Garden Maintenance: Essential Homeowner’s Guide

Whatever the style of your home or size of your yard, a beautiful garden will enhance the appearance.

Lush, green foliage, ornamental shrubs and trees and colorful flowers will instantly boost your home’s curb appeal and property value.

With regular care and garden maintenance, you can create a picturesque setting for your Northern New Jersey home.

Garden Design

What better way to enjoy the beauty of nature than with a beautiful garden landscape?

Plants will soften hard edges of architectural materials on your house, as well as hardscape surfaces in your landscape like driveways, walkways, patios and retaining walls.

Soft, green foliage will add texture and visual interest, while shrubs and trees will emphasize depth and height.

Blooming plants and flowers will add lovely fragrant scents that welcome guests and attract beautiful birds and butterflies to your yard.

By selecting a variety of plants that bloom at different times throughout the year, you can have vibrant color in your landscape year-round.

Designing a garden for your landscape can be challenging. A professional landscape company that specializes in garden design and garden maintenance can help you choose the best location and the right plants, so your garden will thrive.

Whether you plant a front yard garden or a backyard garden, it’s important to consider:

• Local weather and climate conditions
• Existing soil conditions
• Existing landscape conditions
• Amount of sun and shade during the day
• Garden size and location
• Garden maintenance requirements

With a front yard garden, you can make a welcoming statement and pathway to your front door.

You can design interesting borders for your driveway and walkway with small shrubs, colorful annuals or perennials or exotic ground covers.

With a backyard garden, you can create a comfortable outdoor environment for entertaining family and guests.

You can design a border around your patio or deck with colorful bloomers, a quiet corner for meditation with native plants or winding pathways that lead to a wonderful scented rose garden.

Depending on the size and existing conditions of your garden location, here are some ideas to consider:

• Specialty Gardens – Creating a beautiful home garden doesn’t have to cost you a fortune, but it may look like it did with good design and planning help from a landscape professional. Consider a hardy cutting garden full of roses, gladiolas and sunflowers, an edible garden with fresh herbs for cooking or a butterfly garden that will attract colorful butterflies to your yard.
• Terraced Gardens – If your landscape lacks visual interest, consider a terraced garden to increase depth and scale. Stacked stone walls around different levels of lush, green foliage will add wonderful texture and natural appeal to your landscape. Whether your yard is large or small, creating terraced levels will make it feel more spacious.
• Hillside Gardens – If your Bergen County home is built on a steep slope, a hillside garden can help to reduce soil erosion and drainage problems. By selecting ornamental grasses like blue festuca and pennisetum, or ground covers like creeping phlox or sedum, you can create a mat of brilliant color that will protect the hillside and require minimal garden maintenance.
• Water Gardens – An outdoor pond, natural flowing stream or beautiful rock waterfall will create a relaxing backyard atmosphere for year-round outdoor enjoyment. The soothing water sounds will turn your landscape into a tropical oasis in a comfortable, tranquil setting. Talk to a landscape professional about a relaxing water garden for your home.
• Native Gardens – Native gardens adapt easily to local landscape conditions and offer easy garden maintenance. With native plants, you can provide a natural source of seeds, pollen and nectar for Northern NJ birds, butterflies, insects and wildlife. Native plants don’t need fertilizer, require little water and help to reduce air pollution.

Choosing the Right Plants

To ensure the best plant growth and easiest garden maintenance for your garden, it’s essential to choose the right plants.

The experienced garden designers at Borst Landscape & Design are knowledgeable about the growth requirements of all types of annuals, perennials and blooming plants.

They can help you design your garden with plants that will thrive all year in your Northern NJ landscape.

• Spring Gardens – Azaleas and rhododendrons will add a bold dose of vibrant color to your early spring garden. For brilliant shades of pink, purple, yellow, orange and red, include hostas, alliums, primroses, daisies and roses. For an early Spring garden, add tulips and daffodils for a big burst of beautiful color and hyacinths for a wonderful fragrance.
• Summer Gardens – Summer perennials will thrive through summer heat and bloom non-stop into fall. For great color, choose golden sunflowers, yellow daisies, blue asters, purple coneflowers and red, orange and pink dahlias. All of these varieties are hardy bloomers that do well in a summer garden.
• Fall Gardens – A fall garden is perfect for late-season color in your landscape. Asters, goldenrod, purple Russian sage, pink colchicums and toad lily with gorgeous orchid-like blooms will do well in a fall garden. They will bloom throughout the fall and often into early winter if temperatures don’t get too cold.
• Winter Gardens – Although Bergen County and Passaic County winters can be harsh, you can still create a winter garden. Flowering quince is a great winter plant that easily tolerates climate extremes and little garden maintenance. This deciduous thorny shrub can grow up to eight feet wide with vivid red blooms in the dead of winter.

Garden Planting Tips

Before planting your garden, it’s a good idea to make a planting chart to decide where plants should be placed and which ones should be planted first.

For a successful garden, you should consider which plants need sun, which plants require shade, the existing soil type, water requirements and garden maintenance requirements.

Proper planting is essential to establish strong, stable root systems for healthy flower and foliage growth.

Plants and Shrubs

• Large plants and shrubs – These should be planted in areas of the yard where they have room to grow. Their roots will grow deeper and spread out across a broad area. For best results, select plants and shrubs that are recommended for your soil type. If the soil is poor or compacted, you will need to add organic matter like compost, peat moss or cured manure.
• Shrubs with root balls (root balls wrapped in burlap) – You should dig a hole that’s the same depth and twice as wide as the root ball, then gently place the root ball in the hole and remove the burlap. When positioned, mound soil around the root ball to secure it, fill the hole with water, then let it drain.
• Shrubs with bare-roots (no soil around the roots) – Shrubs with bare roots should be planted as soon as possible to retain plant vitality. To jump-start growth, trim away any damaged roots and soak the root system in a bucket of cool water for one to eight hours before planting.

Raised Garden Beds

Raised garden beds can be made of stacked stone, concrete, brick or wood. They are typically built three to six feet wide, six feet long and six to ten inches high.

Raised garden beds offer several advantages:

• A longer growing season because the soil stays warmer above ground level
• Requires less garden maintenance
• Reduces weed growth
• Faster drainage
• Less soil compaction provides richer soil

In-Ground Garden Beds

When planting your garden in the ground, choose an area in your landscape with the right sunlight or shade conditions, fertile soil and good drainage.

Dig a garden area that’s approximately 12 inches deep, then loosen the soil and remove any roots and large rocks. Add two to four inches of organic compost and work it into the loose soil.

If you use a liner, make sure it’s well vented for drainage, then add gravel on top to secure it. In-ground garden beds offer these advantages:

• Requires no building materials or extra costs
• Compost can be added directly to existing soil
• Requires less water since ground soil dries out slower
• The garden can be replanted or moved easily to a different location

Professional Garden Design and Maintenance Services

At Borst Landscape & Design, we have experienced garden designers who can create beautiful annual and perennial gardens for your Northern NJ home.

With horticulture training and knowledge, our garden designers will work with you to create a front yard or backyard garden filled with lush, green foliage and colorful blooms that add year-round beauty to your landscape.

Garden Design Services

• Annual and Perennial Garden Design
• Garden Renovations
• Bulb Plantings
• Potted Arrangements
• Container and Window-Box Planting
• Outdoor Fall Plantings and Displays
• Holiday Decorating and Lighting

Garden Maintenance Services

• Spring Garden Cleanup
• Fall Garden Cleanup and Cut-back
• Prune and Deadhead Annuals and Perennials
• Weed and Cultivate Beds
• Fertilize Annuals and Perennials
• Custom Pruning
• Disease and Insect Control

A garden can give your home a fresh, new look with stunning appeal. It will instantly add vibrant color, interesting texture and lush, green foliage that will enhance the beauty of your home and landscape.

Talk to a Borst garden design specialist about the exciting possibilities of designing a beautiful garden for your Northern NJ home.