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September 1 - 7, 2005 Edition
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Garden Notes: Dry weather, brown lawns, and fall choices September 1, 2005 By Abigail Higgins Not dead, just dormant, this brown lawn provides a sharp contrast for the flowering tree and green leaves in the background. Photo by Susan Safford We enter September with the new moon. Labor Day is within sight. Traditional weather patterns for this time of year would have had some sort of gale blowing through here, requiring sweaters and raincoats and reminding the summer people it’s time to head home. Nowadays, the summer people stay longer and longer, and no one knows what to expect of the weather. At this time it does not look as if the path that Hurricane Katrina is expected to take will bring any rain to our area. But it is a safe bet that most Islanders are hoping that somehow, some day soon, some rain will fall. Mostly it is the brown and crispy-crinkly, un-irrigated lawns that provoke concern, since the water table is quite high. An up-Island client recently confided to me that he felt lucky to have an irrigated lawn, as “most of my friends’ lawns are dead.” This is a misconception. His friends’ lawns have gone dormant and will revive when seasonal fall weather returns. Please take some time to read through the Island Blue Pages, which came to you inserted in last week’s Martha’s Vineyard Times. There you will learn many interesting facts about water on the Island, including watershed maps and tips on lawn care and fertilization. The Island Blue Pages will give everyone on the Island a better understanding of how to conserve and protect our groundwater and why that might be important. Back to lawns. Fall is a great time to repair or improve lawns. Some problems that occur on Island lawns have their origin in unrealistic expectations. For example, bluegrass turf is poorly suited to our thin, sandy soils. Nevertheless that is the type of idealized lawn that many homeowners think they want (influenced in many cases by what they see at the golf course). The performance of many Island lawns can be improved by over-seeding with grass seed appropriate to the conditions the lawn is expected to perform in. These would be primarily fescues. Look also for the Cape Cod-type mixes (or shade-type mix if that is your situation). Now is the best time to re-seed. Re-seeding and new lawns done at this time of year will be thicker and less prone to weed contamination. According to Mary Owens, the turf expert at the University of Massachusetts Extension, fescues, such as creeping, red, sheep, and Chewings, are better able to withstand periods of heat stress and are slower-growing than cool-season turf grasses, and so require less frequent mowing. Their nutrient requirement is also lower than cool-season turf grasses (i.e. bluegrass and perennial ryegrass), and they tolerate infertile soils better. Ms. Owens writes in Planting and Maintaining Sustainable Landscapes (a publication of UMass Extension): “Maintenance of turf grasses requiring few inputs does not mean neglect of the grass. The higher the use required of the turf, the greater the inputs required and the more critical the care (i.e. irrigation, supplemental fertility, pest management, etc.) for maintenance of a dense and quality turf cover.” So the harder the wear that your lawn, or portions of it, is expected to take, the more you will have to do for it. Another good technique for the energetic lawn owner at this time of year is to spread a quarter-inch layer of compost or leaf mould on the lawn and then rake it in. The application of fertilizer (preferably with slow-release, organic, low-number products) split into spring and fall applications, feeds the lawn at a more consistent rate. Just as the lawn may appear tired by the end of August, so too with planters and beds. Many container plants need nothing more than a renewing “haircut” and fertilizing. Cut back plants like diascia, petunia, heliotrope, and osteospermum, sidedress them with a little fertilizer, and watch them flush nicely with fresh growth. But sometimes it is a relief to chuck out the current bedding plant material and start over again with fall-blooming annuals. While the variety of cool season bedding plants is not vast at Island garden centers, which at this point in the season are starting to scale back, there is a tempting array of mums everywhere. I especially like the “Belgian” hybrid chrysanthemums, with their hundreds upon hundreds of small buds and flowers. They bloom over an extended time if you are looking for long-lasting color. Coleus, ivies, ornamental cabbage and kale, and pansies are other good choices for cool season bedding plants to freshen the look of your planters. The All-America Selections (AAS) committee has picked two cool season bedding plants for 2006. Plants that can be tested, and thus used, in the cool season bedding plant trial category are alyssum, bellis, calendula, campanula, ornamental cabbage and kale, carnation, delphinium, dianthus, lobelia, lupine, pansy, poppy, ranunculus, snapdragon, stock, sweet pea, and viola. These are the plants that you will want to renew your containers with, but on the Island you may have to grow them yourself. Next year we can look for Viola “Skippy XL Red-Gold,” which looks as big as a pansy, but is a viola with one-and-a-half-inch flowers. The coloration is ruby red with violet shading below the golden face containing “whiskers.” The strong dense plant exhibited heat tolerance combined with winter hardiness (given protection). When mature, the plants will spread eight inches and remain dwarf. I look forward to seeing the AAS award winning cool season bedding plant Diascia “Diamonte Coral Rose” in 2006, since I am already a diascia fan. The AAS describes it as improved for early flowering, branching habit, flower production, and length of bloom. The 8-to-10-inch height and 18-inch spreading habit will be perfect for mixed containers where a cascading plant is wanted, or as a low edging plant in a sunny garden. The one-inch rosy flowers are produced in spikes on all sides of the plant, which is frost tolerant. In perennial beds, we have started to cut back the foliage of plants that have gone by: hemerocallis, eryngium, dianthus, and so on. Sidedress with low-number organic fertilizer while you do this. There will soon be nice clumps of new basal leaves. Watch for very small new basal foliage of perennial poppies just starting to peep out of the soil. The same cutting back goes for perennial herbs such as oregano, lemon balm, and tarragon, except you can dispense with the fertilizer. While in the herb garden, watch for self-sown seedlings of cilantro, dill, and chervil. These will be a fresh fall crop.

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