hi Minnesota gardeners I'm Julie Weisenhorn with University of Minnesota
Extension and I am here in my pollinator
friendly landscape, once again to
talk about plant selection. In other
words, right plant and right place.
The entry garden is a very important
part of a home landscape. It's the part
of the landscape that welcomes visitors
to your landscape to your home it
highlights your front door and points
people to the door so that they know
where it is and how to come in it's also
a great place that you can put a lot of
variety and get away with it so in my
entry garden here I have it's a little
early in the spring yet or in the summer
but we've got some things blooming and
I've got a lot of native plants here you
can see the different heights you can
see different textures we've got some
flowers that are blooming at this point
but lots of different variety here and
that's one of the great things about an
entry garden
when you're choosing a plant for a
location in your yard there are three
important things to look at one is your
soil type your Sun amount and the space
that you have available for planting so
soil Sun space so let's take a look at
my site this was a site of a plant that
just didn't make it through our tough
winter so it's time to replace it with
something different the soil that I have
here is pretty good soil one way that
you can tell is you can have a soil test
down at the University of Minnesota soil
testing lab but you can also find out
about your soil just by taking a handful
of it and pinching it into a ball a
tight ball if it holds a shape like this
you know you've got some clay in there
if it doesn't hold a shape at all it's a
sandy soil if you give it a poke with
your finger and it breaks and crumbles
like this you can consider it a clay
loam a little bit of clay a little bit
of loam loam is comprised of plant
debris that's broken down some sand and
good aggregates you can see the
different sizes here this is a good
growing soil if you pinch it together
and you can't break it apart even as
hard as you try to poke it with your
finger you know you've got some heavy
clay soil it's important to know that
because the soil is the foundation of
your garden you want to be sure to have
a good foundation just like you would if
you were building a house
the second important thing to consider
is the amount of space that you have
available for the plant and how big the
plant is going to get and the best tool
for that
good old measuring tape you want to
think about access also so here we have
our rain barrel we have a hose here we
want to be able to access that easily
right we also have a drain down here and
this drain has a pipe that comes out
this side of it so I know I can't plant
over to this area but we don't want to
have a plant that's blocking that dream
we want that to flow easily we also
don't want to block our hose access you
don't want to drag a hose through that
plant so you want to be sure that that's
accessible and easily easy to get to the
other thing to think about too is
overhangs is to look up and to decide
where that overhang is you want your
plant to be under the overhang or
outside the overhang any excess water
that might come down from that roof you
don't want it to land in the middle of
the plant it can be really hard on it it
can cause a plant to fall it can also
ride out the center of the plant so you
want to be sure that that plant is under
the overhang or outside the overhang so
I'm gonna use my measuring tape
I've already dug a hole here for
demonstration purposes but I'm going to
show you how I came to this I looked at
the space I had and I measured out about
24 inches like that and if I Center that
on the post that I put in here and then
check it this way as well I can see that
I'll have plenty of room for that plant
to grow see that again it's 12 inches
here lots of room here access lots of
room over here likewise it's not gonna
block the catmint
and it's not going to block the hose
over here so I know that my plant should
be about 24 inches wide at the mature
size so this is a size that it will grow
to and reach in its mature size not the
size necessarily that you'll buy in a
pot at the nursery then you want to look
at
Heights and when you're thinking about
Heights think about how the plant will
frame your house whether it will block a
window or not or a door you want to
think about also the rule of thirds now
the rule of thirds has to deal with the
more artistic part of design here we
have a cat mint plant it gets to be
about 24 inches tall so we want to think
of a plant that's going to be a little
bit taller than that about 1/3 taller
than that so that would be about a 36
inch plant that will give you a really
nice movement from the lower plant to
the taller plant to your house creates a
nice blending of plant and building
together so if I look at this plant here
and this plant let's say 36 is what we
figured for the heights based on the
height of the cat mint there oh there we
go
so 36 inches that would look pretty good
if it's a little bit above that it'll
show above the cat mint it'll be a nice
height over here to compliment the
planter looks like a good height so our
plant size we're looking for is about 24
inches by 36 inches and I say about
because it may not be perfectly that
high might not be exactly so you can get
within a range of that and be pretty
safe
so the third s is Sun and we want to
determine how much Sun our space is
going to have this is a pretty full Sun
location but morning Sun is different
than afternoon Sun this is an easterly
facing location so the Sun is going to
be cooler less intense less likely to
actually cause your plants to wilt in
the heat afternoon Sun on if we were on
the other side of my house that's the
Western facing part of the house and
that Sun is very intense we know this
because as gardeners we like to do our
hard work in the morning when it's
cooler and save the afternoon for
sitting in the shade and reading a good
book about plants of course so one of
the things that you want to do is you
want to actually observe the amount of
light that your space has now I'm
looking at this it's 12:30 in the middle
of the day and we're still in a fairly
bright location right so here we want to
determine well we've got about 6 hours
of full Sun that is considered full Sun
8 would be even better but we have about
6 hours of full Sun here so we can look
for a plant that will tolerate some full
Sun and will grow well in that the other
that we might think about is the
afternoon now in the afternoon the plant
will be in the shade so a full two part
Sun type plant is what we're looking for
a plant that will do well in full Sun 6
or plus hours or parts on about 3 to 6
hours
this ends part 1 of this series of right
plant right place in part 2 we're going
to look at actually using a plant
database for plant selection plugging in
all these characteristics that we want
in a plant and seeing what we get part 3
we're going to talk about actually
choosing the plant and putting it in the
ground for more information about any
kind of planting or gardening you can
visit the Extension umn edu yard and
garden webpages
you
