Country garden tips

I have put together these country garden tips because I'm often asked how we created our garden and how we maintain it. Given the limitations of real life – 10 acres and middle-age – people wonder how we do it.

My first country garden tip is this: Unless you love spending every moment working on the garden, hire some part-time help if you can afford it.

Country garden maintenance secrets

Beds around our house are dominated by grasses and perennials
Photo: İY.Cunnington

That fact that we couldn't do it all by ourselves took us three seasons to figure out. Having at least part-time help goes a long way toward making a big garden manageable.

Our garden helpers contribute to spring clean-up and weeding two or three mornings a week through the summer. For heavier jobs, like tree planting or moving shrubs or edging, we have a friend who comes on weekend mornings in the spring.

Even with help, we try to keep maintenance as simple as possible. We minimize deadheading and we leave most perennial remains and ornamental grasses in place over winter. This looks natural and feeds the birds.

Creating a country garden - getting started

My prairie-like country garden style    Photo: İY.Cunnington

Before you start out, try to have a vision of what you want your garden to look like. Read gardening magazines and books to put together a file of your favorite garden ideas.

List what appeals to you in terms of plant choices, landscape features and the kind of garden feeling you want to create.

For me, the prairie style was a natural fit as it would suit our sunny open acreage, and I had already fallen in love with ornamental grasses and prairie perennials.

More country garden tips

North American native wildflowers with a few non-native Queen
Anne's lace in our planted meadow     Photo: İY.Cunnington

• For earth-moving projects – improving drainage and expanding natural ponds – hire agricultural contractors instead of landscape contractors. Agricultural contractors are more affordable.
• Hire landscape contractors for big hardscaping jobs such as making compacted gravel paths through the beds or building patios or garden structures beyond your own capability. Do the bed preparation and planting yourself.
• To control weeds and conserve moisture in our country garden, we top beds with a three-inch layer of mulch (straw or wood chips). The straw is from a local farmer, and the wood chips come cheaply by the dump-truckload from a tree service. (More information on using mulch effectively.)
• Try to keep your lawn low maintenance and buy a professional type mower with a wide cutting deck to shave time off grass cutting.
• Grass creeping into beds is the main problem I see in many country gardens. Maintain sharp V-shaped edges so that grass doesn't get into the beds. Weed and edge diligently early in the season and plant abundantly to crowd out weeds.
• Keep maintenance manageable by choosing suitable plants. To avoid manicuring 10 acres, we hired Wildflower Farm to plant two and a half acres as a prairie meadow of wildflowers and native grasses, below. (See Wildflower Meadow for more information.) Around our farm ponds, we planted native wetland perennials that we found at Acorus Restoration, a company that specializes in wetland restorations..

• To conserve water (we are on a well), we use drought-tolerant plants, many of them North American natives.
• We collect rainwater in buried cisterns off the house and barn. During severe drought, we truck in water for the cistern so we can keep new plants watered, along with trees and shrubs in their first couple of seasons. Generally, established perennials are on their own, unless drought is severe.

• At the beginning we grew many plants from seed. We still grow some plants in the basement under lights in winter and then move them to a polyhouse in spring. If you grow your own perennials from seed, remember that it takes a couple of seasons for them to reach a good size. We also did quite a bit of plant multiplication by division.
• Build a relationship with a good nursery. If you're buying masses of plants, negotiate a discount, or buy wholesale.
• Spread the cost and the work of large projects over a few seasons. Our four-square garden began as a vegetable garden with wood-chip paths. Two years later, we added compacted stone chip paths edged with pavers. Then the following year, we planted boxwoods that we have now shaped into a formal hedge.
• Allow yourself time to populate large beds with plants. Our strategy with large beds has been to cover them with wood chip mulch to keep the weeds down, and then plant the space over a couple of seasons as we acquired the plants.