27August 25, 2016

After a summer of hot and humid, it was nice to wake up on Tuesday morning and have it feel cold outside. I would guess that summer is slowly winding down.

The end of August is a good time to dig up and divide any of your over- grown perennials. This year may be a bit more of a chore because you will need to keep the soil moist to help those newly divided perennials to get their root system back out into the soil. You should also use a plant starter fertilizer to help to stimulate new root growth. This fertilizer is mixed with water and the plants are watered with this fertilizer solution.

Now would be a good time to start a fall crop of peas in your vegetable garden. At this time of the year, there always appears to be some extra room in the garden. You may have pulled up some of your spring planted vegetables that are no longer producing. Peas are not the only vegetable that you can plant now in your garden. There is still time to plant beans, lettuce, spinach, kale, beets, some varieties of carrots and chard. If you have space in your vegetable garden, don’t let that space go to waste. Plant some more vegetables for fresh fall vegetables.

Hardy mums are beginning to show up in some of the stores. You do have to be careful when you buy hardy mums early in the season. Many of the mums you see now are the early maturing varieties. They will flower well for a month and then the flowering slows way down. The first mums that we bring into the store are the mid-season flowering varieties. They may not, initially, have as many flowers in bloom but over time they will give flowers later into the season.

So many people are talking about animals eating the vegetables in their gardens. My thoughts on this are that the animals are eating the vegetables for the water that is contained in the vegetables. With only a little bit of rain, there are fewer and fewer sources of water for animals to get a drink. There may also be an issue with there being less and less “ wild “ food due to the continuing drought. I know that both birds and animals are constantly using our birdbath. It is not unusual to see a squirrel or a chipmunk handing from the birdbath and drinking the water. It might be a good idea to set a shallow bowl or saucer in your yard with water in the container. You should empty out the container every few days to keep mosquitoes from using it as a source for laying eggs that will hatch into adult mosquitoes.

Speaking of mosquitoes, the rain that we had Sunday night helped to water our plants, but any water that has pooled will be a place for mosquito eggs to hatch and turn into adult mosquitoes in about 10 days. Before the rain, I put a mosquito larvacide in the gutters at the house. Any water that pools in the gutters will have an organic mosquito larvae control that will help to cut down on the number of mosquitoes that we will have in a few weeks.

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