How to Start a Flower Bed

Hi, this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about how to start a flowerbed. Now you can start a flowerbed anywhere that there's sun and even if you have a shady garden or a shady property you can even start a flower garden there because a lot of varieties of flowers don't even need a lot of sun. So to start a flowerbed all you need is organic material. You need compost or potting soil and you can have a truckload delivered or you can start collected the leaves and the grass clippings and make your own compost pile and make your own compost. But it really doesn't take a large area, you can put a small container garden together and have lots of flowers without even having a raised bed. But I really love my raised beds and it's about the easiest way that you can garden. So even if you don't have a large budget, you can always buy the bottom of the line bags of soil and put them into an area and make a raised bed, you don't need wood or rocks, you can use that to separate it, but as long as it's a little bit raised everything is going to grow really well. When you're growing a flower garden, there's different considerations. You can grow perennials, those are plants that grow every year, you can grow annuals like pansies that bloom and then die, or you can do bi-annuals that will grow the first year but not bloom till the second year and there's all types of seeds that you can grow as annuals too. So the best time to plant a garden is year round. If you live in a mild climate even in the middle of winter you can plant flower bulbs, there's really no reason not to. And you want to make sure that if it's a tall flower, that it's in the back of the bed and it's not pushing out the rest of the flowers so you can't see them. So you put the smallest flowers to the outside and the biggest flowers to the middle and to the back that's farthest away because you don't want to have the larger flowers taking the scent away from the smaller flowers. And there's really no rules, what I've found with flower gardens is that gardening is about change. So just plant a bunch of flowers in an area and wait for them to grow, if they get big, you can dig them up and move them to the back, if they're really small and hidden you can move them to the front because gardening is about change and the seasons and they're so rewarding to be part of nature and be part of the seasons.