These are blue-sky days, great for weddings; but I am a gardener and hoping for rain. Everything I see is hanging in droughty ribbons. Yet “there is no drought, only abnormally dry conditions.”
Early Fall Garden
Gardeners face such a variety and quantity of projects and endeavors at this time of year that it is hard not to be bewildered and spun upon the wheels of indecision.
Redesign? Rework beds? Dig and divide? Renew soil? Prep houseplants to return indoors? Visualize plantings and order bulbs? Soil test? Lawn repair? Mulching? And it isn’t as if we are all ladies and gentlemen of leisure, daintily picking up a pair of garden snips in our endless idle hours!
However, let’s review these topics. The end of the season is a great opportunity to go through the garden with a revising eye, while the recollection of what worked, what did not, and what downright annoyed you, is still fresh. (This is where frequent photos of the garden help greatly.) In my garden, a Japanese maple sapling is coming out — not without guilt on my part. It was part of a scheme of three young trees, planted to create a backdrop with four-season interest for a portion of a bed. Well, this one proved to be more of a light-blocker than I’d anticipated, so — sayonara.
Reworking beds is simplified after plants have been cut back, although the digging can be laborious nonetheless. Removing growth creates clarity vis-à-vis their location and relation to one another, and there are no tops to deal with if you decide to shift some. This is a good opportunity to renew soil by adding compost or leaf mold, too, while plants are out of the ground, especially if you did find the soil hard to dig.
Mulching can be just about the last garden task of the entire year, done after leaf drop and cleanup, and just before true cold weather sets in. Alternatively, should you have had a load of mulch delivered and unloaded in a convenient spot, it can be spread, little by little, as you do this reorganizing work. Keep a bag of low-number, organic soil food (i.e., fertilizer) nearby, to side-dress the area around the plants as you mulch.
You know with certainty that next spring you will find that your place needs more spring-flowering bulbs, so don’t disappoint yourself. Ordering bulbs should be simplified if you have been perusing the bulb catalogues as they come in. Many arrive in spring, while bulb season is underway. The rub is that the lists may be made “mentally” and “mentally” disposed of, too.
With the endemic Island deer problem, where we can plant tulips for any real landscape enjoyment is a problem. For several years I have been locating tulips in my vegetable garden, more as a cut-flower crop than as an enhancement of the garden landscape. This year, however, voles (?) seem to have discovered them; I continue to find dug and gnawed tulip bulbs lying on the ground.
If you wish to have plants such as digitalis, lunaria, hesperis, and lychnis, biennials all, sow or locate the young plantlets and transplant, or let grow, now.
Houseplants have grown over the summer, and may need repotting before returning indoors. Water well and then remove root balls from pots and slice off about an inch of root mass and old soil, using an old kitchen knife. Replace in pots and fill in with fresh container mix. Soak them well. Top growth may need to be reshaped to balance the loss of roots.
Lawn repair and renewal is a classic fall project, but one that is predicated upon the arrival of fall rains. While warm, dry conditions prevail, hold off on this one.
Soil testing may be done now, and no oven drying is needed — the soil is already dry. The new address for UMass soil testing: UMass Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Lab, 203 Paige Laboratory, 161 Holdsworth Way, Amherst, MA 01003. Go to the UMass web site at soiltest.umass.edu for information and to download order forms. Specify that you want advice for organic management.
Fall Garden: Sedums
When summer’s annuals and perennials are looking tired, the sedums come along to enliven the garden scenery and attract myriad pollinators. In this dry month, they have been outstanding! Most familiar may be the sturdy, often-used “Autumn Joy” (Hylotelephium “Herbstfreude”), but there is actually much more to choose from among these succulents. Late-summer sedums’ color range is primarily pale pink aging through ruby to mahogany.
If one goes toplantlust.comone can view the many varieties and cultivars of sedum (also called stonecrop) available, and find where to get them. The variety is extensive and enormous, and many are for specialist gardeners. These are all succulents and well adapted to dry or rock-garden conditions, something to keep in mind during these “not drought” times.
My new sedum fave is “Xenox,” a dark-leaved cultivar just under two feet tall, with rosy pink flowers at summer’s end. I like it grouped with “Matrona,” a slightly taller German introduction with paler, starry flower heads that age pink, greenish foliage, and wine-red stems.
The stonecrops as a group are endearingly called “kinder” plants, as leaves and stem pieces root effortlessly, producing offspring, or “kinder.” Give them full sun exposure and well-drained soil, and divide after three or four years. The plants of large-flowered taller varieties may be pinched early in the season to make for bushier growth and daintier flower heads, which may lessen the need for staking a large clump.