Gardening This Weekend: July 3, 2025
The most important thing is to water. New plants get soaked every two days. Use a garden hose with a bubbler or breaker and stand there until you have watered clear to the bottom of their original balls of potting soil. Let them dry out once and you’ll lose them.
PLANT
• Fall tomatoes. Hopefully your garden center has transplants available. Set out small to mid-sized varieties. Provide them afternoon shade with a small A-frame made out of cardboard for the first several days.
• Summer annual color. The easiest way is to buy large pots and hanging baskets and replant them immediately into your decorative containers for instant patio and entryway pots.
• Crape myrtles while they’re still in bloom and perhaps on sale in local nurseries. Pay attention to their mature heights. Choose a type that will fit without pruning.
PRUNE
• Spent flower stalks and dead leaves off spring perennials.
• Remove flowers from coleus, basil, santolina, lambs ear, and caladiums. Flowers stop production of additional leaf growth.
FERTILIZE
• Pots and hanging baskets every couple of weeks to keep them growing vigorously. Nutrients drain away quickly in those environments.
• Iron-deficient shrubs and vines (yellowed leaves with dark green veins, showing most prominently on newest growth first). Also apply sulfur soil acidifier to help keep iron soluble. Keep iron products off masonry surfaces that could be stained.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Gray leaf spot in St. Augustine causing irregular yellow washes. Avoid applications of nitrogen during summer, as that promotes the fungus. Apply fungicide Azoxystrobin to stop the outbreak.
• Chinch bugs in St. Augustine cause dry areas (full sun) that will not respond simply to water. The grass will still show signs of drought the next morning after watering. Apply labeled insecticide such as Merit. These pests can kill St. Augustine very quickly. Don’t delay treatment once you have seen the BB-sized black insects with irregular white diamonds on their backs down on the soil surface.
• Lacebugs turning leaves of pyracanthas, Boston ivy, sycamores, azaleas, loropetalums, and a host of other trees and shrubs tan and mottled. Apply systemic or contact insecticide.
• Webworms devouring foliage of pecans, persimmons, mulberries, possumhaw hollies, and other trees and shrubs. Where possible, prune out the webs. In small outbreaks, simply tearing the webs open may suffice so that hot weather and predators can finish the task.
• Bagworms on junipers, cypresses, and other conifers threaten to strip off all the small needles. Before they can do that, step to your plants’ rescue with almost any organic or inorganic insecticide. Bagworms aren’t difficult to control. Early treatment is the key to success.