Production

Proper planting is essential for healthy, vigorous growth of flowers and ornamentals. Provide a favorable environment for the developing root systems and you’re assured of rapid plant establishment.

In this section, you’ll find information on choosing, planting, and maintaining ornamentals and floriculture. Find tips on pruning, diagnosing plant health, plant life cycles, container gardening, repotting, and fertilizing.

How to Plant Flowers and Ornamentals

There’s a lot more involved in planting ornamentals and flowers than simply digging a hole and sticking a plant in it. You must give careful consideration to several factors, such as preparation of the planting site, the time of year and environment for best plant establishment, handling requirements of different nursery stock, proper planting techniques, and how to maintain the plants you’ve planted.

For greenhouse operators, timing product supply and quality with peak customer demand is another consideration. Growing plants from seeds is a relatively inexpensive way to produce garden plants. In Pennsylvania, you can sow most annual seeds outdoors after the last frost date.

Planting flowers and ornamentals in the right location is crucial if you want them to survive and flourish. Here are some examples of plants that thrive in certain conditions:

• Shade to part shade/dry to moist soil: American filbert, mountain laurel, blue wood, and white wood aster
• Sun to part sun/wet to moist soil: Red and sugar maple, American holly, red and black chokeberry, silky, gray, and red osier dogwood
• Sun to part sun/dry to moist soil: Mockernut hickory, cockspur hawthorn, eastern red cedar, bush honeysuckle, and oakleaf hydrangea

How to Grow and Maintain Flowers

Whether you’re a home gardener, cut flower producer, or greenhouse grower, a certain amount of basic care is required if you want to keep your flowers growing and in the best of health. Different flowering plants have different requirements.

Care and maintenance of perennials include lifting and dividing every three to four years. Some perennials benefit from being cut down in the fall. Leave others standing for the benefit of insects and birds, and to provide additional interest in the winter.

Mulching and watering are both necessary for the growth of flowers and ornamentals. You can improve the fertility of the soil and manage pests by rotating plants based on plant families.

Deadheading also plays an important role in promoting new growth and reflowering. The best time to deadhead a flower is when its appearance begins to decline.

The successful production of nursery and greenhouse crops depends on the quality of the water you use to water your plants. Ideally, water should be balanced in pH and alkalinity, and low in suspended solids and dissolved minerals. A steady supply of good quality water can be difficult when growing a container garden. The solution is a home container irrigation system.

Pests such as insects, mites, and diseases can seriously affect the health of your flowers. Being able to recognize the symptoms and signs of plant health problems is crucial. If you can identify and diagnose plant health problems you’ll be able to solve an issue before you lose the plant. Being able to scout for fungus and bacteria means you can manage diseases once you’ve identified them.

Dividing, Pruning, and Training Perennial Flowers and Ornamentals

To keep a garden looking its best requires a certain amount of maintenance. Dividing, pruning, and training all have a crucial role to play.

Knowing how and when to prune is important for plants’ best performance. Ornamental plants require careful pruning to maintain healthy and vigorous growth. Deadheading, disbudding, pinching back, heading back, cutting back, and thinning are things you can do to encourage your herbaceous plants to bloom for longer periods. The schedule for pruning flowering shrubs depends on when they flower. For ornamental trees and shrubs, it depends on the plant's seasonal cycle.

By dividing perennials you can control the size of the plant, rejuvenate plant growth, and increase their number. Use a trellis when training perennial flowers and ornamentals because it keeps them off the ground, increases usable space, promotes healthy growth, and reduces the incidence and spread of diseases.

Landscaping with Ornamentals and Flowers

There are several reasons why you should include ornamentals and flowers in your landscaping plans, whatever your rain garden zone. The biggest advantage is that they look good, but there are lots of other reasons why you should plant ornamentals and flowers.

Pollinators in particular love them. There are plenty of other beneficial insects you can attract into your garden with the right type of flowers. Butterflies not only pollinate flowering plants, they also serve as food for other organisms and are an important link in the food chain. Carnivorous plants can be a link in the food chain too. Hedgerows and woody plants such as trees, shrubs, and vines can provide excellent wildlife habitat.

A wide variety of herbs and flowers can be used to create an edible landscape. If you’ve got children, a great way to get them involved is to help them create a miniature garden. You can also use gardening and natural landscaping practices that harmonize with nature to help change the face of residential landscapes.