You don’t have to spend a fortune, or branch into plants-unknown if you want to have reliable blooms, and healthy foliage around your mailbox.  For the gardener who wants to keep things simple, a large bed of Irises around the mailbox provides March through May color, and lasting green foliage!

Fall is the best time to plant Irises if you want to guarantee spring blooming, so get your trowel ready!  As a very hardy perennial, they can be transplanted almost year-round and survive, but they prefer cooler temperatures, which help them adapt to new environments quickly.

Irises are one of the easiest plants to grow, and can be great fillers for a low-lying mailbox area that may catch a lot of street water. Irises love having their “feet” wet, but they can be equally successful in raised garden beds, and will produce large amounts of blooms with moderate amounts of watering.  A spot prime for Irises ideally will be an area that has a little shade, and soil that has some organic material in it, with a little sand mixed in (play sand from Home Depot can be substituted).

To prepare an Iris bed for planting, loosen the soil in the designated area, mixing in organic material or a little sand as needed. Make small mounds approximtely 12 -20 inches apart where your Irises will be planted, and set the bare root Iris plants on these mounds. Irises are planted just at the soil level, with the rhizome root system showing. Leave the rhizome exposed, and above the soil, but separate the small root system on either sides of the mounds you have just placed the Irises on.  Lightly cover the root system, and water.

Irises will spread by themselves through rhizome growth, and will fill in your garden within a few years, providing you with extra plants that can be divided and used elsewhere, or given to neighbors. It’s up to you whether you will want to plant only one color, or mix in several colors for interest.

Tips To Create This Look:

• Make sure that you do not mulch Irises, doing so will inhibit the plants growth, and can kill the plant.  For a neat edged look mulch can be dusted around the perimeter of the bed to keep down weeds.
• I recommend a tall variety of Iris for mailbox plantings, to add height to the bed, and to bring the blooms up to mailbox height.  Favorites of mine are varieties of tall Bearded Irises, who have double the bloom of other varieties of Iris, and look great from a distance!

Good luck with this bed idea, and let me know if you try it!  I’d love to hear from you!

For the sunny garden location that you don’t want to have to “baby” with lots of water and time spent weeding, try this great plan for an easy-care mailbox garden bed that will also add some impressive curb appeal!

This bed was designed with a 90 degree triangle shape, with the mailbox snug in the “bottom” corner, between the curb and the driveway. The two sides of this triangle that make up the right angle, are planted with five evenly spaced clumps of Variegated Liriope, right at the curb, and driveway line. The middle section depth is filled with bright Black Eyed Susans for summer and fall color. The back row (farthest from the street), running the length of the final line in our triangle, is filled with a row of Dwarf Fountain Grass, or what some call “Foxtail Fountain Grass.” All of these plants are hardy perennials that will self seed, and spread on their own accord.  They each do very well with minimal watering, and the Black Eyed Susans are a terrific native plant that not only bloom from summer to fall, but also attracts Goldfinches, who feed on the dried flower heads.

For those who prefer a visual aide, I’ve also prepared a visual layout of this garden to help you plan a garden of your own!

Hints for this Triangular Garden:

Variegated Liriope (or any Liriope for that matter), is amazingly hardy, and it is a great plant to use to fill in an area that you no longer want to weed.  The plant spreads prolifically via “runners,” and will form a beautiful carpet of grass that never needs mowing.  I recommend using Liriope in an area that you are comfortable with the plant eventually dominating, otherwise, you will find yourself constantly fighting it’s growth patterns, and make yourself miserable.  In this garden bed the Liriope is planted around perennial plants that can hold their own against it, and won’t be overrun completely. Concrete curbs and driveways are particularly great assets around a bed with Liriope in it, since they will contain much of the plant’s spreading habits, and provide year round color at your mailbox. I also recommend digging a trench edge around the back perimeter of the fountain grass, to both contain the plants within the bed over time, and set the design off with neatness and distinction from the turf grass of your lawn.

Blooms and Habits:

• Dwarf Fountain Grass will grow in clumps of up to 1-2 feet in height, and spread slowly. They especially look great as a border, when planted in groups.  The plant will not die back to the ground, maintaining its shape year round, with foxtail blooms turning pink in the fall, and remaining through the winter, where they look beautiful under snow.

• Liriope will grow 10-18 inches tall, and sport delicate purple flowers from late summer through mid fall. If left alone they will spread rapidly, but they make excellent garden plants when planted thoughtfully, and are pest and disease hardy.

• Black Eyed Susans are an easy-care native plant, that are virtually bullet proof, and look great in arrangements.  They can be trimmed back heavily in mid summer, when the stems begin to  look black, and will bloom again on the fresh growth, or you can prune them little by little to achieve continuous blooming, while retaining the height of the plant.  Black Eyed Susans grow approximately 18-24 inches.

If you are in the market for a new garden bed idea this fall, search through a few local or online plant sales, and try these plants around your own mailbox.

For some reason mailboxes are the last frontier in gardening.  Untouched and forlorn, most mailboxes sit naked on the curbside until a work-weary homeowner starts watching too much HGTV to unwind, or discovers a need to spruce up the curb appeal of their house to entice homebuyers.  Where have all the mailbox gardeners gone? I’d like to see more of what I call “Memorable Mailboxes,” so I’m going to begin my crusade for universal curb appeal with a recurring segment on mailbox gardening.  I want you to have a mailbox that boldly declares “Leave my Mortgage Statements here!”

Full Sun Stunner:  Zinnias Raise The Bar On Non-Stop Summer Blooms

Zinnias are amazing summer plants!  Requiring only a simple flower bed, a little water, full sun, and room to bloom, these summer flowers will last from late spring to the frost with “dead-heading.”  To plant a Zinnia mailbox bed, I recommend creating an edged, and slightly raised bed with topsoil mixed with leaf compost, or homemade compost, and optional fertilizer (either commercial grade granular formula, or a time-release capsul like Osmocote).  I plant groups of Zinnias about 3 inches apart to create a little fullness to a bed design before the plants really begin to root and take off growing.  Plant your Zinnias below the dirt line just lightly covered by a half inch of soil, and a lite dusting of mulch.  For hot weather plantings, give your Zinnias a head start by planting them, and watering them immediately before mulching, and watering again after mulching, to lock in moisture around the new root system.  Zinnias need only one or two weekly waterings, dependent on temperature, and rainfall, and prefer well drained soil.  Generally mulch will assist the plant in maintaining the minimal moisture Zinnias need for optimal health.  If your Zinnias begin to wilt, up the number of weekly waterings to compensate for dry weather.

Summer care: To keep your Zinnias cheerfully in bloom, deadhead with scissors blooms that begin to turn black on the petal tips, or fade.  These “spent” blooms have done their work, and trimming the blooms one or two leaves down from the flower will encourage constant growth, and flowering over the summer months.  Flower heads can be either discarded in the flowerbed for self-seeding, or dried in paper bags to catch seeds to be preserved for the following year.

Tips: Pruning doesn’t have to be a chore, you can keep a small pair of children’s scissors, or bypass pruners in the back of the mailbox, as a rainproof solution for quick “dead-heading!”  Then, whenever you check your mail, the tools you need to upkeep your garden are already at hand, and your postal worker will still have ample room inside the average mailbox to place mail, and small packages.

Your thoughts: Have you decorated your mailbox?  Have a picture?  I’d love to see it!  You can send it to my gmail account, greengardenista, I would love to post it here for the world to see!  Or, if you have a flickr photostream, include that link in a comment so the world can see it there! 

(Beautiful link picture by Sean Dreilinger)