Gardening This Weekend: September 26, 2024
Here’s my list. I submit it for your inspection. See how many of these tasks await you at your place.
PLANT
• Dig and divide spring-blooming perennials such as iris, daylilies, St. Joseph lilies (“hardy amaryllis”) coneflowers, gloriosa daisies, thrift and others as their foliage begins to turn brown and die back.
• 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. In the case of daffodils, that will usually be the early- and small-flowering types. Ice Follies and Carlton are two excellent mid-sized rebloomers.
• Tulips and Dutch hyacinths must go into the refrigerator for at least 45 days at 45 degrees to give them chilling they need to flower normally. Plant them between December 15-31. Planting earlier will cause poor blooming.
• Nursery stock to give the plants maximum time to establish before next summer’s heat. Watch for end-of-season sales as garden centers reduce their inventories before winter. Fall is the best time for planting.
• Cool-season color plants such as ornamental cabbage and kale, pinks, and, in South Texas, sweet alyssum, petunias, stocks, English daisies, ornamental Swiss chard, and calendulas. Wait until daytime highs are reliably in the low 80s to plant pansies and violas. Higher temperatures cause plants to become stretched and weak. They often do not recover.
PRUNE
• Continue mowing at recommended height until frost. Letting grass grow tall weakens it. Mowing is also a good way to keep fallen leaves picked up off your lawn. It’s also a way to discourage growth of winter weeds.
• Remove dead and damaged limbs from oak trees, lacebark elms, ashes, maples, crape myrtles, and other species that have been hurt by extreme cold of past four winters and extended droughts of past several falls and early winters.
• Dead stubble from perennial garden to keep plants tidy. Run it through the mower and put it into the compost pile.
• Reshape houseplants you intend to bring indoors for winter on an as-needed basis.
FERTILIZE
• St. Augustine, bermuda, or zoysia turf with all-nitrogen or high-nitrogen fertilizer with 30 to 40 percent of that nitrogen in slow-release form. Exact ratio should depend on soil test from a reliable lab. Texas A&M Soil Testing Laboratory has sophisticated equipment and gives excellent results and advice for a fair fee.
• Fescue turf if that is your permanent lawngrass (most common in Northwest Texas), with high-nitrogen or all-nitrogen fertilizer so it can take advantage of cooler growing conditions.
• Newly planted winter color annuals with water-soluble, high-nitrogen food. Repeat weekly until frost.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Houseplants you intend to bring indoors for signs of insects. It’s better to eliminate them while they’re still outside.
• Fall webworms in pecans, other shade trees. It’s easier to prune the webs out with a long-handled pole pruner than it would be to spray them. They do very little harm to the trees. Their feeding cycle is almost completed. You could opt to leave them alone and just pick up the fallen webs this winter.
• Brown patch (also called Large Patch) is showing up in St. Augustine. Look for round, yellow patches 18-30 inches across. Blades within those patches will turn brown within a few days. Soon thereafter the blades will pull loose easily from the runners. The fungicide Azoxystrobin offers good control of the disease. Avoid nighttime watering as that leads to spread of the disease.
• Apply glyphosate herbicide to kill grasses and other weeds in turf areas where you intend to develop gardens or shrub beds over the winter. It’s imperative that you apply it while the unwanted vegetation is growing actively. Glyphosates must enter the plants through green and growing tissues. Avoid combination products that contain other active ingredients. They will contaminate the soil. Glyphosates become inactive when they come into contact with soil.