Getting You're Garden to Stay in Place

Now that you want to start a garden you need to know how to keep it the way you want it. The true question is how to do this and what is available to help you on this quest. After you put in a garden the garden tends to wander outwards, or possibly your grass tends to wander inwards, it usually depends upon the grass type, and the garden type. If you happened to use a layer of weed barrier or carpet between the soil and the mulch then most typically the grass will wander inwards into your garden. Of course there are some steps to help keep all this at bay.

The first step is to use a good quality fabric layer underneath the mulch. Mulch by the way needs to be raked and re-newed at least every other year. It will cost more to put in higher grade fabric but it is well worth the money. Instead of paying $3.50 for a strip of 3 year fabric 3ft by 10ft, pay the extra 5 dollars for the 20 year 3ft by 10ft. It actually does save money and regardless of the fabric you will still have to pull up those occasional weeds.

Also in 3 years are you going to want to rip up the garden to replace it all, or does 20 years sound better? If you follow through the math that it takes to figure out costs per year between the time and fabric and plant costs it is much more cost effective to start with the higher quality longer year fabrics. This is only the first step but since it goes below everything in your garden it is considered the most important.

Now before you go laying all of that fabric down you need to condition the soil below it. It does no good to lay the plastic on top of soil that plants cannot live in. You must make sure that the soil below the fabric is good for plants. One way of getting this done is by simply tilling up the soil and adding in some top quality top soil for plant growth.

This will allow the roots ample nutrients for growth and allow then to spread and get water when needed. If that is not a good option or your soil quality is too low for that then simply digging it all up and filling it back in with quality soil will work. Either way taking the time to make sure there are no weed seeds below the fabric is very important. Even though the fabric will block out the sun the heat will still encourage growth and weeds can still be problematic even for fabric.

Now for that pesky grass that want to wander into your garden. The use of a good barrier will keep it all at its respective locations. By placing a decent barrier around your garden your will not only be placing a nice trim piece on the garden but a physical barrier between the grass roots and the garden. This keeps the grass from wandering in along with all those really nasty weeds. Not to mention the nice appearance of a border to help you garden look even better.

Up keeping you garden is simply the most important step in the process of gardening. If you leave your garden to its own devices is the worst thing you can possibly do. The holes made in the fabric where you had to plant the flowers and plants that you wanted actually create little spots of vulnerability for weeds. These spots need to be up kept unless you want the vining and pesky woody weeds to get through the barrier you have set up. Next comes the mulch, which is only really good for about 1 year.

Two years can be achieved with raking but that is the max time after that it decomposes into soil which once again will usher in a new era of weeds for your garden. If the mulch looks bad then replace it, if the mulch just looks compressed or worn rake it to mix up the mulch for another year.

With proper maintenance of mulch and barriers your garden can keep looking the way you originally intended it to look. A good rule of thumb is that if something looks bad in the garden it usually will hurt your garden. So make sure to keep up on your garden, and with a little time and a couple of bags of mulch per year, your garden can survive for years.