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Maintenance On Your Rock Garden.

By: Rick Skuw

If you have made a rock garden or a raised bed by following the basic rules, then routine maintenance should be a straight forward task. It will not entail as much skill as required in your cutting of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in your vegetable plot. You shouldn't be troubled by weeds for quite some time and your plants should thrive in the well drained, gritty conditions that you should have supplied for them. But regular maintenance is not something you can pay no heed to. Leave a shrub border untended for a season and no great harm should result, but leave a rock garden for just a year and it may well be ruined.

Treat rock garden care as a routine once-a-week job during the growing season, in the same way as you might treat house plant and lawn maintenance. Weed control should be the major task. Keep the area free from dead plants and debris, and water only when needed. Dead-head spent flowers where practical, particularly 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 chief overhaul time of the year. All fallen leaves need to be removed and the stems of rampant plants must 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 come too late for you - the rockery may already be over-run by weeds and it is covered with straggly rampant alpines caused by past neglect. There is not an easy answer. You will be required to start again. Remove the soil from the affected area, replace it with new planting mixture and then replant.

Weeding Your Garden:
Weeding your garden is one of them most tedious of all maintenance jobs, and prevention is a lot easier than cure. Start at construction time, make sure that your planting location is free from all perennial weeds and that all weed roots have been removed from the topsoil used for creating 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 still appear and so they have to be tackled promptly as dwarf plants like alpines can easily be swamped by them. There are a number of sources of these weeds, and you can reduce the work of weeding if you take preventive measures. Firstly, weeds are often brought in with the plants that you purchase, always check carefully and pull out stems and roots of any weeds that happen to be growing on the soil surface of your pot.

Next, perennials can creep in from surrounding land so try to create some form of weed-proof barrier if this is likely. Finally, weed seeds are often blown onto your site - keep in mind that this includes the seed from close by rock garden plants which effortlessly produce self-sown seedlings. Dead-heading and weed control in surrounding land should reduce this predicament.

Hoeing will not be practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds manually is the usual method to tackle the situation, you might need to trowel if the roots are firmly anchored. However, not all self-sewn alpines are weeds, you might only want to pull out seedlings which are growing where they will not be wanted. Perennial weeds are a difficult 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.

Article Source: http://articles.tiptopweb.info

A fantastic period of my time is spent in my garden, but as I am getting older and things have become harder to do. I have decided to use a company called Tree Surgeon. 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.

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Maintenance On Your Rock Garden.