GardenMaid| Flower Gardening

Flower Gardening

Flower gardening is perhaps the first choice of the home gardener. Flowers can brighten everyone's day, they smell nice, are a great hobby, and fun to grow. Flower gardening is simple, inexpensive, and loads of fun. Flower gardening can be done for yard decoration, simply as a hobby, or even professionally.

There are a few simple decisions that have to be made before you start to flower garden. You must decide if you want annuals that live for one season and must be replanted every year, or perennials that survive the winter and return again the next summer. When buying and planting, pay attention to what kind of flowers thrive in your climate as well as the sun requirements. If buying perennials make sure they are "hardy" in your area.

When flower gardening, you must decide what type of look you want before planting. For instance, mixing different heights, colors, and varieties of flowers together in a "wild-plant style" will give your garden a meadow look and can be very charming. If short flowers are planted in the front of your garden and work up to the tallest flowers in the back you will have a "stepping stone style".

You can order seeds for flower gardening from catalogues or buy them from a nursery. Most people will go to the nursery and buy actual flowers and then transplant them. After you have prepared your garden area and purchased the flowers, it is a good idea to lay the flowers out in the bed to make sure you like the arrangement and that they will be spaced properly before you actually plant them.

One of the easiest planting processes in flower gardening is just sprinkling the seeds into a well prepared flower bed. For planting transplants dig a hole a little bigger than the flower, pull the container off, and set the root ball into the hole, cover it with the loose soil and press down firmly, then water.

Maintaining a flower garden is even easier than planting one. Although they might make it on their own, a proper dose of fertilizer applied in the early spring is a good idea. You can also use a "slow release" fertilizer that will feed them for most of the growing season. Pinch back any blooms after they start to fade and keep them good and watered. To save yourself work during the next season of flower gardening, rid your garden of all debris and spread out organic nutrients like peat moss or compost. Don't forget to turn over the soil to properly mix in the fertilizer and rake smooth when finished. If you have perennials planted be careful not to disturb their roots in this process.

Flower gardening is as easy as 1, 2, 3:
simply decide what to plant; plant it, and water, water, water!