Add Color To Your Deck

Take Time To Enjoy Your Gardens

Gardening can have a positive effect on your health.

A beautiful landscape motivates you to get outdoors and increase your physical activity.

This can improve your mood, relieve stress and anxiety.

Pruning

For spring flowering shrubs, remove spent blooms to encourage more blooms the following year. Proper pruning improves flowering and fruiting. This type of pruning should be completed by late July. Pruning promotes new growth that is tender. This new growth needs time to harden off so that is is protected from freezing and drying out in the winter. Also, you don’t want to prune off next year’s flower buds by pruning too late in the season.

Pruning is also used to control the size of plants without destroying their natural form. Be sure to remove dead, damaged and diseased branches. This can be done anytime.

Read about more pruning techniques in our blog here.

Shearing

Shearing is a technique that is used to maintain formal shapes as in hedges (typical used in Boxwoods). This should be done when new growth is complete which is early to mid summer. Shearing will promote new growth and it needs time to harden off before winter. Since Boxwoods and Yews never go entirely dormant, pruning is avoided in winter.

When possible, remove weeds by hand before they seed. If allowed to seed, there will be many more next year.

There are an assortment of hand tools that can help to remove the weeds with the roots, depending on the application.

Mid-summer is a good time to fertilize. For shrubs and perennials, use a granular, slow release fertilizer.

For annuals that are in beds or containers, use a water soluble fertilizer throughout the growing season. Annual flowers should be fed on a regular basis.

Follow directions on the product you choose.

Annuals and Perennials

Removing spent blooms encourages re-blooming and tidies up the plant’s appearance.

Some later blooming perennials have attractive seed heads and can be left alone.

Roses

Get To Know Beneficial Insects

• Ladybugs eat aphids, scale, mealybugs and more.
• Praying mantis eat grasshoppers and beetles.
• Garden spiders eat wasps, mosquitoes and beetles.
• Honeybees and bumblebees pollinators and not aggressive.

When possible avoid using systemic insecticides because they do not differentiate between beneficial and harmful insects because this type of insects control makes the plant that’s being treated deadly to all insects.

Adding a water feature will draw the attention of beneficial insects and birds. A simple birdbath with a pump to move the water can work nicely. Read more about the benefits of Pond-less Waterfalls in our blog here.

Add biodiversity to your garden by planting a variety of plants that will attract birds, butterflies and other beneficial creatures.

For Control of Insects

Cicadas

• Provide proper growing conditions so plants stay healthy and vigorous and not stressed.
• Prune to create good airflow.
• Watch moisture levels.
• Keep soil evenly moist by watering from below.
• Remove and dispose of infected leaves.
• Sanitize garden tools.
• Plant diversity.
• Plant resistant varieties.

Read here to find out more about treating plant disease.

If it’s dry, give plants that are in the ground an inch of water a week.

Try to water before the temperature rises.

Even watering helps to minimize stress on plants during the summer months.

Perfect for homeowners who want the natural sight, sound and tranquility of a waterfall without the maintenance of a pond.

A pond-less waterfall is a re-circulating water feature (waterfall and or stream) without the need for a pond.

Space: the pond-less waterfall can range in size. It works well if you are limited with space. It can easily fit into a small corner of your yard, be an extension of your patio, front walkway, etc.

Maintenance: they are the easiest water feature to maintain. They require occasional algea control, depending on sunlight exposure. There is no pond cleanup. A very low-maintenance option!