Plant Now for Color and Crops Straight Through Fall
Spring planting is upon us. There’s certainly no chance of frost, soil temperatures are prime for seed germination, and we’re well into the season for warm-weather crops. Whether you dream of picking fresh fruits and vegetables right from your backyard or envision a bounty of beautiful blooms, it’s time to bring in the experts at Landscape East & West.
Through our decades of tending to the unique outdoor spaces across the greater Portland region, we’ve learned what thrives whether your yard is sun-drenched or a forested oasis.
For garden lovers, spring planting is an exciting time. Portlanders love their fresh produce, and our Northwest climate makes backyard gardening a breeze. Now is the time to get those heat-loving plants in the ground. Ready for a summer of Greek salad? Tomatoes and cucumbers should be planted right now, alongside peppers and zucchini. Spice it up with a plot of basil, oregano, and thyme.
Professional landscapers and garden specialists treat spring prep as a mix of soil science, timing, and preventative care. It’s less about “planting and hoping” and more about setting up conditions so plants basically do the work themselves once summer hits.
We plan vegetable gardens carefully, from bed preparation to crop choices and layout. Bed preparation is critical to growing success. We’ll test and amend soils, refresh beds, and define planting zones, pairing plants that benefit each other like tomatoes and basil, and ensuring airflow to prevent disease.
Our team applies organic pest and weed deterrents. When needed, we add mulch to further suppress weeds and stabilize moisture. Mulch also helps regulate soil temperature, so vegetables aren’t impacted by some of the wild temperature swings we can see in the spring.
If fruit trees are your fancy, we’ll get to work to ensure abundant production. Fruit trees and berry bushes will be pruned, fertilized, and thinned to encourage those plump blueberries and juicy peaches.
If your preferred outdoor space is full of flowers and greenery or if you complement your vegetables with blooms and shrubs, it’s also the time of year to address your other plants.
The early-season flowers are done. Our maintenance crew will remove spent plants and plant new ones. We pull out pansies and violas and add in snapdragons and calendula. We can probably begin to add zinnias and cosmos as well, with the temperatures climbing so fast.
Your garden will look effortless because we focus on prevention and systems: healthy soil, efficient watering, early pest and weed control, and a smart layout.
To ensure your vegetable garden always has something growing, and your yard always has color and interest, we implement succession planting. Succession planting is a simple but powerful gardening strategy. We don’t plant everything at once but rather stagger planting. Instead of getting 20 heads of lettuce at one time, we slow the flow so you get a fresh head every week. The core idea is to plant crops at planned intervals, so something is always growing and at its prime.
For vegetables, this means planting small batches continuously. As one crop finishes, something new is planted in its place. Spring spinach becomes summer beans and then fall kale.
We also pair plants with different growth speeds. A quick-growing radish can be harvested in time to give slow-growing carrots more room. With this tempo, the prime growing season can expand from March through July or even August.
The same methods or relying on timing or plant type work with flowers. We can choose plants that naturally bloom at different times. For early spring, it was daffodils and tulips, now we’re adding alliums and peonies, summer we’ll come back with coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, and then fall we turn to plants like asters and sedum.
Different types of plants grow at different speeds. Keeping this in mind, we mix fast and slow bloomers, filling gaps while slower plants mature. Dahlias take time; calendula sprouts quickly. By layering the bloom season, your yard will have continuous color and vibrancy.
There are as many different types of gardens as there are homes in Portland, and we’re proud to have designed and maintained many of those gardens. Ready for months of magnificent landscape? Contact us for a free consultation, and let’s dig in.
