North Mississippi Gardening Tips
September 2010
Flowers
If your perennial and annual flowers look all tuckered out by this time of year, take a look at the perennial salvias. These plants are in their glory days during the fall. Spikes of blue, purple, and red flowers are absolutely brilliant. You may be familiar with the popular annual salvia (Salvia splendens) or scarlet sage as it is commonly called. This is a bedding plant used for summer color. Or, you may have grown the sage to use as an herb, Salvia officinalis. You might not be as familiar with the perennial flowering salvias. Well, get ready to be introduced to the fall lineup of salvias!
Mexican bush or velvet sage (S. leucantha) is truly a fall flowering masterpiece. It produces scads of purple flowers from late summer to the first frost atop 3 to 4 foot high plants. Emerald is a selection with purple spikes and white center. The cultivar All Purple has all purple flowers. Another great salvia for fall is S guaranitica. It doesn’t have a common name, but is certainly worth learning a little Latin for. Another late bloomer, it boasts some of the biggest flowers in the bunch. Wisps of 1 ½ to 2 inch long bluish purple flowers appear on 3 to 5 foot high plants. This plant is best used as an annual unless you live in the lower or coastal parts of Mississippi. Other great salvias for fall include S. uliginosa, with azure flowers atop 4 to 6 foot high plants, and mealy cup sage (S. farinacea). Forsythia sage (S. madrensis) bears bright yellow flowers, but is not winter hardy in north Mississippi. For all these plants, providing good drainage is a must. Provide plenty of water during the summer. Provide a slow-release fertilizer at planting and during mid-summer. All these plant require full sun for best flowering.
Lawns
If you’d rather just forget about your lawn this fall, you’re in good company! But the few minutes you spend now will pay ample dividends next spring. Soon after the first hard frost, warm-season grasses (Bermuda, Zoysia, centipede and St. Augustine) go dormant and turn brown. When they do, mow them one last time this year, cutting to about an inch height. Cool season lawns (Kentucky bluegrass, fescue and perennial ryegrass) continue to grow in fall and winter. So, cut them to about 1 ½ to 2 inches in height.
A well fed lawn will better endure cold winters and green up faster in spring. But you don’t want to overfeed your lawn at this time, particularly with excessive nitrogen, because this may cause diseases problems and actually lessen root growth. For cool season grasses, apply fertilizer with a nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio of about 2-1-1 or 4-1-2, such as 20-9-9 or 20-5-10. Warm-season grasses need a lower nitrogen, higher potassium fertilizer, such as 8-8-25. At least 25 to 30 percent of the nitrogen should be in slow-release form that will feed over a period of weeds. For most lawns, one fall feeding is plenty.
Herbs
Plant individual cloves of garlic now for a harvest next summer. Choose a sunny spot in the garden, spacing cloves 4 to 6 inches apart and 3 inches deep in rows a foot wide. Set cloves with their tip ends up.
Continue to cut herbs for drying, freezing, or putting in vinegars. By storing them now, you won’t be in such a panic when the first freeze is predicted. To keep the fresh harvest going during the winter you can take cuttings or buy small plants of oregano, sage, chives and other herbs to grow indoors for fresh use. Pot them in 6 inch containers, and place in a sunny window. Keep plants watered. As the plants grow, just snip off a few leaves or branches to add that zesty flair to your winter foods. Fertilize with a water soluble fertilizer to keep the foliage coming all winter. Next spring after the weather has moderated these can be transplanted into larger pots or directly into an herb garden.
Fruits
Branches that are heavy with fruit can break. Support them with a wooden 2 x 4 that has a V cut in the end. Rake up fallen fruit to eliminate diseases that could over winter on the ground beneath the trees.
You may plant strawberries now in full sun and fertilize well drained soil. Be careful when planting not the completely cover the growing point of the plant. Space plants 18 inches apart. Water well and mulch.
Remove all canes of semi-bush fruits like blackberries which fruited this summer. This will encourage the new shoots from the crown on which next year’s berries will be set.
Flowering crabapple fruit will begin to ripen this month. The larger fruited varieties are spectacular in the fall. You can also make delicious jelly from them.
Continue to harvest pears before they fall from the tree—this is where those young grandchildren who can climb like mountain goats come in handy! Give them a boost into your tree and have them toss the pear hand grenades down to you. If they happen to launch an under ripe grenade at you, you can ripen them in the house by wrapping each in a piece of newspaper and placing in a cool spot.
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.