Home Gardening

North Mississippi Gardening Tips
June, 2005

Flowers

Because of our long growing season, it is not too late to continue to seed summer annuals like zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, spider flower and others this month.  There is plenty of time for these annuals to mature and produce flowers.  Annual vines can also continue to be seeded this month. Remember to water these young plants during the dry, hot summer.

To keep annual plants looking neat and blooming well, remove spent blossoms and yellow foliage periodically.  All the annuals listed above would benefit from this grooming.  To fill those empty spaces in your borders purchase summer-flowering annual transplants in four-inch or quart pots from your favorite garden center.   These may look small but will quickly fill the area.  Good choices would be ageratum, coleus, geranium and salvia.

The garden is full of blooms now.  Take the time to frequently cut a bouquet to bring inside and enjoy.  The best time to cut flowers is in the early morning. When cutting flowers it is a good idea to take a bucket of water with you to put the cut stems in while you wander all over your yard trying to make up your mind what to cut next.

To keep those blooms coming for many bouquets, don’t forget to deadhead (removal of spent blossoms).  Cannas, stokesia, coreopsis, catmint are a few that will reward you with additional blooms if deadheaded.

Container Plants

The secret of successful containers lies in regular feeding and watering.  Check containers daily and water them whenever the potting mix feels dry.  During our hot summers, containers in full bloom may need watering twice a day.  Hanging baskets pose the biggest problems.  Being up high, you cannot always reach them easily to water.  When you do, they drip all over you, and if they dry out badly the water just runs off the surface without soaking in.  Fortunately, there are various products and devices to help with these problems.  If you forget to feed regularly, use slow-release fertilizer pills, granules or sachets.  If watering is a problem, try self-watering pots or add a water-retaining gel to the soil before planting.  Some potting mixes now come with the water-retaining agent already mixed in. If you have several awkward baskets to water, it might be worth investing in a long-handled, hooked, watering attachment for your hose.

Fruits and Nuts

June is harvest month for many of our home fruits.  Blackberries are among the home fruits you will enjoy harvesting this month. After the blackberry harvest remove old fruiting canes.  They are going to die anyway and early removal makes room for the young canes that will bear next year’s crop to grow more vigorously.  Be sure to fertilize the young canes.  It is also a good idea to prune the top of the developing canes back by several inches to encourage lateral branch development.  This will increase the number of fruiting branches for a bountiful harvest next summer.

Slowly soak fruit trees and bushes if there has been no significant rain in a week.  This is especially important for fruit plants that have been newly transplanted this winter or spring.

Groundcovers and Lawns

You can continue to seed warm-season grasses such as Bermuda and zoysia. Keep these summer grasses well fertilized with a high-nitrogen lawn fertilizer.

Be careful not to cut your fescue (cool-season) lawn too low during this hot month.  While summer grasses respond to low cutting heights, the weakened fescue lawn cannot tolerate this during hot, dry weather. The best way to help your fescue lawn through this period is to keep it well watered and properly cut. 

Trees and Shrubs

June is the month to begin taking softwood cuttings.  This type of cutting is taken from current season’s growth.  Softwood cuttings should be from new growth that is firm, mature and slightly brittle.  To test the branch tip to see if it is at the right stage of growth bend it to about a 90-degree angle.  If it snaps instead of bending, it is right for make a softwood cutting. 

Plants that root easily from softwood cuttings include azalea, aucuba, crapemyrtle, boxwood, camellia, Chinese holly, English ivy, Japanese holly, photinia and privet.  Go by your local Extension office and pick up a copy of Information Sheet 207, Propagating Plants For the Home Landscape for details on how to take cuttings.

Vegetables

By this month we are harvesting Irish potatoes, bulb onions, cabbage, broccoli and other early vegetables. By mid-month you early bird gardeners may be enjoying your first “mess” of green beans and plenty of fried green tomatoes—possibly a red tomato or two.

Don’t worry if the first flowers fall off your yellow squash plants without producing squash.  These are male flowers.  You can tell the difference because male flowers have a green stem.  The female flowers have a little squash at the base of the flower that develops after the flower is pollinated.

Don’t forget to side dress your vining crops like cucumbers, muskmelon, watermelon, pumpkins, gourds, and winter squash, when they first begin to “run.”   A general recommendation for side dress applications of ammonium nitrate for vegetables is 1 pint of 34-0-0 (ammonium nitrate) per 100 feet of row or three and one-third tablespoons per 10 feet of row.

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.