Gardening This Weekend: October 6, 2016

I’ve made a list of the things that are most critical to your gardening success. Let’s take a look.

Plant

• Dig and divide spring-blooming perennials such as iris, daylilies, coneflowers, gloriosa daisies, thrift and others.
• Daffodils and grape hyacinths as soon as you buy them. Ask questions about how well the types that you’re choosing will “come back” year after year. Tulips and Dutch hyacinths must go in the refrigerator for 45 days (or longer) at 45 degrees.
• Pansies, violas, pinks, snapdragons, ornamental cabbage and kale for late fall, winter and early spring color.
• Trees and shrubs to give them maximum time to establish before next summer’s heat.

Prune

• Continue mowing at recommended height until frost.
• Dig and remove roses infested with rose rosette virus. I have details on my website. This disease is rampant in the DFW area but not so much in other parts of Texas.
• Reshape houseplants you intend to bring indoors for winter on an as-needed basis.

Fertilize

• Newly planted winter color annuals with water-soluble, high-nitrogen food. Repeat weekly until frost.
• Fescue turf if that is your permanent lawngrass, with high-nitrogen or all-nitrogen fertilizer so it can take advantage of cooler growing conditions.

 

 

On the Lookout

• Brown patch in St. Augustine. It is becoming quite common across Texas right now. See Item 2 from this story in last week’s e-gardens.
• Fall webworms in pecans, other shade trees. Here’s what we had on them last week.
• If you intend to develop new garden or landscape beds next spring, and if they currently have grass and weeds growing in them, apply a glyphosate herbicide now. It won’t contaminate the soil, but it must have warm conditions to kill out the unwanted vegetation. You’ll be able to rototill within a couple of weeks so that you can start working up the soils well in advance of late-winter plantings.