Fair / 3° F
Late summer chores will enhance next year’s garden
Published 6:00am Saturday, August 23, 2008Don’t give up now. Keep pulling those weeds. Any that go to seed will give you a gazillion plants next summer.
Crabgrass is going to seed now. Be sure not only to pull it up in the garden but to bag it and get it out of Dodge. If you compost it, be prepared for more grass.
Most home compost piles don’t get hot enough to kill weed seeds.
If the skunks have tilled up your yard looking for grubs, you have half the work already done for you. You will need to reseed the grub-blasted lawn, anyway.
If you have been cutting your grass less than three inches tall, you are seeing the result now in a brown crispy lawn, full of sprouting weeds. They like the sun exposure short grass gives them.
How is the perennial bed looking? A bit ratty? Now is the time to plant a few new varieties and divide and transplant many perennials.
It is the perfect time to redo your iris and peonies. Iris has a bad habit of dying out in the middle of the clump leaving only the outside ring of plants to flower.
Cut the leaves off the plants you dig up and replant in a ring with the “toes” pointing out.
They like to sunbathe, so cover the rhizomes with just enough soil to hold them in place until their roots get established.
Now is also the time to sprinkle annual seeds around for next year.
Let one lettuce plant go to seed and you will have the earliest lettuce in town next spring.
It may not be in the row, but you can work around that.
If you didn’t thin your apples to one or two per bunch last July, and have a heavy crop, brace the branches or thin them now.
A strong wind storm can literally tear the overloaded branch off the tree.
Pick up any windfalls and remove them from the yard. Not only do they attract wasps but, more often than not, are quickly infected with the larvae that make those railroad tracks in your apples.
They stay in the soil to hatch into moths next spring that lay eggs in your apples that turn into worms that can instantly spoil an appetite when bitten into.
The Plant Clinic at the University has detected pine wilt in a Scots pine, its usual host.
The needles go from grayish green to yellowish green then brown. They die in a few weeks to several months. There is no cure.
The infected tree should be removed and burned or buried because the beetles that spread the nematodes will emerge from the tree and fly to other trees carrying the nematodes that get into and destroy the resin cells of the pine.
Don’t store the trees for firewood for the same reason. Norway or blue spruce, Douglas fir, cedar and hemlock seem to be immune.
Pick a cool day and get out and get dirty. Your gardens will appreciate it.
