24September 12, 2012

When you wake up to an early September morning and you find out that the temperatures are in the 40’s, and then you know that fall has arrived.

Let’s start with the vegetable garden. Yank out those old green bean plants and put some pea seed in place of the beans. You should also plant some lettuce or spinach. Just because it is fall doesn’t mean that you cannot plant any more vegetable seeds. Don’t waste any of that garden space.

People will buy hardy mums and yet the mums don’t come back the following year. The trick to get hardy mums to be hardy is to get the mums planted during September. If you leave them sitting on the porch until the plant is killed by the frost and then you plant them, they won’t be back next year. Mums need time to put a root system out into the soil. If the leaves are dead, the plant cannot make the food that the roots will need to get established in the soil. If you get the mums planted now, they will have plenty of time to get those roots established before the winter.

If you have had your houseplants outside for the summer, it will soon be time to bring them back into the house. While the plants have been outside, they have had many insects set up home on your plants. Natural predators such as ladybugs have kept the insect population under control. Once you bring the plants back into the house, the insect population will skyrocket. Before you bring those plants inside, you must spray the plants with an insecticide that will kill those insects. If you don’t do this before you bring the plants inside, you will create a problem for that plant and potentially, all the other plants you have in the house.

The grubs have begun to feed on area lawns. If you did not get your grub control in place earlier, now is the best time to get those grubs controlled. The grubs are still small at this point in the season and that makes them easier to control. If you wait until late fall or early spring, they will be harder or even impossible to control.

To have the best success at getting grass seed to grow and get established before the ground freezes, you should have the seed planted by the end of September. This will allow time for the seed to sprout and time to get a strong root system established before the ground freezes.

Well, that’s all for this week. I’ll talk to you again next week.