Southlake Real Estate - the taylormade team specialize in luxury home sales in Southlake Texas.

Home News Home and Garden Grow a backyard wild flower haven

Grow a backyard wild flower haven

(NC)—A field or garden dotted with purple coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and bee balm is a breathtaking sight, and attractive to a wide range of wildlife, including hummingbirds, butterflies and bees. With a little planning, your backyard can be a haven for wildlife and a pleasure for the whole family. New Sunlight Wild & Fresh Laundry Detergents (www.sunlightlaundry.ca) show you how. Size Up the Site In the wild, native plants grow in a variety of environments, from shady forest floors to sun-scorched prairie meadows. Before planting, assess your backyard for soil and light conditions. Sunny gardens with poor to average soils are good spots for prairie flowers and grasses, many of which are drought-tolerant sun-lovers with long tap roots that seek out water buried deep in the ground. In shady locations, native woodlanders thrive in the dappled shade of deciduous trees where they can root around in rich, crumbly organic soil. Still other native plants prefer a boggy site where water collects in the spring and dries out as the season warms. Prepare to Plant When preparing a new site, start the fall before you plan to plant by laying sheets of black plastic over the soil. This will kill most weeds. Remove the sheets in the spring and plant the garden with potted plants rather than sowing seeds. These young plants will become established more quickly than seedlings and are better able to combat weed seeds that blow into the flower bed from surrounding areas. Select the Right Plants A garden that offers a range of flower colours and shapes, and which blooms at different times of the season, provides a good habitat for wildlife visitors. Butterflies feast on milkweed and clover in their larval stage and switch to nectar-producing perennials such as bee balm and sedum when they mature into butterflies. Hummingbirds are attracted to tubular-shaped flowers in shades of red and pink. Credit: www.newscanada.com

 

< Prev		Next >