subject: Carrying Out Rock Garden Maintenance. [print this page] Once you have made a rock garden or a raised bed by observing the basic rules, then routine maintenance ought to be a simple job. It will not entail as much skill as required in your pruning of fruit trees nor the heavy work demanded in the vegetable plot. You should not be worried by weeds for quite some time and your plants should flourish in the well drained, gritty conditions that you should have supplied for them. But regular maintenance is not something one can ignore. Leave a shrub border untended for a season and no great harm may result, but leave a rock garden for a year and it could be ruined.
Treat rock garden care as a routine once-a-week job during the growing season, in the same way as you might treat house plant and lawn maintenance. Weed control should be the major task. Keep your garden free from dead plants and debris, and water only when necessary. Dead-head spent flowers where practical, especially if the variety of plant can become a nuisance by self seeding. Label plants which die down for part of the year.
Autumn is the major overhaul time of your gardening year. All fallen leaves need to be removed and your stems of rampant plants must be cut back. You should not leave this job for the spring. Cover winter sensitive plants. In spring renew the grit mulch, feed, remove winter protection, firm plants which have been lifted by frost and search for slug damage.
All this advise may have arrived too late for you - the rockery may already have been over-run by weeds and it is covered with straggly rampant alpines as a result of past neglect. There is not an easy answer. You will probably need to start again. Take away the soil from the affected area, replace it with new planting mixture after which you can replant.
Weeding Your Garden:
Weeding your garden is one of the most tedious of all maintenance jobs, and prevention is a lot easier than cure. Begin at construction time, make certain that the planting location is free from all perennial weeds and that all weed roots have been removed from your topsoil used for creating the planting mixture. As described below, a mulch of grit on rockery and raised bed gardens or bark on peat gardens will help to prevent weeds.
It is unfortunate that however careful you have been at the construction stage, weeds still emerge and they need to be tackled promptly as dwarf plants like alpines can easily be swamped by them. There are a number of sources of these weeds, and you can reduce the job of weeding if you take preventive measures. Firstly, weeds can be brought in with plants that you purchase, at all times check carefully and pull out stems and roots of any weeds which are growing on the soil surface of the pot.
Next, perennials can creep in from surrounding land so try to make some kind of weed-proof barrier if this is likely. Finally, weed seeds are often blown on to your site - keep in mind that this includes the seed from close by rock garden plants which easily produce self-sown seedlings. Dead-heading and weed control in surrounding land should reduce this predicament.
Hoeing will not be practical where a grit mulch is used. Pulling out weeds manually is the usual way to tackle the problem, you might need to trowel if the roots are firmly anchored. Obviously, not all self-sewn alpines are weeds, you might only need to pull out seedlings that are growing where they arent wanted. Perennial weeds are a difficult problem when the roots are too deep and widespread to be removed. The answer here is to paint the leaves very carefully with glyphsate - never spray weed killers and never use lawn-type ones.
