Add Perennials To Your Garden Plan
When planning your garden beds and deciding which garden flowers to plant this year, be sure to leave room and budget for perennial flowers. These make an excellent investment for gardeners who would like to have flower blooms and green vegetation for several years at a time. Perennial plants and flowers don’t have to be replanted each year the way annuals do. Some perennials will last for two to three years on their own, while others will continue growin and blooming for five years or longer.
Some perennial plants and flowers will take longer to become established in your yard and garden. Not all of them grow or bloom in the first year so they do take a bit more patience. Once they’ve become fully established in your garden beds though, it’s a wonderful feeling. All you have to do from that point on is make sure they have enough water and keep the weeds out of their way.
It’s this longer outlook that causes many gardeners to be confused, frustrated or discouraged when they plant perennials though. Some inexperienced gardeners don’t realize they’ve planted perennials, and they don’t understand why the plants and flowers don’t seem to be growing or thriving. This is particularly difficult when you start your perennial plants from seeds. Some perennial seeds take a full year or more to even start sprouting, and new gardeners who aren’t prepared for this assume they did something wrong or they wonder if the seeds they planted weren’t any good.
When all goes well though, often the very next year shows a proliferation of new plants and flowers. In fact, some gardeners have forgotten all about the seeds they planted so they’re not quite sure what’s growing or why.
The best way to plan for growing perennials in your garden is to actually make a plan and keep detailed notes. A garden journal that grows from one year to the next is an excellent way to keep your notes organized.
The first year you decide to grow perennials, it’s best to also grow annuals in the same garden bed. This allows you to have the immediate satisfaction of beautiful burts of color from the shorter lived annual flowers, and having that quick satisfaction makes it easier to wait for results from the longer term perennials. By the time your annuals start dying off, some of your perennials may be sprouting already, so it will feel as if your garden is prolific for the entire season.
When you plant your perennials, be sure to choose their locations well. Once they become established you’ll have to live with the location they’re in for at least several years. So don’t put a creeping perennial ground cover in the dead center of your yard if you aren’t sure you’ll want it there next year.
You’ll also need to pay attention to the growth details of the perennials you choose. If you plant tall perennial flowers in a garden bed, you’ll want to plant them towards the back of that flower bed so they won’t overshadow smaller flowers once they’re fully grown.
Note too that in some climates you may find annual garden flowers acting like perennials. In other words they come back on their own year after year. This generally happens when annuals produce seeds which drop to the ground and germinate naturally. These are always a pleasant surprise for me to discover personally, but if you plant annuals in a flower bed that you plan to eventually have filled with perennials only then you’ll want to make sure you’re not planting any annuals which perpetually self propagate each year.
