September Newsletter

September Gardening

Can you feel it? Fall is in the air, and plants are responding to the shorter days and somewhat reduced temperatures by shooting out lots of fresh growth and wonderful flowers. That nice September rain that cooled everything off for a few days has gotten most of us antsy to plant, but hold on! Some things can go in now, but a lot of flowers need to wait for a little more cooling. If you are going crazy to start your fall planting, try some seeds. Although most experts will warn against planting sweet peas this early, I must confess, two years ago, knowing how busy I am in October, I planted all of my sweet peas in early September. They came up great. We have a lot of new seeds including: alyssum, larkspur, nasturtium, poppies, and a large variety of sweet peas.

One thing that needs to be done as soon as possible is rose care. Prune off all of those candelabras from the summer. You can take up to the top third off. Use a strong blast of water and hose of all those dead sun burnt leaves. Clean up the mess. Now take three cups of the hickmans rose fertilizer and dig it in around each of your roses. Water the fertilizer in. This prep work will set you up for some fabulous rose in Oct and November.

Wisteria alert. I didn’t do an August newsletter so I missed getting to tell everyone that you to feed wisteria in August. Wisteria is kind of cranky it needs a heavy nitrogen fertilizer in Aug to help it set buds for next springs plus some severe pruning in January-but if you do all of that stuff you get some glorious bloom just in time for Easter. So it’s a little late, but go ahead and feed your Wisteria.

Another August slip- Labor Day was time for your last Citrus feed. If you forgot you can still feed your trees if you do it right now.

September is great for improving your beds. Go ahead dig in some compost, add some sand, organic fertilizer, and disper-sul then you can plant, plant, plant.