Summer in Vermont is always a mixed bag; either we have cool, rainy weather or (like this year) it’s unseasonably hot and dry. Despite the weather we’re given, there are several things you should always be doing in your mid-summer garden to help keep your plants healthy and growing strong. We’ll talk about some of the most important maintenance tasks for your summer garden.

Summer Garden Maintenance – Watering

Watering in summer, no matter what the weather, is extremely important. Here are a few tips to watering that will help keep your plants free from sunburn, mildew, and disease:

• Although it may be tempting to set up a sprinkler in your garden, spraying the tops and foliage of the plants could result in them burning. The best way to water your plants is underneath the foliage right at the roots. If you’re looking for an automatic way to do this, soaker hoses are an affordable (and water-friendly) solution.
• Water in the morning if possible. This lets any water that got onto the foliage dry before the sun reaches its peak in the afternoon. Watering in the evening is the second best option but if it’s extremely humid, this could cause root rot or your plants to become diseased.
• Don’t water every day! This is a common misconception that gardens need to be watered on a daily basis. Many perennials are tough and don’t need constant watering. Check the soil in your garden beds and if a couple inches down the soil is dry, water. If it’s not, let it be.
• Containers and raised beds should be monitored more closely than regular garden beds as water drains more regularly. Keep an eye on these parts of your landscape every day and check to see if they need a good water.
• Water thoroughly. It’s better to soak your plants a few times a week than simply sprinkle them every day. A good soaking is important so the root systems get enough water, which means your plants will grow larger and more healthy.

Summer Garden Maintenance – Weeding

Many gardeners dread weeding, while others enjoy the monotony. Regardless of your feelings for this task, it’s extremely important to keep your garden beds weeded — especially in the summer.

Regular weeding helps create more airflow through your plants which helps with preventing disease. Weeds also can take water and nutrients from the soil that would otherwise be going to your plants, so that is another reason to stay on top of weeding in the summer months. Map out your week by sections of your garden so you’re not trying to tackle everything at once. If you spend 10 minutes a day on small portions of your landscape, it won’t feel so daunting and can be extremely manageable. If you really hate weeding, our expert gardening team can do it for you!

Summer Garden Maintenance – Deadheading

If you have annuals in hanging baskets, containers, or in your garden beds, deadheading is an important task to keep up on. Deadheading (removing spent blooms) helps the plant produce more blooms instead of putting its energy going to seed. If you continue to deadhead throughout the summer, most of your annuals should put out blooms all the way through fall.

Summer Garden Maintenance – Enjoy!

Summer gardens, especially here in Vermont, can be the most impressive of the season and it’s important to take time to enjoy the fruits of your labor and reflect on the beauty around you. And with a little regular maintenance in your gardens, your landscape will surely be a thing of beauty and color.

Now that it’s finally May and it’s finally feeling like spring here in Vermont, it’s time to talk about an easy, low maintenance way to create pollinator-friendly gardens that add color to the garden all season long. We’re talking about wildflowers, of course! Many think of native varieties when wildflowers come to mind, and native varieties are important to our local pollinator population, but wildflower plantings can also include non-native, easy-to-pollinate varieties that add huge color and satisfy both the bees and the gardener. We’ll talk about when the best time to plant wildflowers is in the spring here in Vermont, along with some of the reasons why wildflowers may be a great addition to your landscape.

Why Plant Wildflowers?

As mentioned above, wildflowers are an easy, cost-effective, and low-maintenance solution to large garden beds, meadows, replacing part of your lawn, and more. We recommend skipping most of the seed mixtures found in the big box stores and looking for only mixtures that contain 100% seed. Many reputable seed companies formulate their own mixtures for different purposes (to attract butterflies, regional varieties, deer resistant varieties, etc) and these mixtures contain a dozen or so varieties that will offer up color from spring all the way through frost.

We’ve planted swaths of wildflowers in several client’s homes along their driveway, on sloped banks, and other areas to create that big statement of color with little supplemental watering or weeding. If you’re looking for a long-term planting, make sure to plant both annuals for color the first year (sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos) and perennials for color in the second and successive years (purple coneflower, lupine, black eyed susan).

When To Plant Wildflowers

There are two times here in Vermont to plant wildflowers: fall and spring. In the fall, spread the seed after there have been a few hard frosts and the seeds don’t have the chance to germinate until the spring. This method mimics the way wildflowers naturally drop their seeds in nature and results in earlier blooms.

In spring, plant your wildflower seed after there is no more chance of frost in your area. You can find your last frost date at the Old Farmer’s Almanac website. The last frost date for Burlington is May 10, so as long as you check the weather and don’t see any crazy lows in the near future, anytime after that date should be fine to plant your wildflowers.

How To Plant Wildflowers

Another big plus with wildflowers is how easy they are to plant. The most important step to ensuring the wildflowers grow successfully — and don’t get overrun by weeds — is to prepare the soil ahead of time. Clear all existing growth from the area (weeds, grass, etc) and either till or rake the soil. Wildflowers thrive best when planted on completely bare soil. Once your soil is ready, sprinkle the seed on top of the soil and either step on the area or use a seed roller to compress the seed into the ground. Give the planting a good watering and water every other day (if it doesn’t rain) until seedlings are a few inches tall. After that, as long as we’re having regular rainfall the wildflowers don’t need supplemental water. At the end of the season (or in early spring) use your mower to mow the area down and that will help annuals drop seed for next season. It’s really that easy!

We’ve been incorporating wildflowers more and more into our plantings and find that they are a great way to add pollinator-friendly plants to our client’s landscapes. Is this your year to try wildflowers in your garden? If so, please share a photo on our Facebook or tag us on Instagram at @DistefanoLandscaping.

Each year, the Garden Media Group puts out a detailed report of what trends they’re predicting for the garden industry in the upcoming year. The four biggest takeaways we took from the report for 2018 were gardening for wellness, growing plant communities, gardening for privacy, and growing your own protein. We’ll dig into these ideas and talk about how you can apply them in your own landscape this season.

2018 Garden Trends: Gardening For Wellness

As the world gets more and more complicated, many of us are seeing our stress levels rise with it. One of the ways to combat the constant stream of news and information coming to us from our phones, TVs, and social media is to get out and enjoy a moment device-free in nature. The report states, “The new study of neuro-conservation from Dr. Wallace J Nichols, an evolutionary ecologist and research associate at the California Academy of Sciences, says that being in nature and around water shifts our brains towards hope and compassion and away from stress and anger."

We know from first-hand experience that a day digging in the dirt leaves us feeling both physically tired and mentally energized. So this season, make sure you have a space in your landscape that you can sit out and enjoy nature. If you have a particular part of your garden you love, place a bench or adirondack chair near it to be able to enjoy it more. Place a water feature in your yard to enjoy the soothing sound. Get out into nature and plant something in your garden, or even head out into the woods for a hike.

In 2018 — and for many years to come — making an effort to get out in nature isn’t only a “trend,” but a necessity.

2018 Garden Trends: Plant Communities

Our Landscape Designer David is a big advocate for this idea of landscaping with plant communities instead of individual plants. So what is a plant community? Think of plants as species that interact with each other and the garden, instead of plants placed adjacent to each other with mulch in between. The plants should work together, instead of live apart with no communication.

An important aspect of planting a plant community is to incorporate groundcovers as “green mulch” to help prevent weeds from growing and fill in around the roots of the other plants. Other parts of this planting method include layering plants vertically, making sure you’re growing the right plants for your soil type, sunlight, and other growing conditions, and making the garden low maintenance.

Learn more about plant communities in our blog.

2018 Garden Trends: Growing For Privacy

As more and more people are choosing to live in cities and suburban areas, the idea of using living plants as privacy is becoming more popular. We see many clients looking to use shrubs, vines, and other long-lasting plants to help naturally block out a home next door, hide an ugly septic tank, or other unsightly areas in their property.  

2018 Garden Trends: Growing Your Own Protein

Whether you’re a vegetarian or not, more and more people are realizing the importance of plant-based protein in a well-balanced diet, and many gardeners are opting to grow their own in their backyards.

Top 10 Easy-to-Grow Protein-Rich Foods:

• Edamame
• Peas
• Quinoa
• Broccoli
• Corn
• Asparagus
• Spinach
• Kale
• Millet
• Sunflower Seeds

You can get seeds for most of these varieties from the Vermont-owned company High Mowing Seeds, which sells all organic and non-GMO vegetable varieties.

2018 Garden Trends: Takeaways

The common thread through most of the garden trends for 2018 are wellness and growing smart. Gardening not only can help us relax and give us yummy, healthy foods to eat, but more and more gardeners are seeing the importance in growing low maintenance plants that serve multiple purposes in their yard. If you love that climbing Hydrangea vine, you may want to place it in an area that can also provide screening from a neighbor’s patio. If you’re looking to create a new garden bed, use the plant community method to reduce your need for watering, weeding, and pruning.

We’re excited to use some of these practices in your gardens for the 2018 season!