Flowers In Your Organic Garden By Stephanie Foster At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Even though you don’t eat most flowers, keeping things organic in your flower beds is a good idea. If you know what you’re doing, you can control many pests without buying harmful poisons.

One of the most important things is to choose flowers that will grow strong in your area. No matter how much you love a particular flower, if it is going to have a lot of trouble staying alive or is prone to disease, it’s going to greatly hamper your organic gardening efforts. You are better off sticking to flowers that are stronger and more suited to your area.

Just as an example, we’ll consider tropical plants. Beautiful colors, amazing shapes… but they require extra help if they aren’t suited to your area. They won’t be happy at all in a cold climate.

The best flowers for an organic garden are ones that are native to the area. They cope best with local weather conditions. They’ll have very little need of chemicals and require less water.

Even if you live in an area where most native plants can be described as “scrub brush” or something similar that you don’t like, you may be surprised at the range of colorful flowers available to you. I live in the San Diego area, and when I look around at undeveloped areas, the plants don’t seem terribly inspiring. There’s a nursery in the area that specializes in native plants, however, and the color range is quite simply amazing.

When buying plants, do your best to only pick healthy specimens. Buying a diseased one is only going to give you trouble as you try to keep it from infecting the rest. Check the plants for harmful insects too, so that you can avoid taking unwelcome pests home. Of course, if you know your insects, you might find a few welcome ones too.

Transplant your purchases as soon as possible. Very often roots get crowded in the containers from the nursery, and with so little soil it is easy for them to dry out. Being transplanted can be a shock to plants, but the soil will give them the resources to get over it. Give them a good watering after transplantation, of course.

Don’t forget a nice addition of compost from your compost heap. Depending on your soil, you may want to add compost as much as eight inches deep into the soil. Most people will simply mix compost in with the soil removed to plant the plants, and that is generally sufficient.

If roots have grown out past the plastic containers from the nursery, go ahead and remove them. You don’t want to damage the plant too much, but these roots are generally safe to remove.

An organic flower garden can look quite lovely. Done right, it is no more challenging than any other kind of flower garden. You might even get a garden that is more accustomed to local conditions and thrives when other gardens die.

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