If you have made a rock garden or a raised bed by following the fundamental rules, then routine maintenance should be a undemanding job. It will not involve as much skill as required in the pruning of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in your vegetable plot. You should not be troubled by weeds for some time and your plants will thrive in the well drained, gritty conditions that you should have supplied for them. But regular maintenance is absolutely not something one can ignore. Leave a shrub border untended for a season and no great harm should 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 may treat house plant and lawn maintenance. Weed control should be the major task. Keep your garden 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 main overhaul time of your gardening year. All fallen leaves need to be removed and the stems of rampant plants must be cut back. Do not 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 have been over-run by weeds and it is covered with straggly rampant alpines as a result of past neglect. There is no easy answer. You might 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 great deal easier than cure. Start at construction time, ensure that the planting place is free from all perennial weeds and that all weed roots have been removed from your topsoil used for making the planting mixture. As described below, a mulch of grit on rockery and raised bed gardens or bark on peat gardens should help to avoid weeds.
It is unfortunate that however careful you are at the construction stage, weeds will still emerge and so they must be tackled promptly as dwarf plants such as alpines can easily be swamped by them. You have a variety of sources of these weeds, and you can cut down the work of weeding if you take precautionary measures. Firstly, weeds can be 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 the pot.
Next, perennials can creep in from surrounding land so try to make some kind of weed-proof barrier if this is likely. Finally, weed seeds are blown in to your site - remember 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 is not practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds by hand is the usual way to tackle the problem, you may need to trowel if the roots are firmly anchored. Needless to say, not all self-sewn alpines are weeds, you may only need to pull out seedlings that are growing where they are not wanted. Perennial weeds are a difficult 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.
Author Resource:
A fantastic amount 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 Landscape Gardener London . 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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