How to Make a Flower Bed

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Adding a flower bed makes such a beautiful difference to your yard. If you think your home is lacking some curb appeal, a flower bed is one of the easiest ways to change that. It doesn’t take long to make one or to maintain one, especially if you use perennial plants. Here’s how to make a flower bed.

How to Create a Perennial Flower Bed

First of course, you have to figure out where you want the new flower bed to be. Do you want it to run along side your walkway to your entryway? Or along the base of your house?

If you are going to make a flowerbed, you can easily use a water hose to figure out the shape. Run the hose the length of the bed and curve it if you like. I like the look of a slightly curved flowerbed and that’s what we went with.

My new bed was going to run alongside a pathway that takes us from our vegetable garden to the barn below. I laid the hose out and played around with possibilities for the shape.

I went back up to the house so I could see it from that viewpoint. Be sure to stand back and take a different look. You can easily rearrange the shape now so you can see the new flower bed from several spots around your house and yard.

Cutting out the grass for a new flower bed

Once I had the shape and length figured out, we used an edger to slice through the grass that was there. Then we dug out the soil to a depth of about a foot.

All that sod was a pain to get out of there; definitely the hardest part of the job. Once that was done, we filled the bed with a LOT of really well composted manure.

You can use other kinds of compost too – since we raise animals here, we always have compost to add to flower beds.

Planting Perennials

When you dig your holes for planting, make sure to make them much bigger all the way around, than the plant. And be sure there is a deep layer of compost for the plant.

It’s also a good idea to add some bone meal or blood meal. Or a time release fertilizer works too.

Place your perennial in the hole and bring the soil back up to level. Make sure to press down and compact the soil (not too much). Get those roots settled in.

If you make a saucer like edge about 8 inches from the plant, this will retain more water and not allow any run off.

Here’s the bed after planting. It’s not finished yet; we will add the pathway edging and gravel to really finish this project off.

But for now, the perennial flower bed is finished and we are just waiting on the flowers to grow.

Here’s how the flower bed looked in its first year. You can see how well those plants have already started filling out. Good thing we didn’t plant them too close together. The following year, these plants should explode in growth if all goes well.

The same bed, 2 years later

Here’s the bed a couple of years later. The perennials keep coming back every year, bigger and bigger. Pretty soon, I can start dividing some of these plants if I want.

After a year we planted an apple tree in this pathway garden. Here’s how to plant fruit trees – plant one this year and enjoy harvesting your own apples or peaches.

I ended up transplanting a small native Saskatoon berry bush in this long bed as well. Native bushes don’t like to be moved and often the transplant won’t work. Here’s how to transplant a small bush or shrub.

If you have a shady area in your yard, why not make a flower bed for the shade? Perennial shade plants often have beautiful foliage. Here’s how I tricked up our front entryway with a flower bed for this very shady spot.

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