Flowerbed Maintenance: How Does Your Garden Grow?

Flowerbed Maintenance: How Does Your Garden Grow? 

Summer is around the corner, and it’s time to think about how to stay on top of your landscape flowerbed care throughout the growing season. 

Do you feel overwhelmed by the thought of landscape maintenance while you’re traveling or managing a busy family and work? 

You don’t need to worry. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the following: 

• Gardening best practices: Simple ideas for flowerbed maintenance 
• Keep flowerbed maintenance from slipping through the cracks 
• Let the pros care for your flowerbeds this season. 

Gardening Best Practices: Simple Ideas for Flowerbed Maintenance 

You want to keep your landscape tidy and have a place to invite family and friends. Depending on your lifestyle, you may wish to have a low-maintenance landscape with a few trees and shrubs throughout your property. 

You would only need to keep up with trimming your trees and shrubs so they look well-kept. For a low-maintenance landscape, add 2-3” of mulch to your beds every year to control soil temperature, hold in moisture, and help with weed control. 

Mulch also provides extra nutrients as it breaks down into the soil, feeds earthworms, prevents soil compaction, and recycles yard waste. 

Conversely, you may want annuals, bulbs, perennials, and other plant material in flowerbeds designed throughout your property. While you can have low-maintenance flowerbeds, you’ll still need to weed and deadhead flowers to tidy those areas. 

You can keep your flowerbeds maintained by incorporating these simple ideas into your gardening routine: 

• Cleaning out your flowerbeds 
• Mulching flowerbeds and other landscaped areas 
• Weeding, both hand-pulling as well as adding pre-emergent herbicide and other weed controls 
• Trimming shrubs and trees. 

As stated above, mulch is a vital component for flowerbed maintenance. However, too much of a good thing can have negative effects, so you want to limit the amount of mulch in each bed and rake it periodically to keep it looking fresh. 

Here are some pro mulching tips to add to your gardening best practices: 

• Keep mulching twice a year: once in the spring and once in the fall. 
• Keep mulch in your flowerbeds to ensure the soil won’t dry out. 
• Keep soil away from tree trunks to avoid bark rot, insect issues, and disease. 
• Spread the mulch a few inches from the tree’s base in a 3-4” layer. Outside edges may have a little more mulch. 
• Don’t overapply mulch because it will cause shallow plant roots that could lead to plant death due to drying out. 

Read more: How to Use Gardening for Self-Care