North Mississippi Gardening Tips
October 2008
FLOWERS
Bring the garden indoors to enjoy fall’s glory even more! Combining flowers with spectacular foliage in a big, bold arrangement can just about knock your socks off. Right before our eyes, green foliage is transformed into multi-colored jewels. With a sharp pair of clippers you can use a few of these colorful branches as a base to build a dazzling bouquet. Remember when you are snipping you are pruning so keep the shape of the plant in mind when you cut. Make your cuts in early morning and quickly submerge the cut ends in a bucket of water. Good choices are Japanese maple, other maples, sweet gum, black gum, pistachio, sassafras, sourwood and sumac. Don’t forget the native and ornamental grasses. Some are maiden grass, pampas grass, plume grass and many others to choose from. These can add a spiky look to contrast with the more rounded look of most foliage. For example, the red foliage of sumac, yellow foliaged maple and plumes of zebra grass combined with swamp sunflowers and Mexican bush sage would make a great arrangement. You could even throw in fruited branches of beautyberry, doublefile viburnum, pyracantha or nandina for a flashy touch of color.
SHRUBS AND VINES
We associate fall with spectacular foliage on our trees, but, you know what? There are many shrubs that can rival our trees for fall glory. How about the rusty red of the oakleaf hydrangea? Or the burning bush, Euonymus alatus, which absolutely will burn your eyes with its bright red color! Nandina foliage can range from green to shades or red and orange. Forsythia can turn shades of deep purple. Spring blooming spireas, like Vanhoutte, Bridalwreath, and Thunberg can exhibit fall colors that range from yellow to purplish. If you grow blueberries you know they can turn a very pretty shade of red in the fall. To me, these are one of the truly multi-functional plants. They have attractive flowers in the spring, followed by not only very pretty smoky blue fruit, but edible too! They are even attractive in the dead of winter with their mottled, dark/light colored, wiry, branches and prominent winter buds.
Keep falling leaves from piling against the trunks and stems of plants, especially boxwoods and azaleas. This can cause crown rooting which shifts the root structure upward and can make the shrub more susceptible to drying out in cold or dry weather. Leaves piled against the trunk is the same no-no as piling mulch deeply around bark tissue—same result as planting the plant too deep. Not a good thing!
It is best to wait until next month to start planting new shrubs and winter hardy vines in the landscape. Then these are more dormant and nurseries should have their new fall stock and a better selection.
VEGETABLES
Harvest all tomatoes (green and red alike) before the first frost which occurs around Halloween in north Mississippi. Tomatoes with a radiating white star on the bottom will ripen in the kitchen window. Those without can be fried green tomatoes. Don’t forget to harvest all the eggplant and peppers. If your bounty is too much to eat fresh contact your county Extension office for canning recipes to turn these vegetables into great relishes or other canned goodies.
Beets, carrots and turnips can withstand light frost but not hard freezes. Dig them for immediate use or store in the bottom of the fridge or other cool place for future use. These vegetables tend to have a longer storage life when properly done, compared to other vegetables.
CONTAINER PLANTS
This is the month for us delinquent gardeners to be peacefully, mindlessly watching the 10 o’clock weather report one night; when suddenly, to our utter horror, the weatherman says, “Frost tonight!” What follows is not pretty as we run over children and furniture in our mad rush to drag in all those tender plants that we had totally forgotten about until now. I certainly hope you are not one of these poor creatures. I’m sure you have calmly and diligently, groomed and moved all your tender plants into shelter before the doomsday weather forecast. If not, this is your warning. Begin to make room in your house, enclosed porch or other protected area for these plants. Clean them up a little, removing or pruning back branches and stems as needed. This is not the time to fertilize or repot. That is a chore for when you drag them back out in the spring. If this all sounds like too much work, or you just don’t have enough room inside, seriously consider letting some of these plants meet Jack Frost and go home to their fathers. In particular, those like the tender ferns tend to look ratty, shed and make a mess all winter long. In certain situations it is so much easier to just buy more plants in the spring than to put with the ordeal. Besides your nurseryman will love you more and you can watch the late night weather frost forecast in complete peace and harmony—as you hear the ruckus next door when your mindless neighbors fall all over each other running through the yard gathering up their plants.
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.