Carrying Out Rock Garden Maintenance.

If you have made a rock garden or a raised bed by following the fundamental rules, then routine maintenance ought to be a straight forward task. It will not need as much skill as required in the cutting of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in your vegetable plot. You shouldn't be troubled by weeds for some time and the plants will thrive in your well drained, gritty conditions that you have supplied for them. But regular maintenance is not something you can ignore. Leave a shrub border untended for a season and no great harm may result, but leave a rock garden for just a year and it can be ruined. Treat rock garden care as a routine once-a-week job through the growing season, in the same way as you may treat house plant and lawn maintenance. Weed control will be the main task. Keep your garden free from dead plants and debris, and water only when essential. Dead-head spent flowers where practical, especially if the variety of plant can become a nuisance by self seeding. Label plants which die down for part of the year. Autumn is the major overhaul time of your gardening year. All fallen leaves must be removed and the stems of rampant plants require to be cut back. Donot leave this job for the spring. Cover winter sensitive plants. In spring renew the grit mulch, feed, remove winter protection, firm plants which have been lifted by frost and search for slug damage. All this advise might have arrived too late for you - the rockery may already have been over-run by weeds and it is covered with straggly rampant alpines as a result of past neglect. There is no easy answer. You will have to start again. Take away the soil from the affected area, replace it with new planting mixture after which you can replant. Weeding Your Garden: Weeding your garden is one of the most tedious of all maintenance jobs, and prevention is a great deal easier than cure. Begin at construction time, make sure that the planting location is free from all perennial weeds and that all weed roots have been removed from the topsoil used for making the planting mixture. As described below, a mulch of grit on rockery and raised bed gardens or bark on peat gardens will help to prevent weeds. It really is unfortunate that however careful you have been at the construction stage, weeds will still emerge and so they need to be tackled promptly as dwarf plants such as alpines can easily be swamped by them. There are a variety of sources of these weeds, and you are able to cut down the work of weeding if you take preventive measures. Firstly, weeds are often brought in with the plants that you purchase, at all times check carefully and pull out stems and roots of any weeds that happen to be growing on the soil surface of the pot. Next, perennials can creep in from surrounding land so try to create some type of weed-proof barrier if this is likely. Finally, weed seeds are blown onto your site - remember that this includes the seed from close by rock garden plants which easily produce self-sown seedlings. Dead-heading and weed control in surrounding land will reduce this problem. Hoeing just isn't practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds by hand is the usual technique to tackle the problem, you may want to trowel if the roots are firmly anchored. Obviously, not all self-sewn alpines are weeds, you may only want to pull out seedlings that happen to be growing where they aren’t required. Perennial weeds are a challenging problem when the roots are too deep and widespread to get removed. The solution here is to paint the leaves very carefully with glyphsate - never spray weed killers and never use lawn-type ones.

A fantastic amount of my time is spent in my garden, but as I am getting older and things are getting harder to do. I have decided to make use of a firm called Landscape Gardeners. Up to now they have given me all the help and advice that I have asked for. I still do a bit of pottering around my own garden.