Sherri Sanders: Get a start on the fall gardening calendar

Pay attention to the weather and know how much rainfall your garden receives. Success in your garden will still be measured by how well you manage your water needs. Heavy, quick downpours help, but often more water runs off than penetrates. A nice slow, steady rain is what we would like, but sometimes we don’t get what we want or need. Supplemental watering is usually a given for many landscapes, but requirements vary with what plants you are growing. Know what your plants need to help them thrive.

Staying indoors and enjoying the air conditioning sounds appealing when heat indexes are over 100 degrees, but there are gardening chores that can be done, and unbelievably August is the time to begin planting a fall vegetable garden. You can plant both cool-season and warm-season crops now. Plant peppers, tomatoes and squash for a fall harvest and mid-month cool-season transplants of broccoli, cabbage and the like will start arriving. You can also seed greens, green beans and lettuce later in the month. Water and mulch will be vitally important to get these new vegetables established this time of year!

If you have been watering your summer vegetable garden, you should still be harvesting. Peppers, eggplants, and okra are plentiful in many gardens now. Tomatoes may be a bit slow right now. When daytime temperatures are above 95 or nighttime temperatures are above 75 degrees, tomatoes take a siesta. Ripening is slowed down, and new tomatoes are slow to set. If your plants are still healthy, keep watering and once the weather evens out (fingers crossed) they should begin to bear again.

This summer has been a good trial for many of our summer annuals. Which plants are doing well in your garden, and which aren’t? Annual vinca or periwinkle looks amazing in many gardens, and I am duly impressed with Sunpatiens. Lantana, pentas and zinnias are also thriving in full sun in this heat. If you have been watering, your common impatiens are doing well in the shade and the Dragonwing begonias look good too.

If your plants have slowed down in their blooming, check your nutrition. Annual flowers like fertilizer, and as much as we have watered or gotten rain, nutrients do leach out. Use caution when fertilizing when it is extremely hot and dry, or you can burn your plants. Use regular light applications and water it in well and your flowers should come back.

For all-summer blooming perennials and shrubs, know whether they set seeds or are self-cleaning and drop spent flowers. If your plants are trying to set seeds, you will be in the seed business and not the bloom business. Deadhead the spent blooms to direct energy away from seed set and into more blooms.

Plants that benefit from regular deadheading are coneflowers (Echinacea), blanket flower (gaillardia), coreopsis and black-eyed Susan (rudbeckia). Summer spirea, some butterfly bushes (buddleia) roses and crape myrtles will also rebloom if you cut off spent flowers.

For all our talk on watering annuals, vegetables and containers, don’t forget about your spring-blooming trees and shrubs now either. I have already seen new flower buds for next spring on camellias, tulip magnolias and dogwoods. More will be setting on other spring-blooming trees and shrubs from now through September. If they get too stressed or dry, they won’t set as many buds.

Encore or repeat blooming azaleas are beginning to produce new blooms now and should continue through fall. No more pruning should be done to any spring-blooming plants – including the reblooming azaleas. Treat them just like spring bloomers and only prune after bloom in the spring. For now, all that you do is monitor water needs for all spring-blooming plants. No more fertilization or pruning is needed.

Tropical flowering plants are in their element with this heat and humidity, but they do like a little water and some fertilizer. Regular fertilization will keep them blooming for another two to three months. You may also be able to find some good bargains on summer tropical plants at area nurseries now, so if you need a boost in color, go shopping. They do well in containers or planted in the ground, but if growing in containers, the bigger the better to help you keep them watered. Small pots dry out very quickly these days, especially in full sun.

Sherri Sanders is a county extension agent – agriculture with the White County Cooperative Extension Service. She can be reached by calling (501) 268-5394 or emailing [email protected].

Sherri Sanders is a county extension agent - agriculture with the White County Cooperative Extension Service. She can be reached by calling (501) 268-5394 or emailing [email protected].

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