for the easy way out, and dragged out the sprinkler to do the work, guaranteeing that these plants spend the night wet. Ouch.
Don't cut little circles into your lawn and plant flowers in them.
 |
 |
This practice is a component of what I call the creeping landscape, where the homeowners "landscape" their acreage bit by bit, a little piece at a time, with no overall plan. Problem is, at no time does the landscape come together, flow, or delight as a whole.
Island beds are fine, so long as they are islands just barely offshore. An island bed only works when it is relatively large, or handles the scale of the shoreline nearby. It should also mimic the shape of and atmosphere given off by the shoreline. Like a real island.
When it comes to tiny, circular, uncharted islands that exist beyond consciousness, lost amidst a vast sea of green, it's best to steer clear. Thar she blows.
Don't fertilize perennials, trees, or shrubs after August 15th.
After becoming accustomed to fertilizing around our yards and gardens we sometimes forget that we are growing different kinds of things, and that not all plants on our property benefit from late-summer feeding.
Perennials, for instance. Don't ever fertilize after mid-August, thinking that your plants need a little boost to help them through winter. All that happens is they get jazzed up heading into fall, when cool nights and the sun's lower intensity are trying to steer your perennials toward dormancy. You're whipping the horse when you've already crossed the finish line and should be slowing down. Fertilize your mums and fall-blooming perennials on or just before August 15th, but any perennial that bloomed in June or July or already in August has no need for it.
There used to be a theory that you should fertilize trees and shrubs in the fall, but now more and more experts are realizing what's the point? You were always told you were "fertilizing for next spring." Well, lay the fall fertilizer down around your shrubs or trees and then get a very long fall, or December warm-up with no snow cover, and if the ground hasn't properly chilled the plants can break into new growth that won't have a chance of surviving winter. Wait and fertilize in spring, when you're full of vim and out there cleaning around the beds and laying fresh mulch.
The only fertilizing you need to do is to continue to fertilize annuals in beds and in containers, and your late fall lawn fertilizer application (end of September in Zone 3, mid-October in Zone 4, end of October in Zone 5). Lawn grasses are different. A good fall blend fertilizer has relatively low Nitrogen (N), so you're feeding your lawn a little phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) in the fall when it is stockpiling nutrients into the roots to help survive winter, and then there's some left over in the ground, waiting to be taken up in spring.