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Care Free Care: Now You Can Have Beautiful Landscaping With Your Boxwoods

Boxwoods accent well to most any gardens and landscapes having a formal appeal. They can be sheared and shaped into just about any shape you can imagine. They’re know for being perfect in gardens, staying vigorous and green all throughout the year and even in the northern seasons. Boxwood’s do require a certain amount of care and maintenance. Follow these easy steps to maintain beautiful boxwoods year round:

1. Avoid a mix and match boxwood hedge. If you have an existing boxwood hedge it is entirely possible that you will have trouble finding the exact match to what is already there. This is a situation that you’d want to find some types with similar green. Just like with flowers, there are a variety of choices and what looks good together can vary, so examine what the nursery has, see what looks good together and make your decisions accordingly. Alternatively you’ll wind up with assortment of rapid growth and slow growth boxes with a few being a lime green and others being darker green giving you a undesirable end result!

2. When building a new hedge or landscape, do some research to find a good boxwood for your region. Look for a boxwood that is a vigorous grower, drought tolerant and disease resistant.Northern climates are fantastic for Korean Boxwoods because this variety is practiacally immune to plant disease.

3. Your spring clean-up and maintenance for boxwood’s starts with the addition of a 1/2 cup (per plant) of good organic, acidic fertilizer that has compost, peat, some special evergreen nutirents and dehydrated manure, mixed and spread out, around the base of your bushes. Ignoring the needs of the root systems leads to issues, so each season check them and add the needed organic soil to help protect, replenish and ensure their safety.

4. Just because the boxwood is mostly obvious when it comes to pruning dosen’t mean that a tips aren’t necessary. One – let that precious spring growth firm up a while before you start pondering of triming it down 1st second you get and don’t, I say don’t, trim the buggers end of season. If you didn’t know, pruning in the fall promotes new and tender sprigs to grow that are going to brown in the spring. This is going to cause a dead look for several months before new growth comes in so your best not to do it. Poorly [keptmaintained] boxes will brown up and look even worse in the winter when they stand out even more. Better they be a little shaggy than dead looking.

5. Boxwood’s have a shallow root system and because of that they can dry out quickly. So don’t forget to do the mulching on your boxwoods. This is going to help the boxes roots to retain the water they do get and protect them. On the other hand, you could wind up killing your box’s by rotting out the bark if you over do it with the mulch. Everything considered, discipline and moderation are even necessary when doing landscaping.

6.Keep an eye peeled for diseases and fungus problems on your boxwoods. While they are generally vigorous they can fall victim to few problems. Do some reading up on your boxs’ if you have suspicion that the problem is more than simply winter damage. A large percentage of the plant problems and infestations can be fixed with a spray. Just make sure you diagnose the problem correctly before you start spraying chemicals all over the place. This is not always as easy as it sounds, but you might have to just dig out the shrub that is causing you the issues before it gets worse. Fortuantly having to replace just one plant isn’t a huge deal, but when it comes to big problems and reestablishing a complete landscaped hedge your going to incure some possibly larger costs.

Enjoy this time of landscaping…boxwoods are really great for landscaping wheather you have a formal or even informal setting.

For a wide seleciton of home and garden decor to accent your landscapes, be sure to check out Cool Garden Things with their decorative bird feeders and ceramic gel fuel firepots.

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