Keeping Your Investments Healthy

In the post before this, I compared the soil with a bank and your plants with investments.  As with any investment, your plants need to be constantly monitored and adjusted to keep them healthy in your Outdoor Living Spaces and flower beds

Investing in a business and controlling a business are very different things.  If you are good at managing and growing a business, you have the potential to make a lot more money by investing in and controlling the business.  You should look at the plants in your landscape as being little businesses that you not only are investing in, but also controlling.

Plants and trees tend to grow and branch out like a business and, just as with a business certain branches tend to take more capital and produce less.  When a business has parts that are not pruductive, those parts need to be removed to keep the business healthy and so, with plants some pruning needs to be done periodically to keep the plant healthy and producing.

It goes without saying that a plant that has more branches, leaves, flowers and fruit will use more water.  Also, it is important to know that a plant in its natural habitat grows very differently than a plant in your yard.

Natural settings are much more harsh than urban settings.  We baby, spoil and pamper our plants and they are very obese in our yards.  The idea is to maintain the plant in a healthy form, not an obese form.  The best way to do that is through proper deadheading and pruning.

Deadheading is the process of removing dead flowers after their prime.  A plant’s main goal in life is to continue its species through reproduction, not unlike the animal kingdom.  As such, fruit and seeds tend to follow flowers.  We don’t need fruit and seeds on most of our plants in our landscape and so removing flowers after their prime prevents valuable water and nutrients from being used in the production of fruit and seeds.

Likewise, shrubs and trees tend to become quite overgrown and produce an excess of branches and leaves.  These also are not necessary for the health of the plant.  A proper pruning plan should be implemented to prevent the waste of water and nutrients on unnecessary wood and leaves.  Again I recommend the website mentioned in a previous post on increasing the life of your trees.

So, in summary, just like with a wise investment, your plants need to be watched carefully  and you need to not be afraid to prune out the material that is wasting your resources and not producing in a healthy way in order to make your landscape more sustainable.  You can do this through deadheading and pruning.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.