Gardens and landscapes need yearly maintenance to keep them
healthy, but so often these spaces go years without attendance and become hot
messes. This can happen for many reasons. Illness can keep someone from tending
to the garden. A home that is in the process of being sold and re-bought often
sees it’s landscaping suffer. Some folks just give up for a season for whatever
reason and find themselves overwhelmed with what the following year brings. For
whatever reason, gardens can become overgrown, and they need to be put back in
their place. So how do you go about that?
Reclaiming gardens is best done in the early spring, before
much of the new growth begins to happen. This is the best time to move plants
(often needed to revamp overgrown gardens!) and prune overgrowth and dead wood on
most trees and shrubs.
The first thing you need to do is assess what plants exist
that you don’t want to remove. Identify all trees, shrubs, and perennials that
you intend to keep. Mark them with stakes or tie a bright ribbon on them-
whatever you need to do to see what you have that’s staying.
Next, if you have overgrown clumps of perennials, it’s time
to divide them. Either save divisions for transplanting elsewhere, or give them
away. You can temporarily store divisions of perennials in plastic nursery
pots, or if you’re rehoming the divisions right away, storing them in plastic
grocery bags works fine. How to divide perennials.
The next thing you’ll want to do is rejuvenate your shrubs
and trees with some pruning. First, concentrate on basic pruning needs. Remove
all dead branches and wood down to the live growth. Next, to determine what
pruning your particular plants needs have going forward, the internet is a
great resource. There are two basic types of rejuvenation pruning techniques-
hard pruning and gradual pruning. Shrubs that respond well to hard pruning
include dogwoods, hydrangeas, lilacs, and spirea. Plants that do better with
gradual pruning techniques include viburnums and euonymous. This is a helpful article on how to properly execute rejuvenation pruning.
Finally, it’s time to remove the weeds. There are lots of
ways to remove weeds. The most effective but the most controversial weed
eradication method involves herbicides. Glyphosate is a highly effective and
fast working herbicide that kills all types of plant growth - both broadleaves
and grasses.
Here is a
basic tutorial on how to use roundup in the garden without killing the plants
you intend to keep. Roundup, or glyphosate, is highly volatile, meaning it
breaks down into safe compounds in the garden very fast. Once you kill your
weeds with it, the garden is safe to plant in again in about 10 to 20 days.
Other ways to remove weeds involve the manual removal of weeds
by hand and with hand tools. This is a lot of hard work, which can be good for
you- but it’s not the most effective on the first round. Often with manual
removal, some root or runner material is left of the weed, and these tough
plants often come back days after removing.
You can also remove weedy growth by smothering it under
layers of wet cardboard, newspaper, paper bags, or even landscape plastic.
There’s no one right way to win the war on weeds.
