Tag: Gardening in Moultonborough

Dec 26, 2022

Creative Resolutions for Your Garden in 2023

A new year brings new beginnings to our garden too. It’s an opportunity to reflect on what went well and how we can make improvements in 2023. If you’re looking for new directions, here are ten resolutions to reduce your workload, enhance your design, and make your garden more eco-friendly!

Grow More Native Plants

As longtime residents of New Hampshire, native plants often require less maintenance than garden cultivars, and are more resilient to environmental stressors, like drought and pests. They’re also beneficial to native birds and wildlife, and provide gifts of tea, herbs, and food to us too. Plus, they express the unique beauty of our natural landscapes!

Increase Your Pollinator Habitat

Anytime you attract a greater diversity of insects to your garden you’ll increase its resilience, boost natural pest control, and help reverse the trend of pollinator decline in our larger ecosystems. Pollinators are especially important to enhance the yields of your fruit, berries, nuts, and vegetables. Growing more native species, having blooms in each season, and providing overwintering habitats are a few of the many ways to attract beneficial insects.

Have Blossoms in Every Season

Spring is not the only time for flowers. In fact, the most beautiful gardens have blooming plants throughout the whole growing season. The nectar is also essential to feed bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and more from spring to fall. So, flip through your memories of last season, see where you have gaps between blooms, and research plants to fill in the intervals.

Plant in Empty Spaces

Take a look at the empty places in your landscape and see if you can make them blossom with new flowers, vegetables, shrubs, or trees. Any vacant spot is an opportunity to enjoy more color, scent, vegetables, and nourishment for the birds and bees. More life in your garden feels more inspiring and looks more beautiful too.

Take Advantage of Groundcovers

What is it about professional gardens that seem to be overflowing with life? A common trend is the use of groundcovers. Nestled in between perennials, these low-lying plants provide a carpet of flowers that often blossom for many months. By covering the ground, they also hold in moisture and prevent the growth of weeds. Check out creeping phlox, creeping thyme, lamium, or sedum!

Use Companion Planting

Far from a new trend, companion planting is a gardening technique that humans have been using for thousands of years. It takes advantage of beneficial relationships between plants to boost natural pest control, enhance yields, and cycle nutrients. Planting marigolds near vegetables to ward off pests is one of many examples. Research ideal combinations for your favorite garden plants and take advantage of them this year!

Start a Compost Pile

Composting is another long-standing garden trend that’s not going away anytime soon. It’s arguably an essential part of reusing plant material and replenishing nutrients in your soil. Compost doesn’t have to be stinky either. In fact, a healthy compost pile should have a rich, earthy smell. The key is to have the correct proportions of nitrogen and carbon, and to turn it often.

Better Water Management

Save yourself the effort and reduce your footprint with better water management. Setting up timers, using drip irrigation lines, mulching your gardens, and watering in the morning rather than midday can all help conserve water. On the other hand, planting rain gardens and ensuring proper sloping helps manage excess water on your landscape.

Grow Plants in the Right Places

Every plant has its preferred home, whether in shade or sun, or dry or wet spots. Often, many plants still grow even if their conditions are not ideal, but they’ll be more work to water, more prone to pests, and won’t look their best. You can let your plants reduce your workload by ensuring they are in the right spot. Research any plants that were suffering last year and transplant them this season, if necessary.

Start a Phenology Practice

The key to eco-friendly gardening is to take advantage of the natural features in your landscape and mesh your garden with the larger ecosystem around you. Both of these practices hinge on knowing your land in a deep way—that’s where phenology comes in. It’s the practice of observing the activities of wildlife, insects, plants, and weather throughout the seasons. Just by observing and recording what’s going on around you, you’ll get ideas of how to improve your garden and integrate it into the ecosystem. Plus, phenology is an enjoyable practice on its own!

For more ideas on new gardening directions in 2023, feel free to visit our garden center in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, and follow us on Facebook or Instagram for updates and featured products!

Oct 03, 2022

How to Use Compost in Your Garden for Maximum Benefits

Garden Center

Compost has endless benefits, from retaining nutrients in the soil to protecting plants from disease. You can use compost in your yard in many ways; it is an excellent additive for crops, and your flower beds and trees can also benefit from enriched soil.

The Benefits of Adding Compost to Your Garden Beds in New Hampshire

You may not notice a difference once you add compost to your garden since it looks so similar to topsoil, but your flowers definitely will! Compost is an excellent natural fertilizer for planters and flower beds because it improves your soil’s structure, adding nutrients that your plants have absorbed through the growing season. With these added benefits, your plants can grow stronger and healthier, increasing their chances against pests and disease!

Don’t forget these essential tips when adding compost to your soil or sprinkling it along your already-planted flower beds:

Add approximately 1 inch of compost to the soil in the spring.
Apply approximately 3/4 to 1 inch of compost in the fall.
Add compost to your soil at a 25% ratio before planting.

How to Add Compost to Tree Beds

Compost is a stellar organic amendment for any garden plant, and your tree beds are no exception! Tree planting requires high-quality, high-buffer-capacity, moisture-retentive compost made of rich, dark peat. Mix your organic compost from the garden center with your original soil when you plant your trees. You can easily rake your compost into the soil of your existing tree beds; in general, it is a good idea to apply a layer of compost about 1-2 inches deep at the base of your tree beds once per year.

Use Compost on Your Lawn

Your lawn is comprised of literally thousands of individual plants, and they deserve some delicious compost too! Spread compost on your lawn as a topcoat to cover a specific trouble area or the entire lawn for rich growth next year.

The best time to topdress your lawn with compost is right after aerating, but you can topdress anytime when the ground is not frozen. You can apply compost every spring when the lawn is just beginning to green up and in late autumn when the leaves are starting to fall; this will keep your grass looking beautiful all year! You can spread it across small yards with a compost wheel or peat spreader or use your hands to sprinkle it evenly.

Use Compost in a Veggie Garden

Do you want to reap a harvest of delicious-tasting vegetables next season? The best way to achieve that is by adding compost to your vegetable garden soil. Vegetables intake a lot of nutrients from the soil, so replenishing your soil before the next season is essential. We recommend working a decent portion of compost into the soil rather than adding it bit by bit; you want your plants to have access to that goodness regardless of how deep or wide their root systems grow! A 1:4 ratio of compost to soil, so your new soil is about 25% compost.

Add Compost When You Replace Your Mulch

Decomposing mulch will contribute to the soil nutrients in your garden beds, but if you plan on replacing your mulch this year for a refresh, this is a great time to add more compost to the soil; that way, when you plant your bulbs for next spring or more perennials, your soil is ready to go.

There are so many applications for compost in your yard that it’s definitely worth considering buying in bulk! Talk to our gardening experts at Stephens Landscaping Garden Center in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, about how compost can help enrich your garden beds and overall landscape today. Follow us on Facebook or Instagram for garden center updates to keep up with our latest news!

Sep 19, 2022

Fall Care for Peonies in Moultonborough

Garden Center

Peonies are well-known, magnificent perennials with big blooms and lush leaves. They delight our senses every summer or spring with luxurious heads of ruffled petals. When fall comes around, it’s high time to plant new ones, divide mature plants, and prepare them for next spring with a bit of care—here’s how!

How to Cut Back Peonies

Peonies have a majestic but relatively short bloom time, averaging around two to three weeks. Deadhead the flowers after their blooms are spent to save them the energy of producing seeds, but make sure the green leaves remain until the end of the summer—they will feed your plant for the rest of the season.

Once the leaves go brown in the fall, you can cut the stems back to the ground. Be careful not to cut so close as to damage the crown of the plant, as this is where new growth will arise next spring. Letting the leaves and stems stay on the plant over winter invites fungi, which can damage your peonies.

Note: This is only applicable to herbaceous peonies, not tree peonies, which don’t need to be cut back in the fall, and rarely need pruning except to remove dead and diseased branches in the spring.

When to Plant Peonies

Fall is the ideal time for planting new peony tubers; anytime in late September or October is fair game. The tubers should be in the ground for at least six weeks before the ground freezes. It’s possible to plant in the spring, but they generally don’t do as well in the first year as those planted in the previous fall.

Fall is also the best time for dividing and propagating a mature peony. Ideally, wait until the leaves turn brown and are dormant before digging and dividing.

How to Make Your Peonies Comfortable

The Best Location: Choose a sunny, well-draining location away from the wind. Remember to choose your location wisely as they don’t like to be transplanted. Peonies do best in rich organic soil but tolerate many soil types. Anticipate a growth of two to four feet in height.
The Planting Process: Dig a hole about two feet wide and two feet deep, and mix in some compost or aged manure during planting. You’ll see three to five “eyes” or buds on the crown of the plant—make sure you plant these facing upwards and 2 inches below the soil surface; avoid planting them too deep.
Finishing Touches: Mulch your new plantings with evergreen boughs, straw, pine needles, or bark mulch to protect them over their first winter. Mulch should be removed in the spring after the risk of cold weather passes, as peonies don’t like to be smothered by mulch above their crowns. Peonies more than a year old don’t need to be mulched in the fall.

When to Feed Peonies

Mixing in compost or aged manure when you plant in the fall will boost their growth the following year. Generally, the best time to give them fertilizer is after they finish blooming in mid-summer! Compost or aged manure are the best foods for peonies, which you can top dress around the crown but not directly on top.

Tips for Summer Care

Stake Early: The big flower blossoms we love are usually so heavy that the stems keel over. Staking is necessary, but it’s best not to wait until the flowers fall over. You can create a more stable and discreet support system by setting up your stakes early in the spring. Tomato cages, three-legged peony stakes, or crisscrossing wooden stakes are great options.
Plant Different Varieties for Longer Blooms: Peonies only bloom for a short time, but you can enjoy their blooms in your garden for longer by growing more than one variety, each with different bloom times. Flower colors come in pink, purple, red, yellow, and white. Look for early, mid-, and late-season bloomers.

For more info on peony fall care or to pick out your next new flower, feel free to visit Stephens Landscaping Garden Center in Moultonborough, and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook or Instagram for updates!

Jul 25, 2022

Fragrant Native Plants for Your Landscape

Garden Center

Nothing is better than sitting outside in your yard and catching the sweet aroma of wild bergamot in the breeze. With these native plants, you can breathe in the natural fragrance of our home woodlands. They’re hardy, low-maintenance, and benefit the wildlife of our larger ecosystems. Here is a taste of the beautiful scents and colors you can enjoy right in your garden!

Woodland Phlox

In April and May, Woodland phlox displays a dazzling carpet of small white or pink flowers. The cloud of blooms is a feast of early season nectar for hummingbirds and butterflies, especially the tiger swallowtail. This low-maintenance native plant thrives in semi-shaded areas and provides good groundcover in woodland gardens or between other perennials.

Anise Hyssop

This anise hyssop unfurls towers of lavender blooms from mid to late summer. This fragrant native plant exudes a unique anise scent, which will waft through your garden and attract pollinators from far and wide. Easy to care for and drought-tolerant once established, it’s an ideal, long-blooming perennial for your wildflower garden. Plus, you can eat the leaves as a herb.

Wild Bergamot

This aromatic native perennial blooms with purple-pink flowers in early summer. Though they look like tufts of petals, they’re actually a mass of tubular flowers, which butterflies and hummingbirds love to feed on. You can use the fragrant leaves as an herb, similar to oregano, or brewed for a soothing, minty-oregano tea. They thrive in well-drained soil and full or partial sun.

Buttonbush

Both intriguing and adorable, this native plant features pom-pom-like fragrant flowers that draw pollinators in like a magnet. An excellent choice for damp soils, buttonbush is a moisture magnet that also helps to control erosion in the landscape. The whorls of glossy ovate foliage and red, ball-shaped fruit of this native shrub remain attractive outside of its June through September bloom period.

Common Milkweed

This native wildflower blooms with spherical tufts of mauve flowers from June through August. The fragrant blooms are a magnet for pollinators, and the whole plant is essential to the life cycle of monarch butterflies. During their cross-continental journey from Mexico to Canada, they lay their eggs on the milkweed, which the larvae exclusively feed on as they mature. Besides attracting insects, these easy-to-grow wildflowers bring clumps of color and fragrance to any naturalized garden or perennial border and are an excellent addition to a pollinator garden.

Swamp Azalea

This delightful native shrub is a great choice for multi-season appeal in the landscape. Clusters of funnel-shaped white or pink-tinged flowers emerge in the early summer, releasing a perfume so potent it can be enjoyed from a nearby patio. In the fall, the foliage takes on brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and purple that meld whimsically with the New Hampshire autumn scenery.

Aromatic Aster

Asters shine brightly at the end of the growing season when other flowers are fading; they are aptly named with the Latin word for ‘star.’ They display vibrant violet petals with yellow centers, similar to daisies, from late summer into fall. They are both host plants and an important source of late-season nectar for butterflies and bees. They are low maintenance, easy to grow, and drought tolerant once established. This particular species of aster is well-loved for its especially fragrant flowers.

Come into our Moultonborough garden center to see and smell these fragrant native plants in person. We promise that you’ll love the sweet scents they bring to your garden, and they won’t cost you any extra effort or maintenance. Follow us on Facebook or Instagram for more news and updates!