- Relevant factors when planting ground cover
- Go with the seasonal and environmental conditions when planting
Are you planning to green an area in the garden with a ground cover? A good choice in many ways! With a planned and purposeful planting, however, you should pay attention to a few things - including the right time of year.
Ground covers are usually planted in late summer
Relevant factors when planting ground cover
Ground covers are popular with both beginners and advanced hobby gardeners - because they have extremely versatile advantages and can therefore be used for a wide variety of purposes. These include above all:
- Weed control/ saving of weeding work
- Stabilization of exposed areas and embankments
- low plant ornament
- soil-improving underplanting of tall plants
- structure-forming ornament in flowerbeds
When considering when to plant groundcover, consider the purpose. Depending on the project, other plantings are more or less involved.
The location is also important. Depending on whether the area to be greened is sunny and poor soil or semi-shady and rich in humus, there is more or less tolerance with regard to the planting time.
Go with the seasonal and environmental conditions when planting
To say it in advance: the general rule for the best time to plant groundcover is late summer. This is because the main vegetation period for most other plants is over here, so that the groundcover has less vigorous competition to conquer its territory. At the same time, the first frost is not to be feared, which could seriously affect the young plants.
This rule applies above all if you want to use the ground cover in the classic way as a practical weed killer. Because the most stubborn weeds such as groundweed, stinging nettle or couch grass are particularly vigorous and almost vigorous in spring, which is generally considered the usual time for planting. They then make it unnecessarily difficult to defend the ground cover against the inexhaustible top dogs.
For the other planting purposes listed above, it is also advisable to follow the late summer rule, but it depends on the variety - slow-growing species such as hazel root or ysander benefit greatly from it, but it is not absolutely necessary for fast-growing species such as ivy.
The rule is even less relevant if the area to be planted does not provide any conditions that are particularly vulnerable to vegetative competition: This applies above all to lean, sandy heath soils or stony slopes, which also offer little basis for weeds to proliferate. Ground covers that do well in such soils, such as thyme, fragrant stonecrop or stonecrop, can also be planted here in spring or simply sown.