Articalize Directory | Free Articles | New Articles Daily | Carrying Out Rock Garden Maintenance.

If you have made a rock garden or a raised bed by observing the basic rules, then routine maintenance ought to be a simple job. It should not require as much skill as required in your cutting of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in the vegetable plot. You shouldn't be worried by weeds for quite some time and your plants will flourish in your well drained, gritty conditions that you should have provided for them. But regular maintenance is not something you can ignore. Leave a shrub border untended for a season and no great harm may result, but leave a rock garden for a year and it may well be ruined.

Treat rock garden care as a routine once-a-week job through the growing season, in the same way as you might treat house plant and lawn maintenance. Weed control should be the main task. Keep the area free from dead plants and debris, and water only when necessary. Dead-head spent flowers where practical, especially 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 your gardening year. All fallen leaves must be removed and the stems of rampant plants have to 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 become lifted by frost and look for slug damage.

All this advise may have arrived too late for you - the rockery may already have been over-run by weeds and it is covered with straggly rampant alpines caused by past neglect. There is no easy answer. You will need to start again. Remove the soil from the affected area, replace it with new planting mixture after which you can replant.

Weeding Your Garden:
Weeding your garden is one of them most tedious of all maintenance jobs, and prevention is a whole lot easier than cure. Start at construction time, make certain that your planting site 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 avoid weeds.

It is unfortunate that however careful you have been at the construction stage, weeds still emerge and they have to be tackled promptly as dwarf plants like alpines can easily be swamped by them. There are a variety of sources of these weeds, and you can reduce the job of weeding if you take preventive measures. Firstly, weeds are sometimes brought in with the plants that you buy, 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 type of weed-proof barrier if this is likely. Finally, weed seeds are blown on to your site - do not forget that this includes the seed from nearby rock garden plants which easily produce self-sown seedlings. Dead-heading and weed control in surrounding land can reduce this problem.

Hoeing is not practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds manually is the usual technique to tackle the problem, you may want to trowel if the roots are firmly anchored. Obviously, not all self-sewn alpines are weeds, you may only need to pull out seedlings which are growing where they are not wanted. Perennial weeds are a tough problem when the roots are too deep and widespread to be removed. The solution here is to paint the leaves very carefully with glyphsate - never spray weed killers and never use lawn-type ones.