How to make shrubs grow faster is easy, just start by growing fast-growing shrubs and then ensure that you grow them in ideal conditions, and with the proper steps, you will encourage the production of more roots, and so you will see faster growth rate in your shrubs.
Your shrubs will also grow quicker when you grow them free from weeds and pests. Continue reading this article to learn all you need to know about encouraging a faster growth rate in shrubs.
How To Make Shrubs Grow Fast?
To make shrubs grow fast, you must test and fix the soil, as you grow them in the right conditions, pruning, watering, and fertilizing the shrubs, repelling pests and weeds, and adding some biological products such as fungi and earthworms, grow in the right location, and amend the soil.
– Test Your Garden Soil
The very first thing to do is to test your garden soil so that you would be confident in the type of the soil and how it will be actually growing. Testing the soil will help you decide what fast-growing shrubs can grow without problems in your garden. It can also tell you what products to use to fix the soil just in case your garden soil is unsuitable for shrubs.
You may also opt for trying out different DIY kits for testing soils, such as pH kits, soil moisture reader, etc. However, for a comprehensive result for your soil, collect different samples from the garden and take them to a lab or an extension office. They will give you the best results and even advise you on what you do.
– Grow Your Shrubs in an Ideal Condition
Before you start growing your shrubs or transplanting them to your yard, ensure that you know their best growing conditions. Growing your shrubs outside their preferred range will only lead to problems, as the shrubs will have stunted growth and grow slower than you want.
Think about temperature, pH, humidity, nutrients, water, and other factors, and make sure that you accomplish fixing them perfectly well. Do the test results of your soil match the needs of your shrubs? Also, you must adjust that if your preferred shrub would grow well in a yard with your recorded temperatures, but note that if not, look for suitable shrubs, to ensure that it will be growing without any trouble.
– Water Regularly
One excellent way to get fast growing plants is to water them as often as you have to. Watering plants do not just hydrate them; it helps them easily collect nutrients from the soil. Watering shrubs also help them stay healthy, so they will have the chance to grow as quickly as they can.
While you have to water the shrubs regularly, remember not to overwater them. When you overwater your plants, you expose them to different soil problems. For example, you may notice that your shrubs are sick of root rot. Just ensure that the plants get just the right amount of water, and do it sparingly or even give them a lack of water.
– Fertilize Often
Another great tip to get fast-growing plants is to fertilize them as occasionally as necessary. Nutrients are like building blocks, as shrubs need them to grow larger. If you want your shrubs to grow fast, you have to grow them in a nutrient-rich environment.
Without nutrients, the plants will get stunted or have no growth, and this is what would cause the shrubs to stop developing. Fertilize your shrubs with a lot of nitrogen and other nutrients. Nitrogen helps boost the growth rate of shrubs, especially when they are in their vegetative stage.
You can also increase the potassium content of the fertilizer to encourage more root production in the shrubs. The best fertilizer for shrubs is organic fertilizer, and this is because organic fertilizers have every nutrient that shrubs need to grow, so ensure that the soil is properly mixed with organic nutrients for your shrubs. Some organic sources of nutrients as rotted manure and compost.
– Prune When Needed
To make plants grow quickly, gardeners occasionally prune the plants. Pruning shrubs is completely safe for the shrubs so long as you prune them well, giving the new growing shoots a chance. When you prune shrubs, you encourage them to grow more branches and leaves, as two or more branches will grow out from a pruned branch. If you want your shrubs to look bushy, prune them.
Prune your shrubs safely so that you do not run into problems when growing the shrubs. Ensure to use very clean or sterile tools for your shrubs, as you do not want to expose the plants to microbes in dirty tools. Also, leave a considerable number of leaves on the shrubs so that they can carry out photosynthesis and heal quickly after you prune them.
– Ensure That the Shrubs Have Sufficient Light
Light is a very important factor to consider before growing shrubs. Shrubs can only grow when they have sufficient light, as they need light for photosynthesis, without which they cannot survive. When selecting a spot to grow shrubs in your yard, go for places with maximum light exposure.
Shrubs need a lot of light exposure, even more than smaller plants. This means that the more light exposure they have, the better. However, too much light exposure, especially in the summer when the heat is too much, can burn your shrub leaves.
Protect your shrubs with shade in summer and make sure that you grow them in a spot where they can get at least six hours of sunlight daily. Nevertheless, eight or more hours are ideal for the optimal growth of shrubs, as shrubs need more sunlight than smaller plants.
Why stress yourself by doing all the work just to make your shrubs grow fast? What if you simply grow shrubs that grow quickly so that your chance of having large plants quickly in your yard will increase? Check for shrubs in your area that grow quickly and then plant them in your yard, and this way you must also ensure that they are suitable for your yard.
Some examples of shrubs that grow quickly are butterfly bush, American hazelnut, ‘grace’ smoke tree, ebbing’s silverberry, Lynwood forsythia, mock orange, cherry laurel, green giant, and skip laurels. Though they grow to become trees, some popular plants that grow quickly as well are red cedar and Leyland cypress.
– Mulch the Soil
Mulching has a lot of uses for shrubs. For one, it helps to maintain soil quality, as mulch prevents external factors from entering and mixing with the soil. Mulch also stabilizes the soil temperature, as it prevents sunlight from directly hitting the soil. Mulch also keeps the soil moist for your shrubs, as it prevents water vapor from evaporating.
Mluch helps prevent soil-borne pests from entering the soil, especially if you use multiple layers of mulch, and it will preserve the right amount of humidity around the roots. So long as you mulch your plants carefully and leave a circular space around their stem, your plants will benefit so much from mulch. In addition, use hay, wood shavings, and tree bark to provide proper mulch.
– Remove Weeds
Do you want shrubs that will grow quickly, then, remove weeds immediately after you see them. Weeds will slow the growth of your shrubs, as they compete with the plants for nutrients in the soil. Sometimes, weeds can act as obstructions and block sunlight from reaching your shrubs.
The lack of nutrients and sufficient light exposure caused by weeds will surely give your shrubs stunted growth. This is why you have to keep your garden free from unwanted plants. Check below and make sure that you remove the little weeds present there, as some weeds do not mind growing below other plants because they would be a determining factor that is coming in the way.
– Repel Pests
When growing evergreen shrubs, and you want them to grow quickly, one of your major setbacks will be the presence of pests in your garden. Pests attack shrubs and make them sick. Instead of growing, your plants will use their nutrients and energy to heal themselves. This is why pests make shrubs grow very slowly.
Remove pests just as you see them, so make sure that you repel pests so that they do not have access to your shrubs. You can use insecticides and other products to keep your shrubs safe from pests.
Some of your shrubs grow slowly because of bad environmental conditions, pest attacks, weed competition, and other negative factors. Some shrubs can also grow slowly because of their variety, so you have to know the real cause of the slow growth before you find solutions.
– Add Mycorrhizal Fungi to the Soil
If you want fast growth of plants in your yard, here is a biological trick for you. Mycorrhizal fungi are fungi that are in a positive relationship with different types of plants. They attach themselves to plant roots and their colony helps connect the roots of different plants so that each plant will become one in a figurative sense.
This is very helpful, as plants can easily transfer or share nutrients with the help of these fungi. This means that so long as the soil is suitable and nutrient-rich, your shrubs will help each other and they will grow quickly. In short, you can get the fungi from gardening shops and with this, you must ensure that you read the instructions carefully and use them to avoid making mistakes.
– Add Earthworms to the Soil
Adding earthworms to the soil is another biological trick gardeners use to speed up the growth of plants as well as keep the plants healthy. If there are no earthworms in your yard, add some, as earthworms help to aerate the soil, keep your shrubs safe from some harmful microbes, and even supply nutrient deposits to the plants as they poop.
– Amend Your Soil
Even if the soil was nutrient-rich and optimal for your shrubs when planting them, you have to amend it occasionally. Amending soil keeps it nutritious and maintains its quality. There are different products to amend the soil with. What you choose to use depends on what you want to fix in the soil.
For faster shrub growth, you can amend the soil with perlite, compost, bones, and eggshells. These products do not just help to fix the structure of your soil so that it becomes well-drained and suitable for shrubs, they also help to increase soil nutrition. Most amendment products are organic.
Amend your soil some weeks before planting your shrubs. Also, amend the soil occasionally so that the soil can stay suitable for your shrubs. Consider the number of your amendment products, as using too much can be harmful to shrubs, and using too little may not be effective.
Conclusion
Shrubs will not grow slowly when you grow them in the right conditions, and now, some reminders from this article are:
- Some of the fastest-growing plants that you can grow in your garden are butterfly bush, American hazelnut, and ‘grace’ smoke tree.
- Test your garden soil, as it can help you decide the best shrubs to grow in your garden.
- If your soil could be better, fix it first before you introduce your shrubs.
- Ensure that you focus on factors such as temperature, humidity, light, etc., as they affect the growth rate of shrubs.
- Add organisms such as beneficial fungi and earthworms to the soil, as they will encourage faster growth in your shrubs.
Now, it is time to check your soil and ensure that it is suitable for your shrubs, so go wear your green thumbs and start righting the wrongs in your garden.
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