North Mississippi Gardening Tips
September, 2007
Trees and Shrubs
The effects of the summer drought may just now be showing up on large trees. Watch for discoloration, drying, dieback, and premature leaf-fall as signs that the tree is being affected. Use a watering spike placed intermittently around the perimeter of the tree’s roots or coil a long soaker hose in concentric rings around the base of the plant radiating out with the rings until you reach the edge of the leaf canopy. Turn on the water and water thoroughly and deeply. Watch for water stress on shrubs as well and water deeply when plants show signs of stress. Pay particular attention to supplying adequate water to those trees and shrubs that were newly planted this spring.
The trunks of dogwoods, flowering cherries, crabapples, flowering peaches, and flowering plums are easily damaged by the over zealous weed-eater operator. Even the slightest damage may make an entrance for borers or other damaging insects. All trees in the landscape are susceptible to this type of damage. One way to avoid this is to apply a layer of mulch around the base of all trees. This eliminates the need for weed trimming around the base, conserves moisture and looks nice.
Fruit
September is a good month to look through the fruit catalogs (in hand and online) to determine which cultivars you would like to grow and that will produce well in your area. Talk to friends and neighbors to find out what they have grown successfully. A local nurseryman and your county Extension office can help as well. This will give you plenty of time to make up your mind, as planting time for fruit trees is from November to February. This includes peaches, pears, apples, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries. As with the ornamental trees, watering during times of drought is really important. If it has not rained the equivalent of an inch per week, you need to soak the base of your fruit plants.
Flowering crabapples fruit will be ripening this month. The larger fruited varieties are spectacular in the fall. You can also make delicious jelly from them. I fondly remember going in the early fall with my grandmother, Mama Suitor, to collect the wild crabapples. Mama Suitor used these as the pectin or “jellying agent” for many of her fruit jellies, jams and butters. These wild crabapples were very tart, but very tasty.
If you have the time, you need to stand under your pear trees to catch the fruit before it hits the ground and bruises—if you wait until the fruit hits the ground, you have to contend with the yellow jackets and wasps congregating on the fallen bruised fruit. Standing out under your pear tree and catching falling fruit would be a great activity for the idle children or grandchildren in your family—especially teenagers! Seriously, it is a good idea to pick pears before they fall to the ground. Picking before the pears are completely ripe is fine, as pears will continue to ripen inside, if left out of the refrigerator.
Flowers
Now is a good time to remove old flower stalks, blooms, and bedding plants that no longer look their best and replace them with the fall bedding plants. Plant choices for adding color and texture to the fall garden has really expanded. It used to be that all we had were mums. Now we have all the new fall pansies and violas, many choices and types of the flowering kale and cabbage, and many new bedding plants like the citronas and all the new marigold selections. Scout out your local nurseries and garden centers to see what is available and start planning for spots of color and texture in your landscape. Highlighting just a few areas in your landscape for the fall is an economical and easy way to leave the impression that you really know what you are doing as a gardener! Be careful when selecting these areas of color and texture, as these will be the focal points in your fall landscape. Pick the best views and highlight those.
Combining some of these purchased plants with seed that you sow like the fancy lettuces or greens can really make your fall garden look good. A tray of the new colorful mixes of Johnny-jump-ups (violas) planted in front of a packet of purple mustard would look spectacular. You could add the viola blooms and the young mustard leaves to spruce up a fall salad—a flowerbed that looks good and you can get it too! What a deal!
Vegetables
By this month about all that is left in most vegetable gardens are tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, okra and sweet potatoes. Remove all the old spent vegetables like beans, squash, cucumber vines and cornstalks. Time to clear the way for the fall crop of onions, carrots, leaf lettuces, radishes, mustards, turnips, spinach, kale and other “sallet patch” greens. Sow these as early in the month as you can (for the onions, of course, you will use onion sets or plants). Even though it seems the first freeze is later every year, it is a good idea to allow the most time for the plants to mature before really, cold weather arrives. The first freeze date for north Mississippi has always been given as around Halloween—last year our first hard freeze in Alcorn County was around the middle of November. Who knows what the weather will be like this fall, so be prepared for anything!
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.