article: Maintaining a Bog Garden

Maintaining a Bog Garden

Bog gardens are relatively easy to care for once they are established. The established bog garden is a variety of plants that are fully taking over where they are planted with little room left to worry about where weeds are growing. Some bog plants can be very invasive, taking over the entire area if you are not careful and pulling out excess plants. Plants that you know are going to take over the area if left go, should be kept in containers so they can’t spread out too fast without your planting and spreading that plant.

The bog garden is going to require some amount of weeding as the plants in your garden begin to grow and take hold in the soil where you have placed them. The plants in the bog garden may be quite small during the first year, needing a little help in fighting off the bigger plants that will take over the area if you are not careful. Weeding the garden so that the plants you want to grow will take root is required during the first two years of a starter bog garden. After the first few years, the plants will over grow and kill off the weeds that try to take hold.

Each year, adding a bit of fertilizer to the bog garden is required to keep the plants thriving and full of the right types of minerals and nutrients that they need to grow. Plants will deplete any soil of the nutrients after growing in the same soil year after year. Liquid fertilizers are often best in the bog garden, but you can use various types depending if the bog garden is attached to a fishpond or not.

When shopping for bog plants in any retail setting or at any greenhouse center, the bog plants should already be found submerged in the water. If the plants are in containers but not submerged in the water, they might be deprived or they might be labeled as bog plants, but not true bog plants.

Something that you ‘do’ in your other gardens is mulching, and mulching makes sense in the bog garden as well. Mulching stops weeds from germinating in the water, in the moist soil and around your other bog plants. Mulching is going to keep the soil moist even when your area is going through the worst drought in years. Mulch is going to add even more nutrients to the soil as it breaks down and decomposed into the soil over the years. Mulch, smaller pieces will look the best and will provide you with great looks of semi order in the bog garden also.