Easy Perennials to Grow

Hey everyone, I have been out shopping and came home with a few perennials from the garden center a couple days ago and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the easiest perennials to grow. I'm sure you have some that you really like in your garden and I have some that I really like in mine and I thought whether you're a beginner or somebody who's been doing it a long time, we're always interested in knowing what kinds of things are just going to take off and look great and be you know make a lot of impact and be easy to care for so I thought I'd share a couple. The first one I want to talk about is tall sedum. Tall sedum has flowers in late summer and fall. They're big heads of pink or red or white clusters that attract lots of butterflies and bees. They're just swarming. It's so beautiful in the fall, not only the flowers but the all the activity that it brings in and has this really pretty foliage and the nice thing about the flowers is if you leave them in the winter they remain standing really well because it has these stiff stems that hold the flower heads up so even though the flowers turn brown the architectural effect that the plant has in the winter is really nice as well. So in the spring you just do a quick haircut to trim off all the dead stuff and it has this cute little rosette of foliage that comes up and eventually then comes up to these you know these nice mounds of pretty foliage and then the nice flowers later in the summer. You might find that when you buy a plant like this as this one you know this is April and so this plant would not normally be blooming in my garden and so sometimes at the garden center you find flowers that are blooming that wouldn't you know it's just sort of out of season because they were shipped in or grown in a greenhouse just not in normal outdoor condition. So I'm actually going to go ahead and cut these flowers off right at a at a leaf joint and that way it'll encourage more new growth to come up from these other spots on the plant and it'll form more little clusters like this that'll bloom later in the year. You might also find when you're growing this plant that it tends to split in the center or the flower heads when it blooms they get tall they get tall and the flowers get heavy and they kind of flop over. So one way I prevent that on the taller varieties is I do this exact thing I just did here for the plant in my garden maybe even a couple times like this time of year in April or May and then I do it again maybe in early summer just to keep the plants compact and you know keep a nice habit and it ends up forming more flowers and and new shoots all over the plant. And once these plants are established they really don't need much water these these fleshy big leaves hold a lot of moisture in them so you shouldn't they're very drought tolerant. The next one I'd like to tell you about is echinacea or coneflower and this is a native a Midwest native and this plant has lots of pink the the species has pink flowers sort of that mauvey pink color but you can get them in white and orange and red and yellow lots of really beautiful colors and the but the the most hardy one and the most reliable one are just the species plants with the mauve pink color and those do so well they form in mid-summer mid to late summer they have these beautiful drooping flowers with the orangish kind of cone in the middle and that a lot of insects and pollinators of course are attracted to it. Coneflowers have kind of fuzzy foliage that deer don't seem to like although the new plants in my garden I sometimes the rabbits go after them so I don't know I think it might be just because they're young and new plants but the new growth but this kind of fuzzy foliage kind of rough that's you can usually count on rabbits and deer being less attracted to those kinds of plants. This one oh another thing that I really like about them is that again in the winter you can leave them standing and the goldfinches seem to really enjoy the the seeds left on the stems so don't cut them all back in the fall to clean them up and then this one the reason I picked this one at the garden center is because it has this it has a couple of crowns you know there were there were several several different pots of this plant at the garden center and I looked for one that had the most sort of the bushiest base I wasn't looking for the tallest plant or the one that had the most flowers on it I really didn't care about whether it had flowers on it yet I'm most interested in how how much growth there was at the base of the plant because that's a better a better start I think. So I just told you about a couple of great sun plants and here's a couple of good shade plants that I really like and think are easy to grow the first one is epimedium. Epimedium is a great little ground covery type plant it forms low growing mounds and in early spring the flowers are red or pink or white or yellow and they're very delicate when they come up and then the foliage comes up sort of as a little bit after and as the flowers are coming up and then it makes this beautiful mound that just looks great all summer you know a lot of spring bloomers after they bloom their foliage kind of starts to go down and doesn't look so great epimedium is not that plant it looks so good all summer and then in the fall it has a lot of them have really pretty fall colors so you know not all perennials get pretty red or orange fall color and epimediums have a really nice fall color. One thing you'll want to know about epimediums is when you're cleaning them up in the spring you just need to do a quick shear of the plant to get them cleaned up if you want to and but the time to do that is before the flowers come up because if you wait until they're starting to come up you can see that picking through the flowers and trying to find the dead stems is really tedious but if you do it beforehand you just shear it right off and it's just super easy. Know that if you don't clean them up in the spring it's not the end of the world either you can just leave them alone and the flowers will bloom and the foliage will come up and eventually cover the dead stems but it looks a lot nicer as you can see if you do a little bit of cleanup in the spring and hellebores are another shade favorite they are so easy to grow deer and rabbits don't like them they don't require a lot of water once they're established the flower colors oh my gosh they have green and white and pink and deep red and some of them have spots and all kinds of fun markings and there's so many new ones being introduced these days that it's really fun to try different ones they bloom forever they make great cut flowers the foliage looks good even after even after the flowers fade but the flowers last a really long time in late winter and early spring and all you need to do to keep them looking good is in late winter or early spring when the foliage the old foliage starts to look a little bit ratty you just cut that off and let the plant do its thing for the rest of the year let me know what some of your favorite easygoing perennials are in the comments