Planting Your New Grasses
Planting Native Grasses is the same as with other perennials.
Dig your hole twice as wide and deep and do some back filling.
Water your plants a couple of hours before you plant. This allows for them or any other perennial to hydrate before the big move.
If your ornamental is container-grown, you will remove the plant from the pot and loosen or fluff the roots.
If your plant is so pot-bound that the roots go round and round, you may want to take a sharp knife and score the roots in one or two places to loosen things up.
Don't worry.
By cutting the roots, you force the grass or other planting to grow new feeder roots and this is a good thing.
When dividing a clump to transplant, make sure it is well hydrated and take a generous root ball with it.
Keep well watered until your plants are established in their new locations.
Spring is suitable for most grasses, though cool-season growers often do well planted in Autumn. Ornamentals are sensitive to soil level, especially when young. Ideally, the crown of the plant should sit slightly above the soil line.
Plant them to deep and your ornamentals will die off from crown rot. Plant it to high can cause them to dry out and die.
Spacing has less to do with culture than design.
Smaller plants are relatively easy to transplant, so if your budget and energy allow, young plants can be densely planted for a quick effect and then rearranged as they grow larger or to your liking.
These plants do well in native habitats and are generally quite capable of establishing themselves in exposed soils. However, in the gardens you may wish to mulch the grounds around your plantings to keep weed down and moisture in.
Many species cannot tolerate mulches pushed right up near the crown. This practice often promotes crown rot and other issues.
When mulching, be sure to leave a couple inch barrier between the mulch and your grasses.
Mulch is most helpful to moisture-loving species, including many of the sedges and wood-rushes that grow naturally in leaf (mulch) covered areas.
Young plantings can be difficult to tell apart until you can learn to recognize them reliably from their vegetative characters. Until then , it is wise to label plants or to sketch simple planting charts to record your plants.
If you planned out a landscape on graph paper, fill in your paper plans now.
In time you will learn to recognize what your natives and others are, just by looking at them.
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