5 Must-Have Easy Care Plants! 🌿 w/ The Impatient Gardener

hey guys how's it going this video comes to you courtesy of aaron at the impatient gardener i thought it'd be a really fun thing to start sharing and highlighting some of those gardening channels that have really inspired me and have helped me out like have taught me things that i didn't know because we're all dealing with such different things in our different climates and erin she's from wisconsin we garden in a very similar zone in terms of winter time temperature but she has high humidity a lot more rainfall deer rabbits those are the things she's dealing with and i have the opposite we don't have deer and rabbits we don't have humidity we have hardly any rain so it's really interesting to see different gardens in different areas of the country and the world so i don't know how regular of a thing this is going to be but we are talking with multiple people at the moment to possibly put together something for us and i think it's just a fun thing to do um yeah so if you are interested in following erin i'll put all of her links down below to instagram and youtube um and she has put together a video for us about five plants that she cannot do without in her garden and i completely agree with all five of her choices so anyway enjoy hey there aaron from the impatient gardener i'm going to start today by asking you to imagine your favorite band and that band is probably made up of a lead singer who is the face of the garden they really make the statement it's also made up of musicians who provide the rhythm and they provide sort of the structure of the band and then really great bands have background singers background singers aren't divas they don't demand certain colored m m's they don't need anything fancy they're often overlooked but without them the songs wouldn't be the same and i kind of think you can translate that to your garden i have a garden full of plants that i love some of them require a lot of care they require pruning and primping and deadheading and fertilizing and extra water and and special locations and all of those things they're a little extra but i love them and they are the things that draw people's attention to them in the garden and they are really what makes my garden when people walk out of this garden they will remember those plants those are the lead singers and then you've got other plants that provide a lot of the structure of the garden hydrangeas for me think of those as sort of your drums they they provide a certain amount of repetition depending on how you plant them evergreens same kind of thing really important plants they provide um all of that that um that form that you really need in a garden and then you have those poor lonely backup singers and those are really what holds a whole garden together but the best thing about the background singer plants is that they don't ask for much so today i'm going to share with you the five plants that i have in my garden that i just wouldn't be without i feel like these are plants that ask very little of me as a gardener but do so much in my garden and provide so much to it and my garden would not be the same without these not to mention i wouldn't have time to work in my garden if i had a whole bunch of lead singers there because not only would there just be way too much to look at and you would have know where to know where to put your eye but also who's got time for all that primping and monitoring all those diva plants so i'm sitting in front of a patch of one of my favorite must-have plants and this is geranium macarizum also known as big root geranium this is hardy in zones four through eight and you can really think of this as a ground cover it has fuzzy leaves and a scent to it which means that it is basically impervious to deer and rabbits i've yet to find anything that will eat these and it just makes this lovely little carpet now it does get a flower this is the species and it gets a sort of a fuchsia colored flower in pretty early in early summer late spring it doesn't last for too long but the plant offers so much in the way of texture and then as we get into fall here it will get some fall color on it which is great the best thing about this is that this is almost evergreen you you almost don't need to do anything with this i rarely cut it back it just does its thing if it starts getting a little ratty as it comes out of winter i will cut it back a little but generally speaking i don't touch it and when i say i don't touch it i mean literally i do nothing with it so this patch that i'm sitting in front of was all a division from another area where i grow this i just dug it up it separates very easily it's very easy to spread around and it does spread by rhizomes but people get worried when they hear that something spreads by rhizomes this is not an aggressive plant this will not take over anything that you don't want it to take over so i just divided those and planted those little tiny little divisions in spring and now i have this great patch so and it won't go beyond where it wants to so if i only want this to stay this big it'll pretty much stay this big if i want this to get larger i just need to go in there and divide some more and spread it around and i have more to me it is almost a perfect plant it grows here i'm in zone five it grows for me in everything from full sun to full shade including dry shade now i think in warmer areas it might want a little bit of protection from super hot afternoon sun but i think even that it would be able to to stand when i divided these plants and put these in this year i watered them in right after planting and i literally have not touched them since so in terms of bang for your buck and bang for your gardening time it doesn't get much better than this so i said i grow this in a whole bunch of places so i'm going to show you where i have this all growing in my garden okay so i grow it here and i grow it here too and i grow a whole bunch of it here in the new garden i planted all these from little two-inch plants just two and a half months ago all this and i even grew it here this is alongside the driveway in full shade underneath a hedge of extremely mature cedar trees nothing grows here not even grass grows here this is as dry and as tough of a condition as you could ask for a plant this is also where snow gets piled up all winter so this shows just how tough this plant is so my next must-have plant is nepeta there are so many kinds of nepeta it's fortunately it's gotten very popular in the past maybe 10 years or so so breeders are doing amazing things creating new forms and new heights a different color there is a lot of options here this is cats pajamas this is the shortest nepota that i'm personally aware of and the shortest one that i grow in my garden and it's relatively new and it has all the benefits of all of these nepotas so that is really good heartiness it's zoned three to eight it is again deer resistant rabbit resistant because it puts off a lot of scent the common name for nepota is catmint so that tells you right away that it's got a scent and now it doesn't smell like mint it has a very unique scent that i find quite pleasant so it gets these flower stalks on it and they're covered in these tiny little um now the colors can vary from variety to variety i would say this one is sort of a light purple light bluey purple and the bees i can tell you right now they're all over the place the bees go nuts for this plant it's a really good substitute for lavender if you're trying to get that sort of lavender look uh without it but you're not an area where you can reliably grow lavender and it's extremely easy care in fact all i do with it is once it starts looking a little ratty which it can during the season is i just cut it all the way back it will quickly reflush and re-bloom in fact i used to line my path with nepota and then i would cut that back three times a year and i would get three bloom cycles out of it now the first bloom cycle is always the best but we still got some blooms later on you do want to be a little bit careful about just paying really close attention to what variety you buy because the heights can vary widely and some of the taller ones do have a tendency to get quite loose and sort of flop a bit so which is not a bad look if that's what you're going for but you don't maybe want to put that right at the front of your garden where it's going to be flopping over your feet all the time so this cat's pajamas i planted a whole bunch of this in a new garden area this year and it's filled in so lovely this is the first year for all these plants and i'm so happy with how this particular one has performed for me but i love all nepalese and i think there's one for everyone's garden so long as it's hardy for you so i'm getting up close and personal with the next plant just because there was a little dew last night and it's so pretty when it's like this it gets these little droplets of water and it holds them on their leaves like little diamonds sometimes they'll even get do sort of just lined up like little diamonds hanging off the edge like a little necklace it is one of the most charming aspects of this next plant which is el camilo malice also known as ladies mantle this is again this is a really hearty plant three zone three through eight it has fuzzy leaves which means it's pretty much impervious to critters munching on it and it gets this nice little mounded form uh not too tall it stays in a plant it's not a spreader um it stays in a plant it will reseed around a bit but not in any sort of unpleasant way the nicest thing about it is that it gets these chartreuse flowers on it and they almost look like chartreuse babies breath and they last for a long time maybe a month and they're fabulous in bouquets but it just adds this sort of frothy airy feel to this whole plant and i love planting it along the edge of a garden because it just softens that edge so much and i think it's just um just so pretty it's super easy care again once it's done flowering sometimes it'll the whole thing will get a little a little shoddy looking the leaves kind of brown up a little bit so you can either just cut the spent flowers off or you can cut just the spent flowers plus whatever leaves kind of look a little ratty off or you can cut the entire thing down and it'll reflush with nice fresh foliage and look great now it won't re-bloom but you will have this nice green foliage for the rest of the for the rest of the summer and the foliage reminds me a little bit of like nasturtium leaves it has that same kind of look but it's just it's just a beautiful nice plant in the garden in fact if i had to pick my number one plant that i absolutely couldn't be without it'd probably be ladies mantle okay the next plant on the list is one that i talk about all the time it's a heck of a cloa which is a shade grass it's also known as japanese forest grass or hakone grass and it is the most useful plants so first of all there aren't a lot of grasses that will do well in shadier spots so and this one will so this is sort of part shade to shade it can actually handle a little sun in its in its cooler range but it provides that movement that very few other plants other than a grass can provide and so that's so important even in the shade especially when you think about contrasting that with your more common shade plants like hostas that are very rigid so this is a great texture and especially because shades gardens often have sort of a woodland feel to them so you want them to be a little bit looser and this certainly provides that so there are a whole bunch of hacklin close on the market so just double check the zone before you choose one most of them are roughly zone hearty zone five to nine this is heckler cloa macra just plain green it's actually also my favorite it's one of the bigger ones you can see it's gotten quite big in this garden and i just love the flowing how it just flows it's got nice flowers going on it right now which is beautiful i leave it standing all winter provides great winter interest so the only thing you really have to do with this plant is cut it back in spring and that's it and easily dividable in spring if you want to move it around which i have quite a bit in my garden so here in a new garden i mixed in heckler cloa all gold with some still bees for this bright pop of color in the shade this stripy one is called oreola and it's one of the most common ones you'll find and it's quite nice doesn't grow as well for me interestingly as macro and all gold does but it's still pretty and i like the stripes here's more all gold looking great over by the side of our garage where i have a climbing hydrangea growing up it as well and here's some more all gold this is in a fair amount of sun this time of year because the sun is so low in the sky this grows along a little bridge and a little creek that we have so this last one i thought about a lot because it's hostas i don't have to introduce hostas to any of you everybody knows all the great things about hostas they're super hardy zone three to nine they grow in shade they have these wonderful leaves but they're not perfect for one they're attract both slugs and deer both of which are a problem here for me so these are actually the best looking hostas in my garden by this late in the year but there's a fair amount of slug damage even on these big thick leaves these will turn the most beautiful bright yellow so i think that the fall color of hostas is oft often overlooked and i don't know why because it is stunning but the deer problem is a big deal i generally manage deer by applying a deer spray but you know deer spray is only as good as the gardener and if you don't get out there and apply it then they're going to take advantage of it it works when it's there works really well when it's there but if i'm behind on getting to it or if i can't get to it after we've had a really heavy rain they're going to take advantage of it especially at this time of year so hostas are not a perfect plant but i think they serve such an amazing purpose in the garden because they offer this big thick foliage in the shade border and frankly you need that in a shade board it makes shape orders look almost a little tropical with that big big foliage in there it provides a ton of color because we all know there's so many hostas out there in all sorts of different color variations so you can have a very colorful garden with nothing but hostas in it and it'll look great in terms of you know care for the actual plant they're pretty easy i mean you give them a nice high nitrogen fertilizer early in the year that'll get them going really good and then you know you don't really have to do much they do want a fair amount of water so you can't grow them anywhere where it's too dry and then you just sort of pull the junk off um either in fall or spring they have a lot to offer because they have this great bold texture if they were not so attractive to deer i would deal with the slug problem and i would call this almost a perfect plant but they're so problematic with the deer that i am hesitant to put them on this list of must-have plants but when i think about what my garden would look like without hostas i can't imagine it so on that basis alone they get added to my list of plants i just have to grow plus i think if you can overcome these other issues or if you live in an area where these issues are not a problem then it becomes much more obvious that hostas are great plants to have in your garden so when someone comes to my garden they're going to come in and the first thing they're going to see is this big limelight hydrangea or maybe the dahlias that i grow everywhere or colorful annuals that i put in containers or clementis that i have growing up everything in my garden pretty much they're not going to notice things like geranium macarism and ladies mantle those things are just going to be in the background but if i didn't have those plants in my garden my garden wouldn't look as good as it does so that's why your garden is like this band it needs all of those parts and the gardener needs all of those parts too because i can spend my time doing things like digging up my dahlias for winter but i don't have to do anything with any of those plants that i just mentioned they just do their own thing i can worry for the ones that need some attention i can worry about it in spring maybe if i get to it in fall that's fine so it's what makes a happy gardener frankly and a nice garden so i hope that was helpful for you to see some of my favorite plants my go-to's those stalwarts of the garden and i hope you develop a palette of those for your garden depending on where you are and what you're growing and what your conditions are like there are plants like this that go far beyond the five that i just mentioned and there are some that are suited for every garden so find those plants and find places to put them and let them be the background singers in your garden in the meantime have a great day in your garden we'll see you soon

Channel: Garden Answer Highlights

Views: 118,827

Keywords:

Id: vkOL_XpkDlI

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020