Garden number three has been prepped! We don’t often feature this garden frequently, aside from our occasional Flower Friday posts. These raised beds focus entirely on zone 2 and zone 3 perennials!
One of the things that we’ve learned to do over the years is fully dedicate a given garden (or at least individual beds) to annual or perennial production. This allows us to “let nature happen” in a given bed. So, if a plant wants to replicate, it’s not interfering with any annual plants we may have planned. We do sometimes stuff a few extra annuals into these beds to help fill things out, but the primary focus is cold hardy perennials.
We do a number of things with this bed. It features our Fiddlehead fern production facility, creating baby ferns that we can transplant elsewhere on our property. It also produces baby Delphinium (and soon also Larkspur) that we can also transplant elsewhere. A few natural Fireweed usually end up making it, too. It’s also a proving ground where we can find out if something will or will not survive for us.
Our basic preparations here are to simply clear out the last season’s detritus and transplant out anything that we don’t want growing in here that season. We usually wait until a week or so to last frost to do this prep, just so we can make sure we can see “most” of our perennials. Some perennials do show up later, like Lilies, so we have to be a bit careful about that.
Perennial flowers are sometimes not a “forever” thing, especially in our cold climate. Inevitably, there are some change to these beds from season to season. We have several experimental perennials going in here this year, so we’ll get to see how they prove themselves.
Some people do say that raised beds are not ideal for perennials in our extreme cold climate. However, since this bed sits right next to our deck, it usually gets a good pile of winter snow on it. This provides the beds with greater than average insulative value. Plus, it typically melts quite quickly in spring, meaning we don’t have excess water pooling around our plants. We find it works quite well for us!
Fortunately, this garden is fairly easy to take care of, it’s a quick week night project. We’re knocking down those gardens, one by one! This weekend and into next week is going to be a big one, where a ton of things will start coming together!
