(upbeat music) - I'm Erik with Landscape Garden Centers.

And we're going to talk about bulletproof plants.

(upbeat music) You think you don't have a green thumb and you're really scared to even try any plants.

I'm going to give you maybe half a dozen good plants you shouldn't be able to kill.

These plants I'm going to give you some that are for full sun and some that are in partial shade or shade.

But remember, most of these, if not all these plants need to have well-drained soil.

We keep on saying that, but well-drained soil will make your life so much easier.

And what do I mean when I say well-drained soil?

If you dig a little bit of a hole and you pour water into it and the water sits there for days upon end that is not well-drained soil.

What you want to have is, when you dig a hole, you pour water into it, it takes a period of time, maybe an hour or half an hour for it to drain away, that would be well-drained soil.

If you need to make well-drained soil, you're going to have to remove a bunch of the poorer soil, add organic matter into there, and then make sure that it's draining away from where these plants are going to go.

So let's get to the plants.

Some of the diehards we always know is a daylily.

Daylilies are tried and true, the easiest plants and they will reproduce and they're easy to share.

When I say share, meaning as if your neighbor has a whole bunch of these, go ahead and ask them if you can actually borrow a couple of them or just buy them.

Daylilies are really easy, they will keep on coming back year after year, it is a perennial.

It will flower once.

And typically these flower during the summertime.

So tend to look at lots of yellows and oranges, reds, and purples.

That will be really good color palette to choose from.

And they will probably be anywhere from 18 to two feet tall, with some of the flowers getting up to three feet tall.

One that's good for shade, hostas.

Hostas are hot, they are popular.

They're easy to grow.

Once again, well-drained soil.

But the hosta has so many different variations of the leaf.

Some of them will have a blue tint.

These will flower once also.

And they will shoot up a stem with the flowers on them.

Typically the flower colors are going to be a white or a lavender flower color.

Those will be blooming later on in the summer.

And these are, hostas are best for shade.

Another one for shade, which in some cases, it's been around forever and a lot of people have seen them are the bleeding heart or dicentra.

Very, very nice plant to have.

But it'll have these little heart shaped flowers that come out.

But it's a very, very tough plant, once again, this is a perennial.

Which means the plant is going to grow once throughout the year, flower.

and then at the end of the year it'll just die back to the ground.

All of these perennials are really awesome because these are going to be able to be shared.

They're shareable plants.

So if you see them at your parents' house, and you'd like to share them, the best time to share them is going to be in the spring and the fall where you can just go and take a section of the plant, but make sure that plant is big enough.

12 inch diameter plant would probably be the best.

And you just take a quarter of that off, remove it and make sure you plant it at the same depth.

Another good one solid one is, of course the Iris.

Iris are really tough, they will spread.

Iris are good to have in an area where they're allowed to spread.

But they also have perimeters.

Basically surrounded by a house, a building, concrete something that kinda keeps them confined.

That would be a really good plant to use.

These do really well facing east.

So basically full sun, but maybe the Eastern sun.

Another one that's been used a lot is basically nepeta, cat mint.

This one is very fragrant.

It is a lower growing plant, about two to three feet wide.

It's bulletproof, you cannot go wrong with these.

These will want full sun.

When you're going to plant a plant.

What you want to do, dig a hole the size of this plus two to three inches around the outside of it and about maybe an inch or so below it and make sure that soil is loose.

Once you take it out of the container you're going to plant it in stick it into the ground and then tuck the soil around it.

This is very normal.

When you have roots that are exposed like this you can scratch those roots apart.

So then that way they grow into the softer soil.

This is a dianthus.

This would like full sun, well-drained soil.

It does very well.

It's a great one for spring blooming.

Just remember, you may think you don't have a green thumb, but these plants will convince yourself that you can actually grow something.

I'm Erik with Landscape Garden Centers and keep it growing.

(light music)