Caring For A Flowering Garden

by Josh on July 10, 2009

Red flowers

Taking care of your flower garden can turn a wilting bloom into a gardening blossom. Luckily, it’s not as hard as some people will make it out to be and with a little work, everyone can have the gorgeous glow of a healthy garden.

1. Always remember the basics.

As with any plant, there are a few basic needs which keep it living. They will need a need source, a reasonable supply of water (don’t let the soil become saturated, but make sure it’s nice and damp) and food. In the case of plants, the food is sugars they make themselves, but adding fertilizer just gives them that extra boost. If you’ve noticed your plant is growing quite quickly, be sure to add extra water/fertilizer to keep up with its increasing demand.

2. Keep an eye on your plants

Because of their sweet-smelling nature, you will attract a lot of unwanted visitors (the flying/crawling kind, not the people that pick your flowers!) To combat this, don’t go dousing them in tonnes of pesticide. Your best bet it to get some liquid soap and warm water, fill up a spray bottle with them and add in some fresh citrus juice. The soap makes the leaves/petals harder to stand up on and the citrus provides a strong smell that most pests will find really unpleasant.

Also, if you eat bananas, when you’re done don’t throw the skins away. Bananas are packed full of nitrogen, potassium and ethylene which will act as a magic pill in helping your buds open sooner.

3. Deadhead to keep the flowers coming

As your flower heads grow older, they’ll eventually dry out. Deadheading is removing the dead heads to promote more growth. The same principle applies to plants that produce fruit, if you remove it as soon as you think it’s ok to eat, more will keep coming through but if you leave it on longer, more energy will be devoted to that fruit instead of growing new ones.

4. Not all bugs are bad!

Although I did say to keep an eye out for what’s resting under your leaves, some of the bugs you’ll find in your garden are actually beneficial. Bees are are perfect example of this, leave them in and you’ll enjoy a free pollination service (much easier than going around with a paintbrush). Most plants actually rely on this to keep growing from year to year.

Butterflies, beetles, ladybirds, lacewings and trichogramma wasps are all excellent predators to have around. They’ll go around gobbling up all of the aphids, greenflies and keep your flowers safe. If you don’t naturally have any, feel free to head to a garden centre and get some, but be warned, if your garden doesn’t have enough prey they’ll leave in search of more food. So don’t kill anything, let your new friends do it for you :)

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Jade July 12 2009 at 9:07 pm

That soap+warm water+citrus mix and the banana thing is a pretty neat trick!

On Guam we don’t get a lot of those bugs you mentioned in #4, though. What’s a trichogamma wasp?

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2 Josh July 12 2009 at 9:18 pm

Thanks :)

Trichogramma wasps are a lot smaller than the standard ones you’ll see, but otherwise they look pretty much the same.

http://www.indobioagri.com/img/insects/wasp-bg.jpg

This picture makes them look kinda huge.

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3 home improvement June 9 2010 at 7:03 pm

Thats useful but for beginners, they need to start with understanding the tools. Yeah you are right…tools for gardening. This will make your work easy and effective.

Thats just my suggestion.

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