Rock Garden Maintenance.

If you have made a rock garden or a raised bed by following the fundamental rules, then routine maintenance ought to be a clear-cut task. It will not need as much skill as required in the trimming of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in the vegetable plot. You shouldn't be troubled by weeds for quite some time and the plants should flourish in your well drained, gritty conditions that you should have provided for them. But regular maintenance is not something one can ignore. Leave a shrub border untended for just a season and no great harm should 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 during the growing season, in the same way as you might treat house plant and lawn maintenance. Weed control will 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 main overhaul time of your gardening year. All fallen leaves have to be removed and your 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 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 as a result of past neglect. There is no easy answer. You might have 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 the most tedious of all maintenance jobs, and prevention is a whole 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 making 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 they have to be tackled promptly as dwarf plants like alpines can easily be swamped by them. You have a variety of sources of these weeds, and it is possible to reduce the job of weeding if you take preventive 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 which are growing on the soil surface of the 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 can be blown on to your site - keep in mind that this includes the seed from nearby rock garden plants which effortlessly produce self-sown seedlings. Dead-heading and weed control in surrounding land should reduce this problem.

Hoeing is not practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds manually is the usual method to tackle the situation, you may need 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 happen to be growing where they will not be 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.