Getting Perennial beds ready for Spring/Garden Style nw

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everybody Debbie here with Garden style so today I am going to be cleaning out the perennial beds and you lucky folks get to watch me work how does that sound and I thought I would just cover a few issues along the way um kind of give you an idea of what I do to clean out the garden best ways to trim back perennials uh some problem plants and some little issues that I keep running into here in the garden which I'm sure all of you do as well um but man what a beautiful day today it's supposed to hit 70 and it's going to get warm the bed I'm working in is in the full-on Sun and it's usually one of my uh high heat beds or dry hot beds whatever you want to call them during the summertime and that's usually where I put some of my heartiest perennials that can handle the heat they actually love it so uh hopefully you'll enjoy this next little ride for the next few minutes watching me slave in the yard so here we go let the clean up begin well as you can see I already started cleaning up the perennial bed but I thought I'd tune you in here as I'm getting ready to pull out some old lavenders I probably had these for about 20 years they transferred with me from another house and they're just tired and time for some fresh ones so if you've got some perennials that you've had a long long time they really slowed down on they blooming it doesn't seem to matter you know what I do to fertilize them or trim them they're just old and very Woody and it's just time to replace these guys so I'm going to be doing that I'm just going to dig them out I'm not sure yet what I want to replace them with but if you guys have some ideas I'm always open and then we're going to clean up the rest of this it's starting to shade over finally so the sun shouldn't be too glaring as you watch me peel through the rest of this perennial B okay can't wait to see the end result once I'm [Music] done oh oh [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] okay so I thought I would show you what I am doing with my GMS you can see that there's some long stocks on here but there's also some beautiful new green growth already so all you got to do is just go in there and just trim out all the yucky leaves and the old stems and just leave the really pretty stuff behind I can do this and hold the phone at the same time so like this you just keep trimming them out until you have all the yucky leaves off like that one right there so the perennials took somewhat of a beating but I tell you what they started Greening up like right away as soon as we stopped freezing at night and especially now that we have 60° weather well 70 today it's actually quite warm out here today and as you can see they start to really clean up and I love GMS they probably get you know 4ot flower stocks on them and mine are kind of towards the back of the bed here so they're just fabulous for a background plant but I wanted to show you this wheat right here this is something that is very common here in the Northwest it's actually in the geranium family it's native to Washington but oh my god there can be millions of them and I'll tell you right now they stink thus the nickname Stinky bob and have you noticed how weeds are such opportunist they just grow right smack in the middle of all your plants plants so this is the kind of stuff I like to pull out by hand right away as soon as possible I probably should have my gloves on for the stinky thing but that's how it is and you want to make darn sure you get the root or they will propagate and come back and I had a real bad infestation of them at one time but now I'm starting to get them under control so I just kind of find them randomly throughout the garden but you know those are the fun things we come across as we start to clean up our beds but uh real good feeling right now is looking back at the progress looks pretty bare at the moment but uh I'll take a picture as soon as I'm done with just a little more cleanup here and I want to blow off the sidewalk get things spruced up hopefully there won't be as much sun and a little bit less glare so I just wanted to show you this is a tree panny that's about to come up or an EO pany it's actually a cross between a regular panty and a tree panty and as you can see there is new growth coming up on the stems unlike a regular panty you know where it all comes from the ground so I was going to show you how I go about trimming these in case you own some or would like to but the ends up here have died back so what I do is I go back to the next live bud and just trim them off just like that and I'll go through and just go down to the next live bud and trim them back and that one actually has a nice healthy one on the end so I'm going to leave that and then you can cut out some of the Dead stuff that's in the center there but he is alive and coming out strong and I have another one over there on the other side and they are absolutely stunning when they start to bloom and I of course we'll follow up with you on that one um but just wanted to give you an idea what to do with a tree py EO piy I guess is what I really should call it and here's another Branch so you just cut it down to where you see the buds coming through and then I go through and start trimming out all the dead wood that's in there all this kind of stuff just to clean them up being careful not to cut off the new buds cuz we want some flowers coming from those but uh this is the kind of life I'm starting to see as I get closer into my perennial bed here and what a cool way to get you know face to face with your garden when you're out here starting to clean it all up but something else too I was going to show you this down here is actually a Johnson's blue geranium and it has actually just died back on itself but oh my gosh I noticed this last year when it was was fully grown I noticed all this grass was coming through so you can see where the actual geranium is right there and when it gets this bad to this point there is no sense trying to save this plant and honestly I'm kind of tired of them anyway so I'm going to yank them out and I will probably replace them with Rosanne geraniums instead but yeah you know some grass crawled in here from the lawn and it was hiding in there and it had a whole reason to do this to spread through this plant so when you've got a situation this bad don't try just don't even try just go ahead and dig up the plant and start over yeah I know it's a little disheartening but I've got them running all the way down the edge of these Gardens down here and after a while you just got to say okay I'm tired of dealing with it it's got to come out so that's what I'm going to do today I'm going to dig a few of these out and uh my first thought is to replace them with some roseand geraniums however I'm also thinking about putting in a low growing mounding shrub in the front here just to give it a little more structure during the winter time haven't quite decided yet of course I'm always open to suggestions if you guys have any but uh these are some of the things that I'll definitely be covering with you as we go through the spring going into summer oh there's still still a whole lot more to do but my gosh the worst is cleaned up and that's that area up there and trust me my Gardens are not put together with any kind of Rhyme or Reason especially in the corner that you're all looking at right there that's more of a test Garden than anything and I am constantly testing out new plants in that area so you know things are kind of random but it's sure Pretty When It's All In Bloom doesn't it looks like the Sahara desert right now but trust me any of you have seen some of my videos from the past you know how full and Lush this becomes within about six weeks and that's all it's going to take especially with weather like this won't take any time at all for this stuff to fill in all right you guys little uh follow up there for the cleanup in The Perennial pits well now that the sun's gone down it's a little easier to show what show you what I've done so far but oh my goodness what a difference you see bare Earth again which can be a little disheartening sometimes uh here during the month of March but I always keep in mind that what green I am seeing here will soon look like small shrubs lots of clumps of perennials will start showing up but uh yeah here we go all nice and clean it's just what a Wonder wonderful feeling to see it cleaned up again and uh lots of things coming up things like uh cat mint and Yos and I can't wait to bring you guys back out here here in the next 6 weeks or so so that you can kind of see how everything is fluffed out so Barber's got a haircut today can already tell we're going to have a bumper drop of blueberries cuz I see lots of blooms but uh there you go that's my day's work today and a whole lot more to do the rest of this week when I get a chance yep all right you guys get out there get your hands dirty and we'll talk soon bye for now [Music]