- Keep your tools sharp, clean and oiled. This prevents you from damaging or bruising the plants and keeps your wrists and arms from excessive wear and tear.
- Edging your gardens at an angle exposes the grass’ roots to the sun and dries them so the grass is discouraged from growing back into the garden.
- When planting bulbs, plant daffodils with the other bulbs to keep rodents away; daffodils are toxic.
- If you plant bulbs with other tall perennials you can leave the green on your bulbs as long as you need because they will be hidden by the tall perennials, ie daffodils planted with day lilies.
- Tulip heads can be cut back about 5″ when finished flowering and then left about 4 weeks until you can gently tug at the yellow leaves and they come away easily from the bulb underground.
- Ongoing deadheading of your perennials will encourage more flowering.
- Build a small three sided wooden frame around your vines to avoid cutting them off with the whipper snipper.
- If planting a perennial that you’d like to flower later than it usually would, ie you want them flowering for a wedding in July and they normally flower in June, cut them back halfway down the stem which will delay the flowering.
- If you are pruning a diseased plant, spray your pruning tools after each cut with a spray bottle of water and 2 tsp of ammonia.
- Bees are attracted to blue, yellow and white and do not seem to like reds. Hummingbirds’ main source of protein are the aphids and other small insects on plants. Healthy plants will withstand a small amount of insects and you can avoid using pesticides.
- Butterflies are attracted to Monarda (Bee Balm). Rudbeckia (Black Eyed Susan), Zinnias, Dill, and Cosmos.
- If your clematis has new growth coming up from the bottom and the dead looking stems at the top don’t have green in them, you can cut them down to the ground.
- If your clematis has new shoots coming out in each stem going up, you should only cut the dead stems out.
- A final thought: Splitting your perennials is beneficial to them. They will eventually die off due to over crowding, but if you share your perennials each year they will thrive for years.