KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It’s hot. It’s dry. Your garden resembles a moonscape, and those flowers that bloomed in spring now look like they’re putting out dreadlocks.
This isn’t fair. There are still two months of heat left. You need a garden do-over, a foliage face-lift, a midsummer mulligan.
“Many garden centers will have annuals that you can plant right now,” Dennis Patton, horticulturist with Kansas State University Research and Extension at Manhattan, Kan. “You can rip out the dead, the dying and ugly and spiff up that container or spot in the landscape.”
Those heat-tolerant annuals include cleome, marigold, zinnia, vinca, lantana, coleus and penta. All are drought-tolerant, need full sun and can be grown in a container or in the landscape.
“Penta doesn’t start blooming until it gets hot,” Patton said. “In the spring it’s just a green foliage plant and people overlook it. Penta hits its stride in July and August. It usually is in shades of pink, red and white. It’s just a little flat-topped grouping of flowers the diameter of a tennis ball, and it’s all over the plant.
“In my containers I put a lot of sun-tolerant coleus, which are looking great. I just fertilized them.”
That’s critical.
“People forget to fertilize,” said Jim Gardner, manager of Family Tree Nursery in Liberty, Mo. “I ask them, ‘Do you feed your children ?’
“‘Well, yes.’
“It’s the same thing for plants. If you don’t feed them they’re not going to grow.”
He recommends fertilizing every fifth watering.
But while people under-fertilize plants, they often over water them.
“We tell people water deeply, but don’t water every day,” Gardner said. “People think they’re hot so their plants must be hot as well. But plants shut down and quit taking up moisture. Then, when people over water, their plants sit in the water in the heat and it’s almost like boiling the roots. What we say is plants can go thirsty many times, but they only need to drown once, and then they’re dead.”
Gardner also recommends a product called Wilt-Pruf.
“It’s like hand cream for plants,” he said. “It helps keep moisture in plants with hard leaves, such as boxwood, holly, azalea and rhododendrons.”
Your toasty brown lawn?
“You have the option of continuing the watering and paying the water bill,” Patton said. “But there are a lot of people who just let their turf go dormant, which means they don’t water on a regular basis. But there’s a fine line between dormant and dead.”
To keep your grass alive you need to water at least every two weeks, and maybe more depending on the soil and location.
HomeStyle, Pages 35 on 07/28/2012