If you have a horrid wet patch in your garden, and this is often the case if your local soil is a heavy clay, you could always turn it into a bit of a bog garden. The effects can be quite lovely. Due to the abundance of water, the plants always look so lush, green and generally healthy.
If the thought of a full size bog garden seems a bit beyond your capabilities, and you fancy trying your hand at something a little more downsized, how about a bog garden in a pot?
Garden
There is a huge range of pots available theses days, to suit all manner of tastes, styles and budgets so you're sure to find something that you like.
Creating a bog garden in a pot makes it so much more adaptable. You can change the location of them, put them on a balcony, and if you fancy a change, you can just replant the pot with other things.
Follow these easy steps to get started.
- Choose a large container to house your bog garden. It doesn't need drainage holes, but if there is hole already there, get a big matching saucer to go underneath that will help the water sit there.
- Half fill the pot with compost. Regular potting compost will be fine, as it's a good mix that already has lots of fibre incorporated.
- Hopefully you've assembled your plants before you started, so now's the time to get planting. Just like with bedding plants, ease them from their pots and stand them on the compost in the pot to get a feel for how they will look at the end. Do any shuffling round that you need to and make sure that you have some idea of how high the particular plants will grow. Make sure the taller one go at the back. This will provide a nice backdrop for the others. It always looks nice to have a trailing plant or two at the front, depending on the size of the pot.
- Plant the plants fairly close together, this emphasises the green and lush theme. If you have any gaps, sprinkle in so pebbles and this will also help prevent the evaporation of the water.
- Give the whole thing a really good watering, so that the composted is soaked, and if you have a tray beneath your bog garden pot, fill that up with water too.
Your bog garden will do best kept in the sun, but keep the water levels topped up, as they won't appreciate drying out at all. In the winter, the plants will go into dormancy and won't need quite so much water, and often the weather alone takes care of things, but if you just keep them topped up they'll be perfectly happy.
When the spring comes, it's a good idea to turf out the whole lot and re-pot the plants using fresh compost. Any plants that have got too big for the pot can be divided up and planted somewhere else.
So, there you are, not a post graduate course in bog gardening, but hopefully you can see how even total beginners can have a go at something bit different and get great results.
Make a Bog Garden in a Garden Pot - How to Create a Bog Garden in 5 Easy Steps
Salena J Newport does not profess to be an expert on gardening. What Salena is however is a person that likes to try new things. However, before giving them a try she does a lot of research to make sure that she knows how to do them properly.
That's where gardening comes in. Salena has a large garden and in order to create the best results possible, she researches and then put plans into action. The results of some of her information quests can be found at http://www.garden-pots.com
The gardening articles written by Salena are intended to provide simple, straight forward and non-technical, but nonetheless complete hints and tips to help other new starters get the most out of their new hobby. After all, we all need to start somewhere!
Salena does have a website at http://www.garden-pots.com if you'd like to find more information to enable the journey to garden expert to feel a bit smoother.