If you’ve been growing a vegetable garden for a while, you might be feeling slightly disappointed that it looks plain and not very colorful. I started my gardening career with a vegetable garden, but after a couple of years I felt ready for something a little more pleasing and interesting to look at. After complaining to a friend about my dull looking garden, he suggested that I try planting some perennials as it could be a great way to liven up my garden without adding a lot of extra work.

Perennials are wonderful because you plant them once, and they grow every year. You do not need to replant them like you do with annuals and vegetables. Once the season is over the flowers and stems dry up and go away. In the spring the new flowers shoot up, without you having to worry about replanting them.

Before you go out and buy a bunch of perennial seeds and start planting, do yourself a favor and check your soil for proper drainage. If the soil stays saturated with water for long periods of time your plants will not grow properly. To test your soil, dig a hole in the garden area and fill it with water. Wait a day, and then fill it with water again. The water should be gone in 10 to 12 hours. If the hole isn’t completely dry, you will need to build a raised bed or seek out another solution for the drainage problem.

With perennials it is possible to have blooms nearly year round. With careful planning and some research you will have an unending array of colorful blooms in your garden. Plan out your garden area so that when one plant starts to wither and die, another one pops up and blooms to take its place. If you plant your seeds just right this will happen year after year.

Knowing which perennials to plant for the best showing takes some planning and research. You can do this research in books or online, sometimes even local gardening shows. Or, you can visit a local nursery or greenhouse and ask for assistance. The staff at these places is very knowledgeable about what will grow the best in your local area. Sometimes you can even find seed mixtures specially blended for your geographic climate.

With careful planning and some help from an expert either a book or local gardening expert, you can have beautiful blooms nearly year round in your garden. You can plant your seeds in groups and place different seeds in the group that have different growing cycles. That way there is always at least one plant in bloom in that section of the garden at all times. When one plant dies, another is just starting to bloom and so on.

When planting the seeds, you should space them out in small separate clumps according to the directions. Perennials tend to spread out and if you have too many too close together then they will end up trying to share the water and nutrients in the soil and will choke each other out. As you plant them, throw in a little bit of weak fertilizer to help the seeds get started. With a little bit of care in the beginning you should start to see flowers blooming up that will return year after year.