What does native plant garden maintenance entail?
Due to ever changing conditions of many native plant gardens, I create a Google Doc that includes pictures, videos, and descriptions of each garden bed, and future maintenance needs so we know what native plants are in each bed and how we can manage them over time. I also include idea/suggestions for your garden. Many of those suggestions are ways to keep future maintenance to a minimum.
It is important to recognize that weeding promotes future weeds. Less heavy duty weeding = weeding. Every time you weed plants, you are stirring up the seed bank/leaving a blank space and chances are an unwanted plant will establish there. My goal is to get you to a point of less heavy duty weeding to break that cycle.
I'll break the maintenance down in to two different types of gardens by using the extremes. And of course it is a sliding scale and there gardens in-between these two.
For well established gardens that are full
Sifting through the dense native plants to identify nonnative plants that can become a problem aka weeding. This takes a careful eye and understanding of what hundreds of native plants look like when they are emerging as compared to unwanted plants. This is one of the hardest things for folks to learn as they start to native garden. Native plants can look much different when they emerge as opposed to what they look like when they are full grown. The same plant can even look different depending on site conditions such as light availability.
Knowing what plants need to be thinned out because they can take over or are near less aggressive plants. A knowledge of plant sociability and understanding of how plants can move and shift in various site conditions helps to maintain your garden diversity and design.
Understanding how and when to transplant plants to get the most out of your native plants "volunteers". Volunteers are native plants that spread by seed or rhizome. They can pop up in wanted places or you might like where they appeared. You can use volunteers for adding native plants to a new garden, making an existing garden fuller, or replenishing areas (many times because some native plants are short lived perennials).
Due to the elements described above, native plant garden maintenance is not a quick in-and-out job. It is much more methodical and takes time to carefully sift through the plants, transplant them, remove them, deadhead, shear, Chelsea chop etc. all while keep the homeowners garden goals and design in mind.
Routine maintenance is suggested (about once every 4-6 weeks).
For gardens that are traditionally landscaped with big gaps between plants
Same as above but might initially suggest a maintenance routine that is more frequent if weeds got "out of control" before my first maintenance. Heavy duty pulling and digging of weeds stirs up the seed bank and opens up blank spots for unwanted plants to establish. If you wanted to maintain a more traditional style garden with native plants that is fine, but just understand the feedback loop you are in. Weeding doesn't stop the weeds from coming back, it can only buy you time.
I suggest future plantings that can fill the gaps that are in line with your garden goals. If you want to convert a traditionally landscaped area to full native garden, we can do that. We can work over time to create a dense, intentionally designed garden. If you don't want to do it all at once we can break projects down into smaller sections and we can work on a game plan to get that done.
As we do maintenance, you might want to expand beds or create new ones. I can design and install those garden beds for you tying in your current garden beds into the design.