If you’re a flower gardener, you notice the first whiff of spring, whether it’s the verdant smell of rain mixing with thawed soil, or whether it’s the distant fragrance of hyacinth wafting to the nostrils, and something happens. A giddy sort of smile involuntarily spreads across your face. You find yourself making an unauthorized stop at the nursery on the way home from work, and suddenly your trunk is filled with three flats too many of flowers you don’t have time to plant.

However, staying out after dark, you make time.

Then, the dog days of summer reveal best laid plans gone to waste. Was the weather uncooperative, or did a plague of caterpillars wreak havoc on your petunias? Perhaps the problem was not enough organization to temper the inspiration. This year, implement these three tips in your flower garden, and ensure that your blooms look as glorious on Labor Day as you imagined they could be on St. Patrick’s Day.

Cast Your Shadow

An old adage shares that the best fertilizer is a gardener’s shadow. Although few of us have as much time to spend in our gardens as we’d like, a conscious effort to spend at least 5 minutes a day tending the garden goes a long way. In fact, it’s better for a flower gardener to spend 10 minutes a day on small garden tasks than to spend 2 hours on the weekend tending the same tasks.

Consider the usual problems all gardeners face, and how regular tending places the flower gardener at an advantage over the weekend warrior. If a few weed seeds germinate on Monday, those plants may have a tenacious hold on the soil by Saturday.

There’s no need to stoop; take a hoe for light soil cultivation, and the uprooted weeds will wither in the midday sun. On your daily weed plucking rounds, keep an eye out for signs of garden pests. Early intervention efforts enable you to use gentler methods like handpicking, before pests multiply out of control.

Go Native

It’s easy to get blindsided by lovely new plant introductions when the garden catalogs start arriving in your mailbox. Sometimes these new plants are rather expensive, as the propagation efforts of nurserymen can’t keep up with consumer demand.

Instead of impulsively falling for the alluring catalog descriptions of these new plants, consider adding some native plants to your landscape. Don’t confuse native with weedy or boring. Many native plants attract butterflies and other beneficial insects. Flower gardeners will like the fact that natives require little or no supplemental water, fertilizer, or pest control. Contact your local county extension office for native plant recommendations. When you’ve selected the best wildflowers to plant, buy from reputable vendors that propagate the plants responsibly, rather than from collectors that deplete native plant populations by digging them in the wild.

Concede to Mother Nature

All flower gardeners have a “problem spot” in their landscape. Maybe it’s that shady spot you try in vain to grow grass on each year, as ineffectual as a comb-over. Perhaps it’s an area that gets marshy in the spring, infecting various plants with rot, mildew, or black spot. Give yourself permission to lose that battle, in order that you may win the war.

Instead of cursing the thin patchy grass under the tree, install a rugged flowering groundcover that thrives in lean soil and shade, such as dead nettle or cushion spurge. Instead of sacrificing pricy perennials to rot and mildew, plant a flowering bog garden. If the boggy area isn’t conspicuous, make it the home of a new compost pile. In other words, when life gives the flower gardener lemons, make lemonade.