George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Fixing a “Messy” August Garden

August 16th, 2022

   Gardens can still look reasonably good this time of year if you’ve stayed on top of maintenance, policed for pests, and kept things watered.

August gardens sometimes can look a bit, well, “unkempt.”

   However, strings of 90-degree days and other life matters have a way of eating into garden care, leading to August yards that, well, aren’t always at the top of their game.

   No need to give up and pull the shades until frost, though. The situation might look worse than it really is.

   A few hours of focused course corrections can bring many botanical messes back into quick order.

   Seven issues and how to fix them:

Floppy plants

   Staking known floppers like sedum and asters from the outset is the best strategy, but if you didn’t do that, corral them now by inserting three bamboo stakes around plants and tying them with green jute into a “straitjacket.”

   Flopping perennials that already have bloomed can be cut back or cut down nearly to the ground, especially ones that have browned or been attacked by bugs or disease. (Catmint, daylilies, iris, peonies, salvia, yarrow, and beebalm are good examples.)

“Dead-heading”

   This gardening term means pinching, snipping, or pruning off old flower heads after they’ve finished blooming.

   This not only neatens the garden quickly but may encourage the plant to rebloom. It also keeps plants from wasting energy growing seeds that you don’t want.

   Dead-heading makes the most noticeable difference on big-petaled species and/or species that hold their flowers high on the plant, such as roses, hardy hibiscus, peonies, coneflowers, and tall garden phlox.

Lanternflies: The Grownups Are Here

August 9th, 2022

   Though the spotted lanternfly has been annoying a lot of central-Pennsylvania gardeners for two or three years now, not everyone has experienced the misfortune yet of hosting this new Asian import in their yard.

Spotted lanternflies often congregate in numbers like these.
Credit: Penn State Extension

   Be ready. You may be about to meet them for the first time.

   Lanternflies morph into their adult form starting in late July and really become noticeable in August and September.

   This is when they become gray flying insects, about the size of a pinky tip, with black spots on the wings. When they go to fly, they open a second set of wings that reveal a distinctive red-orange color with black spots.

   Although they don’t technically “swarm,” they do tend to show up in rather large masses – enough to almost blanket the ground in some cases.

   One oddity about their behavior is that they can be really numerous in one area one year but then seemingly disappear the next. Or they’ll be all over one neighborhood but not in another one nearby.

Three different life-stage looks of the spotted lanternfly.
Credit: Penn State Extension

   I think that a lot of gardeners/yardeners are going to experience adult lanternflies for the first time this year because a lot of people earlier this summer were wondering about strange new little crawling and hopping black bugs with white spots.

   A few weeks ago, the mystery was little crawling/hopping red bugs with white spots and black trim.

   Both of these were the nymphal stages of the grownup lanternflies we’ll be seeing this month.

   Since the nymphs don’t look much like adult lanternflies, it’s no wonder first-timers didn’t make the connection. But once you’ve seen the nymphs and the adults in action, both stages are pretty memorable.

That Fertilizer Question…

August 2nd, 2022

   One question I get a lot – and can’t answer very well – is when and how much to fertilize plants.

Do we really need to use all of these?

   It’s another one of those gardening questions where the only truly accurate answer is, “It depends.”

   Factors include the nutrients already in your soil, the time of year, the weather, the particular plants, your expectations, and a handful of other environmental and plant-performance variables.

   It’s really impossible to make a blanket recommendation to always fertilize Plant A with Product B at Time C.

   Although some plants really do benefit from supplemental fertilizer at least some of the time, I’ve always believed that gardeners fret about fertilizer more than necessary.

   The bottom line for me is that if a plant is performing reasonably well, it doesn’t need fertilizer.

   Most of the time, plants are able to mine the nutrients they need from the soil – especially if the gardener has been adding nutrition from organic toppings such as compost, leaves, and/or mulch.

   That’s particularly true with trees, shrubs, evergreens, and even most perennials. These have efficient root systems (at least in reasonably friable soil) and may never need any help from your store-bought bags and bottles.

   If that’s not true, ask yourself, “How did plants ever manage to survive before Miracle-Gro was invented?”

Eight Weed Mistakes

July 26th, 2022

   One day earlier this month while down on my knees doing battle with the oxalis, it occurred to me that a lot can go wrong in a gardener’s weed-fighting efforts.

Oxalis is one of my many new weed nemeses.

   A lot can go wrong anywhere in the garden, for that matter. But narrowing it down to weeds, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or even make things worse by not pulling the right levers.

   On the other hand, this is one battle we can win if we do enough things right.

   After 34 years of tending my previous Cumberland County third of an acre, weeds were little more than a minor annoyance.

   To get there, though, I muddled and botched my way through plenty of lessons. I thought I’d share eight of them with you here… on the off-chance that you’re getting fed up with a never-ending stream of green invaders by now.

   1.) The curse of bare ground. Ever hear the saying that “weeds are nature’s way of healing bare soil?” It’s true because bare soil erodes, and the way nature conserves soil is by putting something there to keep it in place.

   That “something” is usually the first plant that can seed or creep its way into an opening and then muster enough gumption to fend off competitors. Weeds fit that description.

   The solution is to fill all ground with plants that you want, whether it’s grass in a lawn, wall-to-wall shrubs and perennials in a border bed, or groundcovers under a tree.

   You might’ve heard the saying that “if you have too many weeds, you don’t have enough plants.” That one’s also true.

   If you don’t/can’t be fully planted, the second best thing is to keep the ground covered with enough organic mulch that it keeps a lid on the germination of new weed seeds.

   2.) Never let a weed go to seed. It’s easy for weed troubles to spiral out of control if you run low on yanking stamina, hurt your back, get busy on other things, go away for two weeks in June, or any number of other weed-diverting activities.

   Weeds are such prolific seeders that if you let them mature enough to produce viable seeds, a single plant can sometimes lead to thousands of new weeds.

No Blueberries for Me

July 19th, 2022

   I’m beginning to think that maybe nature has banned me from the blueberry list.

The blueberry production I used to get.

   At my previous place in Cumberland County, I harvested quarts of tasty berries every summer from five blueberry bushes I planted along my western backyard border.

   The main thing I learned was to drape and secure a sturdy plastic mesh net over the plants just as the berries were forming so the birds wouldn’t get them first.

   One year I experimented without a net and didn’t get a single berry. Birds ate every last one a few days before each berry was about to ripen.

   With a net in place, I found blueberries to be reliable, trouble-free producers that needed very little care and no spraying. I even considered them to be the easiest fruit crop to grow in a home garden.

   Ah, the good old days.

   Fast-forward to my Pittsburgh “landscape,” and my harvest from seven plants this summer has been a smattering adding up to little more than a pint.

   Like everything else here, it’s been an uphill battle in the blueberry patch.