To maintain a flower garden and have it continuously healthy is important. Therefore, you should know how to prevent any pests and diseases. Also, it is important to know how to care and maintain your flower garden by practicing various gardening activities. Although diseases alone cannot make your flower garden stay unhealthy, it is important to consider environmental conditions such as drought and humidity that can lead to diseases. Hence, it is best to know any challenges that can affect your flowers and how to solve them. There are many ways to solve problems and to ensure that you have a healthy flower garden. Below are some ways you can keep your flower garden healthy.
Examine flowers carefully as you buy them
Do you plan to start a flower garden? If your garden is already prepared and you want to do a mass planting of perennial flowers or annual flowers, ensure you examine all the flowers carefully before you buy them. In this way, you can easily limit diseases in your garden as you are avoiding it by checking the flowers before purchasing them. Therefore, as you shop for your flowers you must be familiar with what a healthy specimen looks like. Such as the flowers should have no dead spots, insects, rotted stems as they can easily spread to the healthy ones. Always inspect the root quality since most people rarely check. Hence, examining flowers is important to avoid any diseases establishing themselves in your garden as it is hard to eradicate them.
Monitor bugs
When bacteria and viruses enter a plant, it is through an opening and bugs provide this damage. These bugs, also act as transport for viruses, and therefore, cause a faster spread to all the flowers. Hence, it is important to be familiar with the bugs that are harmful to your flowers to keep an eye on them. Caterpillars, aphids, and thrips, are some common bugs that destroy flowers and plants as well. These attacks put the flower plants under stress, and make it less likely to fend off diseases. Therefore, you should monitor them closely to ensure your flowers stay healthy.
Apply the right fertilizer
Not only is it important to apply the right amount of fertilizer, but it should be the correct fertilizer. Therefore, you need to know how to fertilize the flowers as too much fertilizer burns the roots, making it not able to absorb water appropriately. For this reason, the flowers will be more susceptible to stress from cold, drought, and heat. Also, these flowers that lack enough nutrients do not grow to the usual size and cannot fight off diseases. Therefore, you can get an expert to conduct a soil test on your garden to know the accurate nutrient levels on your soil. Plus, to get advice on the fertilizer that you should use. Through this, you can know whether your flowers are having the right nutrients and if they are lacking any.
Water properly
Interestingly, many diseases need water as much as flowers do. Therefore, although watering your flower garden is a good thing, how you go about it is important. The pathogens present in the air and the soil require water to grow, reproduce and move. Therefore, you should water properly, limiting any moisture on the plants’ foliage. Through this, you will prevent giving these diseases an environment they love. Some ways that can help with this is drip irrigation and soaker hoses. Optionally, if you are watering by hands, hold the leaves away as you water the roots. Avoid overhead sprinkling unless it is at a time the leaves will dry quickly. As common leaf problems occur when the leaves are wet. More importantly, avoid overwatering as it promotes root-rotting fungi to the flowers making them look unhealthy.
Clean up in the fall
Have you ever noticed black spots on roses and leaf streak on daylilies? These diseases are easily preventable if you reduce dead leaves during the fall. When you clean your garden in the fall, although you live in a moderate climate. It is a good way to prevent diseases already in your garden and thus keeping your flowers healthy. The diseases on the debris and dead leaves will attack the new leaves as they emerge in spring if you delay the cleanup. Also, if you love to leave out foliage and stems to create winter interest. It is important to remove them before new growth starts in the spring.
Plant disease-resistant flowers
These flowers are among the best as they fight off diseases easily than succumbing to it. It is important to enquire if the flowers you are planting are disease resistant and ask for others that are of similar variety. For instance, if you want to add roses to your flower garden. Buy from companies that offer the flower plants that are resistant to diseases like black spot and powdery mildew. If you can read the codes that are on the plant tags, it will also guide you to know what you are purchasing. Check through catalogs and reference books to see through the list of plants, those that are resistant to certain diseases and use them in your flower garden.
Don’t crowd flowers
Powdery mildew among other diseases is common among flowers and other plants. Plus, for these diseases to thrive, it requires to be around high humidity that happens when the flowers are crowding. Therefore, trim out crowding and old stalks on flower plants and you can prevent most of these diseases. Keep an eye on the flowers as they grow and take care while spacing transplants. The spacing of flower plants will improve airflow around them reducing any high humidity. On the other hand, the flowers that are too close to each other, grow poorly as they compete for light, nutrients, and water. Also, crowding causes leaves to affect others from one affected leaf to a healthy one. Making it spread more quickly resulting in an unhealthy flower garden.
