When I started my first flower garden I had troubles with this very issue, choosing the right Annuals and Perennials for my garden. Many starting out ask me which flowers are best to start with. Do you want your flower garden to have a lasting beauty for a solid year or longer, a few years? Maybe you want the best of both worlds? In my experience, it is best to plant both, Annuals and Perennials. Having both means there is room to plant new plants each year as your annuals die off and there will be no bare spots through the year in your flower garden when this happens; thanks to the lasting life of Perennials, making your yard a beautiful site to see.

A few recommended Perennials for the Northeast region are as follows:

• Astilbe – blooms white, pink, and red flowers. This variety does well full sun or partial shade.

• Veronica – lush and thriving flowers in colors of blues, reds, pinks, whites and purples.

• Miscanthus sinensis – grassy appearance, attracts birds, detours deer, and looks great at the ends of flowerbeds. .

Great choice of Annuals, flowers that last a year, are as follows:

• Begonia – ideal in flowerbeds, hanging baskets, in containers, and for indoors coming in a variety of colors

• Dahlias – spiked delightful petals that come in many colors, great for walkways, flowerbed edges, and to arrange a beautiful centerpiece.

• Gazania – does best in sun and comes in yellows, oranges, reds, pinks, cream, mauve, and burgundy.

A beautiful and well maintained garden can make all of the difference in the world and can greatly improve the look and feel of our yards. If you follow the advice provided above you will make your garden the envy of the entire neighborhood!

Flower beds are a beautiful addition to any landscape and have many benefits if laid out correctly. Planting in flower beds will bring to you gardening in its simplest form. Fewer weeds will intrude and there are a variety of self water and draining systems available for flower beds. Flower bed gardens aren’t only easy to maintain, but they provide a beautiful appeal and are well organized.

Now that you know some benefits of using flower beds, it’s best we share with you how to add flower beds to your garden correctly. The five key components to a successful flower bed garden are as follows:

1. Planning – consider size and the types of flowers you want in your garden, the dimensions of your flower beds, and the location of where your flower beds will sit.

2. Flower variety – annuals or perennials, which will work best for your lifestyle and for your garden. It’s recommended to use a variety of both, annuals and perennials.

3. Location – flower height for different varieties of flower types will call for a specific layout in your planning. Weather and sun exposure matter a great deal! What weather elements do the flowers chosen depend upon?

4. Flower Bed materials and dimensions – what materials will look best in your ideal flower garden? How much space do you have to work with?

5. Seeds or Plantings – Starting with seeds will require more maintenance and will take longer to reap the benefits. Starting with plantings will cost more but will be easier to work with and will produce sooner results.

When planting a flower garden using flower beds, use these steps mentioned. Using these steps, adding flower beds to your landscape, will make your gardening task simpler, cost effective, and will create the ambience and setting you’re aiming for in regards to your ideal flower garden.

Flowers for a butterfly garden

Butterflies are a beautiful addition to any flower garden. Having Monarch, Swallowtail, and other garden variety butterflies in your yard is also an easy way to get kids involved in gardening. Here at the Farm in northern New Jersey, we provide plants and gardening tips that can make your yard butterfly friendly, either with a large perennial flower bed or containers full of garden plants butterflies love. From Jersey City to Short Hills, and Basking Ridge to South Orange, the Farm is your Butterfly Garden headquarters.

A garden needs both host plants and nectar plants to be butterfly friendly. Host plants provide shelter for butterfly eggs and food for newly hatched caterpillars, while nectar plants provide nourishment for butterflies. Host plants include dill, parsley, mallow and hollyhocks.

Gardeners have lots of choices in nectar plants for a butterfly garden. Butterfly Bush, one popular nectar plant, blooms all summer long in many shades of pink, blue, purple and white, and comes in a variety of sizes. For small outdoor spaces, Lo & Behold Butterfly bushes make an ideal selection, growing only 3 feet tall. For distinctive orange flowers that pop in any bed or planter, Butterfly Weed is your choice. Common milkweed has pink and white flowers that bloom throughout the season, drawing butterflies from spring to first frost. Coneflowers, another nectar bearing bloom, come in a variety of colors including pink, purple, yellow, orange and red.

These host and nectar plants are all perennials, and deer resistant as well, so once planted in your yard or garden they will return year after year. You can also simply get a container of annual flowers or plants that butterflies are drawn to, such as Verbena and Lantana.

We look forward to seeing you at the Farm for all your garden and nursery needs. Our advice and high quality plants and gardening supplies have made us the top choice for nursery and gardening supplies throughout the northern New Jersey area, including Basking Ridge, Jersey City, Livingston, Mendham, Montclair, Randolph, Short Hills and South Orange.

We’ve just been buried in snow and more is in the forecast, but I’m dreaming of springtime. Yes, I know it’s only February, but now is the best time to start planning what I’m going to plant in the spring. Last year I planted perennials – some peony and geranium plants – as a foundation for my flower bed. But I need to plan how I’m going to add that extra pop of color or that new sweet floral scent to my yard this year.

I’m considering night phlox (zaluzianskya) or perhaps night scented stock (matthiola bicornis) for a rush of scent in the summer night air. For color, I’m thinking about zinnias, cosmos, and Gerbera daisies. But… I suppose that mixture of plants lends itself to a bit of a mish mash of design. That’s why I rely on The Farm at Green Village.

I love gardening. I love digging in the dirt and watching plants grow. However, I’m not very talented when it comes to landscaping. Colors sometimes clash. The plant sizes are all wrong. Whole sections of the flower garden are out of bloom at the same time. Since I found The Farm at Green Village, that’s not the case.

Last year, I was meandering through the rows of flowers, adding plants to my basket and removing them in a bewildered state, when a staff member noticed the look of uncertainty on my face. He asked about the layout of my flower beds, even asking me to sketch them for him. Then he recommended which groundcover would be most suitable for yard. He even gave me tips on the best mulch and how to perk up a little lilac bush that was dying.

So while my flower beds may be sleeping beneath a foot (or two!) of snow, my mind is thinking about planting flowers in the spring.