North Mississippi Gardening Tips
July/August 2010
Annual Flowers and Vines
You can rejuvenate profuse-blooming annual plants by cutting them back and 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. 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
Parts of north Mississippi had record rainfall this spring and flooding. This 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 than 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.
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, and snapping frenzy trying to keep up with the harvest! 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 the state consumer horticulture specialist for Mississippi State University Extension Service. Her office is at the North Mississippi Research and Extension Center in Verona.