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Caring for Flowers and Bulbs
In This Section
In this section, you’ll find discussions, explanations, and directions for caring for flowering plants and flower bulbs you’ll grow in your home garden or landscape, including:
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- How to correctly water flowers by hand and with automatic or timed watering systems.
- Choosing fertilizers, amounts to apply, and how to apply dry and liquid fertilizers to flowering plants.
- How to control growth and promote repeat blooming.
- Preventing and controlling weeds.
- Why and how to apply organic and inorganic mulch to flower beds.
- Recognizing, identifying, preventing, and controlling common flower pests and diseases.
- Thinning, lifting, dividing, and storing bulbs, rhizomes, corms, and tubers.
- Propagating and reproducing flowering plants and flower bulbs.
- Other flower and bulb care.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions of the following subjects beneath the titles shown:
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- Flower and Bulb Care
- Flower Care Basics and Skills
- Annual Flower-Plant Care
- Perennial Flower-Plant Care
- Bulb Care
Flower and Bulb Care
Flowering annuals, perennials, and bulbs are very forgiving and require only simple care with skills that are easy to learn.
Garden tasks that meet your plants’ needs include watering, fertilizing, mulching, controlling growth, weed prevention, and protecting them from pests and diseases.
You’ll soon discover that caring for bulbs is easier by far than for most other flowering plants, and far easier than caring for landscape shrubs or trees.
Over time, as your interest in your garden hobby grows, you’ll also want to learn how to restore beauty to older plants and propagate entirely new plants by thinning, lifting, and dividing them at their roots.
You may even want to collect flower seeds for replanting next year. These methods will help you renew your landscape, and they’ll give you free plants that you may use to add to your yard’s beauty and your home’s appeal, or to share with friends.
Flower Care Basics and Skills
Caring for flowering plants varies by their growth habit and special requirements.
Choose to learn more about their care needs. You’ll find full information about each of the three major types of flowering plants: annuals, perennials, or bulbs.
Here’s a quick prescription for having success when growing each type of flower:
Annual Flower-Plant Care
Annuals are among the most forgiving of nature’s creations, requiring only simple care.
Care of annuals includes watering when their soil becomes dry, cultivating to keep their soil loose and workable, occasional applications of fertilizer, and regularly inspecting them for any disease or pest problems that might occur.
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Care Annuals Need
Though annuals live only a year, they are hardy and seldom require pampering.
Giving proper care to your annual garden will reward you with beautiful flowers. So simple are many annuals’ needs, however, that the time spent working with your flowers provides equal measures of enjoyment.
You’ll quickly find that annual flowering plants are forgiving. Whether you occasionally under-water the plants, fall behind on weed prevention by cultivating, or fail to fertilize, annuals usually take lapses in stride.
When you properly care for your annuals, they’ll quickly respond and excel.
Far and away the most important aspects of care take place right at the beginning. Choose a proper location. Plant only at the appropriate time. These two important acts give you a step up to a better-than-even chance of success.
You’ll find annuals also are good neighbors to other plants, shrubs, and trees. Most are shallow rooted, and nearly every nook or cranny of your yard will provide them a loving home to grow and flower.
Take the time to learn about every aspect of annuals care, including staking, watering, fertilizing, and deadheading. Take a moment to learn pest and disease symptoms so that you can control problems, or find out how to prevent them in the first place.
Annuals are always eager to please; they repay your efforts manyfold with months of color. The hours that you share caring for them will appreciated by everyone who sees the beauty found in your containers, beds, and borders.
Perennial Flower-Plant Care
Perennials are long-lived, semi-permanent landscape plants that repay proper care by growing and flowering year after year.
Once planted and established, most perennial plants thrive with little more than basic care. Daily to weekly maintenance for flowering perennials includes regular watering, clipping spent blooms, weeding, and occasional fertilizing.
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Care Perennials Need
Proper irrigation of perennials means regular waterings whenever their surrounding soil becomes dry.
Avoid overwatering. Use a hand trowel to check the soil’s moistness beneath the surface. When you find the deep soil is still wet, delay watering until it dries.
As flowers bloom and then fade, remove them by deadheading the spent blossoms. Deadheading prevents the flowers from producing seed and signals to the plant that it needs to produce more flowers.
At the end of the bloom period, allow a few blossoms to remain. They will set seed, then the plant will end its bloom cycle and slow its growth.
At regular intervals, about four to six weeks apart, apply organic, synthetic, or foliar fertilizer to your perennial plants to help them stay strong and vigorous. Both liquid and solid fertilizers are available in each category.
Always work solid fertilizers into the soil around each plant, where the roots can absorb their nutrients.
Longer cycles of seasonal care take place several times a season. This seasonal care includes amending soils as needed by fertilizing, adding soil texture and drainage amendments, and applying mulch.
Annual garden maintenance and care also includes performing a garden tune-up at the start and end of the blooming period and before autumn frosts kill perennial plant foliage or force them into dormancy.
Plan at these times to lift and divide crowded plants to prevent overcrowding.
Propagate new plants at the end of the season by taking outings, layering, and root division.
Remove and replace mulch to provide insulating winter protection for the roots of tender perennial plants.
At any time, extra care may be needed if you discover an infestation of garden pests or an infection of disease in your perennial garden.
Early each spring, give your perennial garden a complete tune-up, preparing it for seasonal growth and bloom. The tune-up—pruning, weeding, amending, fertilizing, cultivating, watering, and mulching—makes your garden healthy and beautiful for another season.
If you garden in a mild-winter but not arid- or hot-summer climate—U.S.D.A. plant hardiness zones 8–11—repeat this tune-up process in late July so your perennials continue to bloom into autumn.
In hot-summer climates, plants naturally protect themselves by slowing their growth and heat prevents them from forming flowers.
Bulb Care
Established bulbs are strong, resistant to drought, and rarely require added nutrition. They also are susceptible to fewer pests than many other plants.
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Care Bulbs Need
The care bulbs, corms, tubers, rhizomes and tuberous-rooted plants need is limited to regular watering, occasional fertilizing, and inspection to prevent disease or pest damage.
Learn how much water to apply, where to apply it, and how often to irrigate [see: Watering Bulbs].
You’ll also learn when and how to apply fertilizer at the correct rate [see: Fertilizing Bulbs], how to control your flowering plants’ growth and keep them blooming [see: Controlling Growth and Flowering], and what to look for and what to do for flower pests and diseases [see: Flower and Bulb Pests and Diseases].
Besides these skills, you’ll also see how good garden practices and care techniques help your flowers stay healthy [see: Weed Control].
End of Season Care
Those who grow flowering bulbs will find some bulb species have special needs as warm weather ends and the cool of autumn begins. Review the specific care instructions for lifting, dividing, curing, and storing each of your favorite bulbs [see: Dividing Bulbs and Roots and Curing and Storing Bulbs].
Renewing them and protecting them from winter cold ensures you’ll enjoy their blooms each and every season.
You’ll find information about storage: the right temperatures, humidity, and storage cycles for many types of bulbs [see: Curing and Storing Bulbs]. Note the methods shown to cure bulbs prior to storage, help them to adjust to dormancy, and prepare them for planting the following season.
Bulb Propagation: Making New Plants
For bulb enthusiasts, see the processes of dividing rhizomes and tuberous roots when they begin to compete with one another. Learn how to propagate bulbs—grow new plants from your offsets, cuttings, bulblets, and bulbils [see: Propagating Flowers and Bulbs].
These are the very same propagation techniques that growers use to multiply plants, so try your hand at growing a new hybrid bulb from seed—one way to have a truly personal and unique bulb garden all your own.
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