Video: Picking Soil for Perennial Flowers

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Soil can make or break your flower garden. Get tips for picking the best soil for your Perennial flowers in this free video clip about gardening.

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Video Transcript

The soil that we are going to back fill with, we are not going to use the soil that came out of the hole to put back around our bulbs. The soil we are going to put in there we are going to mend it. We are going to fortify it with a commercial fertilizer. This is some triple 13 fertilizer, which means it's got 13 percent nitrogen, 13 percent phosphorus, 13 percent pot ash, along with all the micro nutrients like iron, zinc and all that other stuff to give a plant a shot gun approach to what it needs. If you want to go organic, to get phosphorus you can get bone meal. Bulbs love bone meal, because of the high phosphorus. This stuff here has 13 percent phosphorus, or if you need a little nitrogen for it you can add some blood meal, which will give you a little nitrogen. For pot ash, you would have to go to something like mutate of pot ash. Most people have a lawn or a garden fertilizer in there garage. The fertilizer you want to use is not a lawn type. Lawn fertilizers usually have too much nitrogen and sometimes your fertilizers you have in your garage look like this. It's pretty big and crusty, but it can be broken up, and used anyway because the nutrients are still there. It is just that its kind of clumps up. You don't want to send it to the landfill. We are going to put about, in the amount of soil we have in here, we are going to fortify it with about a pound or so of this full blend. We don't want to put to much commercial fertilizer because you can get an excess of nitrogen and get the feeder roots that are trying to establish the plant can get burned off and you don't have the main way that the plant establishes itself the little tiny hair roots are the most important roots on the plant. The big ones that go deep in the ground they hold the tree up, but they sure don't feed the tree. All of the feeder roots are in the top six inches of the soil, and those are the most important ones because you got to have something to feed the plant once you get it up to size. Once we fortify this soil, we will know we have nutrient that is going to be available in the root zone for the bulbs that were planted.

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Picking Soil for Perennial Flowers

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