Gardening This Weekend: July 17, 2025
If you can spend 15-30 minutes per day tending to your landscape and garden, I believe you can accomplish the tasks I’ve outlined below. To be honest, that does not include mowing, trimming, and blowing. But it does include many other little, but critical things.
PLANT
• Heat-tolerant annuals, probably into patio pots filled with the highest-quality potting soil you can find. These are great for a quick pick-me-up for your landscape.
• Peppers for your fall garden. Like tomatoes, they do better in a fall garden than they do in the spring. Finding transplants will be the issue, but better nurseries will have them.
• New bermuda, zoysia or St. Augustine within the next six weeks. Sooner is better than later, but it’s not going to be easy at these temperatures. Water twice daily for 5-10 minutes for first 7-14 days. The grass roots are going to be really shallow initially.
PRUNE
• Errant new shoots on shrubs. There’s no point in letting them hog water the main parts of the plants will need.
• Dead or damaged branches from trees before they can cause decay to move into the trunks of the trees.
• If you find your bermuda is browned for several days after each mowing, and if you’re mowing quite short, raise the mower one notch. You’re cutting into stem stubble. Remember to drop it back down in February as you scalp the grass. Otherwise, mow turf at recommended height. Letting grass grow tall does not offer protection from heat, drought. In fact, tall grass becomes weak grass, more subject to invasion by weeds.
FERTILIZE
• Container plants including hanging baskets with high-nitrogen, water-soluble plant food to keep them growing vigorously. Nutrients leach out of pots as often as you’re watering.
• Do not fertilize St. Augustine at these temperatures due to likelihood of promoting gray leaf spot development.
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Chinch bugs in St. Augustine. If areas appear dried in hot, sunny areas only, and if watering doesn’t help, check for presence of the BB-sized black insects with white diamonds on their backs. Treat with a labeled insecticide as soon as you confirm their presence. They can quickly kill St. Augustine, again, in sunny areas only.
• Gray leaf spot will turn St. Augustine sickly yellow. Blades will have BB-sized gray, diamond-shaped patches. Treat with Azoxystrobin or other labeled turf fungicide.
• Leafrollers in groundcover vinca, redbuds, sweetgums, persimmons, mulberries, cannas, pyracanthas, cotoneasters, and other plants. Leaves are rolled or folded with larvae inside. Control at first evidence with systemic insecticide such as Imidacloprid.