When 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 call for as much skill as required in your pruning of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in your vegetable plot. You shouldn't be troubled by weeds for quite some time and the plants will flourish in the well drained, gritty conditions that you have supplied for them. But regular maintenance is absolutely not something you can pay no heed to. Leave a shrub border untended for a season and no great harm may result, but leave a rock garden for just a year and it could 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 main task. Keep your garden free from dead plants and debris, and water only when necessary. 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 the year. All fallen leaves must be removed and the stems of rampant plants have to 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 may have arrived too late for you - the rockery may already be over-run by weeds and it is covered with straggly rampant alpines because of past neglect. There is not an 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 the most tedious of all maintenance jobs, and prevention is so much easier than cure. Start at construction time, make certain 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 should help to prevent weeds.
It is unfortunate that however careful you are at the construction stage, weeds will still appear and they must be tackled promptly as dwarf plants such as alpines can easily be swamped by them. There are a variety of sources of these weeds, and you can cut down the task of weeding if you take preventive measures. Firstly, weeds are often brought in with plants that you buy, at all times check carefully and pull out stems and roots of any weeds which are growing on the soil surface of the 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 on to your site - do not forget that this includes the seed from neighboring rock garden plants which easily produce self-sown seedlings. Dead-heading and weed control in surrounding land may reduce this problem.
Hoeing will not be practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds manually is the usual way to tackle the problem, you may want to trowel if the roots are firmly anchored. Of course, not all self-sewn alpines are weeds, you may only want to pull out seedlings that 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.
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 firm called Landscaper 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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