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North Mississippi Gardening Tips
July/August, 2003

July-August

Hot dog! July and August in north Mississippi means picnics, fireworks, fresh vegetables and herbs from the garden. It also means continued efforts to stay cool, avoid heatstroke and still keep the yard and garden looking nice. Not a lot of planting going on in the garden now. My energies are mainly directed to keeping my four boys (3 children and 1 man/child/husband) from running amuck by bribing, threatening, cajoling, and otherwise, pitching an occasional conniption fit, to get them to help me with the harvesting, mowing, and weeding. All I have to say is thank the Lord I live so far out in the country that my Extension colleagues and clientele cannot see my yard and garden in late summer. Truth be told, my garden activities tend to peter out about late August and I just want to lolly-gag around in the shade, play in the sprinkler, ride the four-wheeler lickety-split over the terraces in the pasture and do all the other fun and senseless summer stuff. I can do this because I live in a very secluded area of north Mississippi and no one can see what I am doing unless they fly over with an airplane. You, however, should not act like this and should try to set an example for your friends and neighbors by working diligently in your yard, keeping it looking nice right up till frost! To aid you in this endeavor I have written a bunch of suggestions, tips and useful information for you to do during this time-so read on! Now, as for me, where is that four-wheeler key?

Annual Flowers and Vines

You can rejuvenate profuse-blooming annual plants by cutting them back, removing all leggy flowering branches. Fertilize these pruned plants and they will rebound with renewed vigor and more blooms. Soluble fertilizer applied with one of those hose-end applicators works great and gets the nutrients to the roots fast-you know, the way the old guy on TV who used to play Will Rogers keeps his yard looking lush and perfect! By this time, my petunias, bacopa, annual salvias and other annuals, look tired and worn out and this type of severe pruning gets them going again. Industrious gardeners can use this "whack-back, rejuvenating technique" to bring new life to the 'mid-life' crisis suffered by many annual flowers. If you use a lot of annuals in your landscape, stagger the cutting back of these plants by a week or two so that all the annuals won't look scalped at the same time.

Seed marigolds, zinnias and other fast growers for a fall bloom. Marigolds beat the tar out of mums, in my book, for long lasting fall color in the garden. These look great combined with the Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha) and the other tall blooming perennial salvias, like 'Indigo Spires' and 'Costa Rico Blue.'

Bulbs, Corms, Roots and Rhizomes

Bet your bearded iris looks sickly right now. Actually that is normal, as bearded iris go somewhat dormant after bloom. Now is the time to cut them back, divide and reset them. After digging them up, I usually detach the younger rhizomes from the older, woody-looking "mother rhizome" and replant these young ones. I chunk the old mother rhizome over the fence to the cows. Choose a sunny, well-drained spot and don't cover the young rhizomes completely. Don't pinch those dahlias again or you may disrupt the bloom! Watch out for the slugs and snails eating the elephant ears and caladiums. Control these nasty critters by putting out bait or shallow pans of stale beer.

Fruits and Nuts

The blackberry crop is over and it is time to remove the canes that bore fruit this year. These will die anyway and you might as well get them out of the way of the young canes that will supply next year's crop of berries. I usually remove the top foot of these young canes to encourage side branching. This increases the number of fruiting branches for next year. Keep these young canes watered and fertilized during the next couple of months to promote strong, vigorous growth.

Remember to keep the fig bushes well mulched and watered during these typical dry, hot months. You will be rewarded with an abundance of fruit if you can keep the birds and squirrels from getting it first!

Don't be too hasty to maintain the uniformity of your strawberry patch. Let those runners develop into new daughter plants. Keep the weeds under control by applying mulch around these young plants.

Perennial Flowers and Vines

I have used the "whack-back, rejuvenation technique" on hostas, daylilies, Shasta daisies, rudbeckias and other perennials flowers during mid to late summer. Sometimes, this encourages new bloom, sometimes not, depending on when I do the 'whacking-back.' I would encourage you to experiment with this and make notes of what works for you. Always remember to keep these severely pruned plants adequately watered and give them a weekly dose of soluble fertilizer to spur that new growth. Late summer and fall blooming perennials like the asters, mums, salvias, etc. should NOT be cut back as you will be cutting off, or at the least, delaying the bloom period. Keeping that mulch thick (4 inches) on perennial flowers keeps you off the water hose duty by retaining the soil moisture. It also keeps you off the hoe duty by reducing the number of weeds.

Trees and Shrubs

The deluge of rain we got in May (I think I heard someone say we got 14 inches) has caused some real disease problems. Mercy! No wonder blackspot and other foliar diseases are rampant in my garden. There was no way to keep fungicides applied to prevent these diseases, so I didn't waste my time or money. I guess my gardening mentality has been 'see what survives and plant more of it.' As you can expect my hybrid tea roses have no foliage whatsoever because of blackspot, but by George, some of them have blooms! I'm wondering how long they can keep that up with no foliage? If you were smart, as soon as the rains stopped you should have been on the fungicide spray program. There are several broad-spectrum fungicides available that help keep leaf spots, blights and other disease problems under control when used properly. Check with your local nurseryman or Extension office for specific recommendations. If you live in the Tupelo (Lee county) area you can bring your diseased plant to the North Mississippi Horticulture Center where trained Master Gardeners can take a digital picture of your sick plant and e-mail it to the Extension plant pathologist at Mississippi State University for diagnosis and treatment recommendations. These trained volunteers can also assist you with plant and insect identification.

Hours of the Hortcenter are 9:00 am to 12:00 noon, Monday, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Call the Hortcenter toll-free 1-888-920-HORT (4678) for home horticulture information and directions to the Center.

Vegetables and Herbs

If you were a wise gardener you staggered your plantings of sweet corn, beans, squash and other vegetables so that the harvest will be spread out over a longer period and you can avoid the "everything ripening and rotting at the same time syndrome." Didn't do that? Well, I bet if your garden is as big as mine, you are in the midst of a picking, shucking, plucking, shelling, snapping frenzy trying to keep up with the harvest! This is the way the Kelly/Scott Klan handles this dilemma. All my brothers, in-laws, mama and some cousins are what I would call 'mega-gardeners.' So we do what we call team harvesting and preserving-kind of like the barn raising of the past. We all help each other and share the surplus-works pretty well and we have a big old time in the process, visiting and gossiping. You do know you can still plant bush green beans and bush butterbeans (nobody calls them lima around here) in early to mid-July for a fall harvest. Sow beets, lettuce, mustard, turnips and carrots in August for a fall crop of these vegetables.

Lelia Scott Kelly, Ph.D., writes North Mississippi Gardening Tips monthly and is a Horticulture Specialist with the Mississippi State University Extension Service. Her office is in the North Mississippi Research & Extension Center, Verona.