Gardening This Weekend: August 14, 2025
Here are the mid-August things you’ll want to do for your landscape and garden.
PLANT
• Fall annuals for the intense colors they’ll bring to your landscape in fall’s cooler weather. Let an independent retail garden center operator show you the best types.
• Prime time for planting cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower transplants.
• New turfgrass from sod. Bermuda can also be planted from seed, but hurry. It needs time to establish roots before soil temperatures start to cool.
PRUNE
• Dead and damaged branches from trees, shrubs.
• Erratic spring growth from shrubs, vines, groundcovers.
• Tall growing tips, flower buds from coleus, basil, and others to keep them compact and vegetative.
FERTILIZE
• Patio pots, hanging baskets with high-N, water-soluble plant food each time you water them.
• Bermuda turf with all-N lawn food (30-40 percent slow-release nitrogen). Wait until early Sept. to feed St. Augustine (gray leaf spot possibility if fed when hot).
• Iron-deficient plants with iron/sulfur combination. Look for yellowed leaves with dark green veins, most prominent on newest growth first. Keep iron products off masonry (staining).
ON THE LOOKOUT
• Chinch bugs in St. Augustine cause grass to look dry even next morning after watering. Always in hottest, sunniest areas. Treat with labeled insecticide at first signs of the small, black insects on surface of soil.
• Gray leaf spot causing St. Augustine (and zoysia) to develop irregular pale green/yellow patches. Diamond-shaped gray spots on blades. Do not apply nitrogen during summer. Treat with Azoxystrobin fungicide as needed.
• Nutsedge (nutgrass) in lawns, groundcovers, even shrub beds and flowerbeds. The original Image product, also Sedgehammer are both directed at this weed with triangular stems (true grasses have round stems). Treatment must begin by mid-August. See related story this issue.
• Fall pre-emergent heads-up. Full details in next week’s e-gardens. We apply them by Labor Day to stop germination of winter and early spring weeds. In the meantime, be looking for Dimension, Balan, or Halts. They’re much harder to find at this time of year. You may have to have one of them ordered in for you.