Gardening This Weekend: June 26, 2025

Next weekend will be a long holiday weekend. The more we can get done now the less we’ll have to worry about then. Here are the things I’d deem to be the most critical.

PLANT
• Tomato transplants for your fall garden. They’re not always easy to find, but hopefully you can get them planted in the next two weeks for them to mature and make a good crop by the first frost this fall. As always, stick with small to mid-sized varieties. They will set fruit better in fall’s cooling temperatures.
• Pumpkin seeds for Halloween harvest. Stick with small to mid-sized varieties for Texas conditions.
• Crape myrtles while they’re in full bloom to ensure you’re getting the exact shades you want.
• Hot-weather color, especially into patio pots. You can get a lot of bang for your buck if you plant in containers. They’re more easily planted since you don’t have to rototill, and you can get instant color to boot. They’re portable so that you can place them wherever you need that spot of attention.

PRUNE
• Spent flower stalks and browned foliage off perennials to keep garden tidy.
• Growing tips out of coleus, copper plants, other color plants that are tending to become lanky.
• Errant or damaged shoots from shrubs to maintain natural growth forms.

FERTILIZE
• Patio pots and hanging baskets with diluted, water-soluble, high-nitrogen food with each watering. Nutrients leach out of potting soil quickly with frequent waterings.
• Bermuda turf with all-nitrogen food if it’s been more than 8-10 weeks. Do not fertilize St. Augustine for next 2 months due to likelihood of gray leaf spot.
• Iron-deficient plants with iron additive combined with sulfur soil amendment. Iron becomes insoluble in alkaline conditions. Iron chlorosis is identified by yellowed leaves with dark green veins at the tip ends of branches. Keep all iron products off concrete, stone and brick surfaces to prevent staining.

ON THE LOOKOUT
• Chinch bugs are going to be common in St. Augustine turf the next couple of months. If you have patches in full sun that appear to be dry but that do not respond to irrigation, part the grass with your fingers and look closely for BB-sized black insects with white diamonds on their wings. Those are chinch bugs. Your local independent retail garden center can show you several products that will control them.
• Webworms are attacking pecans, walnuts, persimmons and other trees currently. Spraying is not an efficient way of controlling them. I prefer to use a pole pruner when their webs are still small to clip out the ends of the branches where they are starting. If you wait a few days they will form webs that are massively larger, at which point about all you’ll be able to do is pull the webs open so that birds can “harvest” the caterpillars.
• St. Augustine turf that has random yellowish green patches several feet in size may have gray leaf spot. Look at individual blades closely for diamond-shaped, BB-sized spots along the midribs and occasionally on the runners. This is accelerated by applications of nitrogen in hot weather. It is fungal, so applications of Azoxystrobin turf fungicide will help.
• If you are seeing large black-and-white, wasp-like insects hovering near the ground, those are probably cicada killers. They are basically beneficial insects that seek out noisy cicadas, sting them and carry them back to their in-ground nests where they lay eggs in their paralyzed bodies. My practice has always been just to leave them alone. They have a very painful sting, but they don’t bother you if you don’t annoy them, and anything they can do to lessen the din of the cicadas will be appreciated.