Sustainable Garden - Perennials and Annuals

Hi! I am Susan Harris and I am talking about Sustainable Gardening. In this clip, I am going to cover Perennials and Annuals. Now, I love Perennials particularly but they are a lot more work than the larger shrubs. They will spread and need to be divided if they get too big. Sometimes they are just short-lived and also they don't have the impact that the larger shrubs have. It takes a lot more of them to cover your garden but here are some really easy great Perennials for shade. This lovely Columbine is blooming right now. This is the Hellebore, it started blooming in January and as you can see it still looks great. Hellebore looks great all year. Now, what you are looking at now are some terrific Perennials for summer. You see big Golden Blooms or Black-Eyed Susan and then you see the large Ornamental Grasses and notice that they are planted in large sweeps and masses which not only looks great but its actually less work that way. Another really super summer blooming Perennial is this Sedum. I like Sedum especially in pots even because pots need a lot more water but Sedum are very drought tolerant. So, I hardly have to water these at all. Now, I don't grow a lot of annuals myself. By definition, they are only going to live the one growing season. They also tend to take a lot more watering and fertilizing but here are the couple that I really like. First, this is the Petunia, this particular kind is called a Wave Petunia. It will continue blooming, it will gust out all season long and doesn't even require it's dead blooms to be snapped off which can be very time consuming. So, I love the Petunia and then this is a Sweet Potato Vine with a terrific foliage. This will grow to about 25 feet long. So, next, I will show you how to plant all these plants in your sustainable garden.