20August 31, 2017

With September right on our doorstep, there are things that you should be doing in the early fall. Here are a few of the things you should pencil in on your to do list.

If you need to repair an existing lawn or if you are going to start a new lawn from scratch, you should have the grass seed in place by the end of September. Depending on the type of grass seed that you use, it can take up to 3 weeks for the grass seed to sprout and then the seed will need another month to get out sufficient roots for your seed to turn into a permanent lawn.

It is true that some years you can get the seed down later. However if you want to do all the work and hope that Mother Nature doesn’t freeze up the soil early, then you can wait. On the other hand, it probably is best to get the seed down by the end of September.

If you have Japanese bamboo growing in your yard, I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to control. I once owned a piece of property that had some of this invasive bamboo. I soon learned that trying to pull it up was futile. Trying to kill it with weed killer was futile most of the time. I did learn that when this weed was forming its white flower clusters, it would soon be dying back for the winter.

When the Japanese bamboo forms it flowers, it is preparing to pull all the food that has been made in the leaves down to the plants massive underground root system. If you prepare and spray the leaves with a weed killer with Glysophate, the weed killer will be taken down to the roots along with all the food in the leaves. This will severely damage the root system of the bamboo. The weed killer will kill other desirable vegetation so you need to be very careful in how you apply it. I have seen the white flower clusters forming on the Japanese bamboo, so now is the time to spray the weed killer.

If you have space in your garden, now is the time to plant garlic. Many of the garden stores are selling untreated garlic that you can plant now. The garlic is divided into the individual cloves and each clove is planted in the ground. The clove will root and put out growth. The growth will overwinter and, come the spring, each clove will put on a growth spurt that will allow each clove to turn into full size garlic. We have the untreated garlic at our store.

You still have time to make use of some of the empty space in your vegetable garden. There are so many different types of greens that can be planted now that will give you a fall harvest of fresh vegetables. I had one customer who did a fall planting of greens and with a mild fall, she was still harvesting fresh greens at Thanksgiving!

Well, Labor Day is coming up next Monday. Please have a safe weekend. We will be open all weekend and on Labor Day, too.

I’ll talk to you again next week.