A bright and healthy landscape is a source of pride as a homeowner. Part of the picture involves choosing the right plants and useful supplies at your local garden supply center. The wide variety of flowers, shrubs, ferns, and trees that are available at the nursery will give you a better sense of the real potential of your landscape. Best of all, garden and landscape experts are at your disposal for good advice and landscaping industry contacts. Here’s a guide to finding the right materials from a plant nursery and landscape nursery in the Bergen County, NJ area.
Basic Planning Beforehand
Come to the nursery armed with photos of your home and landscape as well as notes about your short-term and long-term vision for your landscape.
To ensure that the nursery experts help you choose the right plants, check the sun exposure by getting some daytime photos of morning and evening of all the places you want to add plants. Check for soil moisture by waiting after a rain and feeling the soil 6 inches deep.
You can arrive at the nursery carte-blanche and ready to do a full facelift of your landscape, but it’s better to come with some sort of game plan or at least an idea of how you want your outdoor spaces to feel.
A Healthy Plant Selection
The choice of adopting healthy plants over starting from seeds will save you toil and trouble. The success rate of seeds in a new environment is far lower than in a controlled environment like a plant nursery. Any gardener will tell you that it’s far easier to transfer plants between pots than to start from fresh. The healthy environment propagated by the gardeners at the nursery gives you a wonderful starting point to choose healthy plants that are ready for their new home.
Native Plants
The plants native to the Hudson Valley area have evolved to thrive in your landscape. While imported exotic plants may look beautiful and perfectly match your design aesthetic, they will require far more watering and maintenance than their native counterparts. Natives, on the other hand, will rarely need any additional watering other than what rain and snow provide. Similarly, they typically don’t need much fertilizing as they have adapted to the local climate over millions of years and take the benefits of each season. Best of all, plants native to the area are incredibly beautiful and will help your landscape feel much more settled.
The Right Tools and Supplies
Plant and landscape nurseries have a variety of tools and supplies: all you could ever need for a successful landscaping project. They have all of the tools for any project (short of agriculture or a botanical garden). The experts will help you choose the proper soil, compost, fertilizer, seeds, trellises, landscape fabric, edging, and other materials to get your garden going quickly.
Access to the Right Contacts
Every plant and landscape nursery has a selection of contacts for trusted landscape contractors that can help you achieve your dream landscape, without you doing all of the hard work. Even if you have the greenest thumb and all the time in the world, sometimes the work just gets a little too much. Beyond just gardening, these contacts will help you set up the landscape features you’ve been dreaming about to make your whole landscape the perfect combination of function and aesthetics.
