Veggies, ratty daylilies and tortured maples

September 4th, 2010

   Now’s not the beginning of the end for vegetables. It’s the time to yank petered-out summer crops and reload the garden with fall crops.

   Few people do this. As the tomatoes fizzle and the cukes die from wilt, most gardeners wind down for the season. Not me. I take advantage of the 8 weeks or so of frost-free weather still to come by planting crops that’ll mature in cooler weather.

   The next two weeks are fine to direct-seed beets, carrots, lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips, kale and maybe even fast-maturing beans. We should still have time to squeeze in crops of transplanted broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts.

   Just keep newly seeded and planted veggie beds regularly watered. It’s been ridiculously hot and dry.

Ratty daylilies

    Daylilies are good survivor plants in central-Pa. landscapes, but that doesn’t mean they’re trouble-free.

A daylily browning out from leaf streak, a fungal leaf disease.

   I’ve seen lots of daylily leaves that turned yellow, then brown, and end up looking pretty ratty by this time of year.

   The problem usually is a fungal disease called leaf streak. It typically attacks daylilies soon after bloom finishes.

   Some varieties are more prone to it than others, and weather plays a factor.

   A good solution is to just cut off infected leaves – even if means cutting whole plants down to a stub. Daylilies are durable enough that they’ll regrow fresh foliage that usually doesn’t get reinfected.

   Don’t compost the diseased leaves, though. Get them out of the yard.

   Dividing your clumps might also help, if you haven’t done that in a few years. Tightly packed plantings are more prone to this disease.

   A fresh coat of mulch each spring can help keep disease spores from splashing up onto the leaves.

   Preventative sprays (every 7 to 10 days starting in late spring) include trifloxystrobin, thiophanate-methyl and chlorothalonil. Neem oil is an organic option that might help.

Wind and maples

    Cutleaf Japanese maples are beautiful specimen plants, but their leaves also sometimes look ratty this time of year.

Leaf tips of a cutleaf Japanese maple beat up by wind.

   The intense heat washed out the color of many of them this year, but wind also can shred their leaves.

   Cutleaf Japanese maples are exceptionally thin-leafed, which means they’re quicker to dry out than, say, a thick-leafed sedum or a waxy-coated holly.

   When leaves dry, they brown around the edges. That happens especially to Japanese maples sited in full sun and especially during hot, dry summers.

   Watering counteracts some of this damage. So does mulching the ground with 2 to 3 inches of bark or leaf mulch. But much better is planting Japanese maples in wind-sheltered spots out of direct afternoon sun in the first place.

   Japanese maples also are a favorite target of Japanese beetles. So you might even be seeing some of that left-behind damage still, too.