The Beginning of the Winter Season

Our winter/holiday season began the moment that our cut greens arrived. Why so early? The daughter of a long standing client is to be married this Saturday the 18th. Lots of family and friends from places far away will be attending.  I promised that her winter pots would be done before the first of their [...]

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Top 5 Fall Landscape Maintenance Tips to Prepare for Winter

It’s finally here! Leaves are changing color, temperatures are dropping, there’s pumpkin-spice flavoring in everything, and stores are putting out their Christmas displays! It must be fall!

But what do you need to do, as a homeowner, to prepare your property for the coming winter? When is the right time to do it? Where do you start? Here’s the list of the top 5 things you should do for your landscape maintenance to prepare for winter:

Five Fall Maintenance Tips

1. Shrub trimming and perennial/ornamental grass cutbacks

Many of the plants in your landscape will benefit from you taking the time to make sure they’re trimmed properly before winter hits. All of your perennials and tall ornamental grasses (like Karl Foerster grass) can be cut back pretty dramatically. Even your smaller ornamental grasses and perennials (like dwarf fountain grass or liriope) can be cut back this time of year. This healthy pruning, done properly, allows these landscape plants to retain their shape when they push new growth the following spring.

NOTE: There are certain plants that should NOT be cut back in the fall. Specifically, shrubs that bloom in spring, such as lilac, forsythia, azaleas, rhododendrons, and some viburnum. These plants should be trimmed immediately after bloom (think early June here in Central PA), so their flowers aren’t accidentally pruned off.

2. Winter Protects

Winter Protection treatments should be done after your shrub trimming in the fall. These are also called “anti-desiccant” sprays. What happens to many of your landscape plants in the winter is they lose moisture more quickly than they can take in new moisture from the root system (called “transpiration”). When this happens, much of the leaf tissue of your landscape plants is irreparably damaged. When this happens, over the course of several winters, it can affect plant healthy by causing the loss of leaf tissue that is vital for photosynthesis.

Winter Protection treatments are a series of sprays done for your landscape plants to protect them from damage that cold weather does to them (hence the name, “Winter Protect”). Generally, three are recommended through late fall and early winter for best coverage. The number of winter protective sprays done on your landscape will be dependent on the weather; if temperatures in your area start to freeze much earlier in the season than is typical, you may only get one or two sprays completed. This is NOT a fool-proof way to prevent winter damage, but for lots of landscape plants (azaleas, boxwoods, holly, rhododendrons, laurels, arborvitae, juniper, cedar and pine, to name a few), a winter protect can improve the long-term health of your plants.

You might also want to consider a physical barrier in some areas (burlap barrier as an example), like those particularly prone to gusty or consistent winds, to prevent these winds from causing additional stress and winter damage.

3. Clean Up Leaves

Recognizing that this one seems really obvious, you’d be surprised at the number of clients who don’t realize the impact that this can have on the health of your landscape. There’s even a whole argument from natural gardeners who will tell you that leaf litter is valuable compost material, and to “leave it” (see what we did there?) right where it lays.

From the standpoint of a professional landscaping company who treats many landscape plants for diseases throughout the year, we’d disagree at least in part. Leaves make a great addition to a compost pile somewhere away from your beds. However, when piled too high in your landscape beds, leaf litter can simply foster a whole host of disease issues. In winter months, when sunlight, airflow, and regular moisture are lower than spring and fall, your plants are already under stress. Why increase the risk of stress by adding too much leaf litter to the base of your plants?

Besides the concern for your beds, there are considerations for your lawn. Leaves laying on the lawn, and overwintering, are preventing sunlight from getting to that section of turf, which can kill it. And although sandy soils are more susceptible, repeatedly allowing leaves to break down can begin to affect the pH of the soil, making it more acidic.

Lastly, your neighbors will complain so just clean up your leaves already!

4. Tree and Shrub Fertilization

We all know those stories about nature preparing for the freezing cold of winter. When we think about this, our minds instantly conjure up images of ants laboring all summer to stock up, or woodland creatures storing up food (which is why we actually call hiding stuff “squirreling it away”) to get them through the tundra until the first signs of spring life present themselves.

What we don’t normally think about is the plants that are doing the same thing. They need to store up energy reserves and carbohydrates for the winter, too. They need to have enough nutrition to survive throughout the cold and freezing temperatures that are quickly descending upon us. Fertilizing late in the season, after trees and shrubs are done growing for the season, truly helps sustain them through the winter and encourages healthy new growth the following spring. Don’t skip this important step in caring for your landscape.

5. Tree Pruning

Tree pruning late in the season, or even over the winter itself, is a much better idea than most people realize. There are a few good reasons for this…

First, winter weather itself. Heavy snow falls and ice storms throughout the winter accumulate on the plant. The more branches and stems throughout the plant means more places for precipitation to accumulate. More accumulation means more weight pressure pulling down on branches and stems. When that weight gets to a certain point, you get stems that snap and branches that break. Having this breaking and tearing is a lot less healthy for your plants than a clean cut would be, and adds stress to the plant when it’s not actively growing and trying to repair itself.

Secondly, it can cost you less money. Less leaf tissue to haul away means less weight for your tree pruning company to carry away, which may reduce your cost. Less leaf tissue to clean up can mean less on-site clean-up, which can reduce the man-hours invested in your pruning job.  Less debris, less clean-up, and fewer man-hours can translate into lower pruning costs for you, the customer.

Lastly, there’s a really good cultural reason for pruning late in the year. Late season and dormant pruning, for certain species of tree, prevents the spread of diseases. In particular, you should really consider having your oaks and elms pruned very late in the season or while dormant to avoid or slow the spread of Oak Wilt and Dutch Elm Disease.

Getting your trees pruned later in the season is good for the health of your plants and potentially for your budget. Don’t overlook this important part of preparing your landscape for the winter.

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BONUS:LAWN CARE TIPS FOR LATE FALL!

Okay, since you’ve made it this far, we’re going to give you a couple of bonus tips for your lawn as well!

Do a late fall fertilization for your lawn. Your turf is made up of thousands of individual plants. The reasoning is the same for your lawn as for your landscape plants – the plants are storing up nutrients so they can overwinter. Make sure you feed the lawn late in the season, one last time, with a slow-release fertilizer (often, this is called a “winterizer”).

Secondly, make sure you core aerate. This one takes a little more explanation. Soils in North America generally fall into 3 types: sandy soils (like in Florida) that are very loose; clay soils (like here in Central Pennsylvania) that are very dense; and loamy soils, which are the happy middle ground between sandy and clay soils.

Clay soils (which is what we have locally) get very compacted and hard over time. Just normal wear-and-tear from mowing, walking, and even rainfall push this already dense soil closer to together. It just keeps getting harder and harder over time.

Your landscape plants (trees and shrubs) have thick, “woody” roots that can sort of “muscle” through the dense clay without as much of a problem. Your turf, on the other hand, has a very fine, “hairy” kind of root structure. The soil eventually gets to the point where the roots can’t push their way through anymore, and the turf will decline. This compacted soil can also prevent water from flowing through properly, causing a shallow root structure and fostering diseases at the crown of the plant (where the grass plant actually emerges from the soil).

Using a piece of equipment to regularly pull out plugs of this soil allows water and air flow to the root level. This adding of oxygen to the soil (hence the term “aerating”) breaks up it up a little bit, making it softer, and allowing the roots to spread and water to flow through the soil properly, creating a deeper growing root.

One of the more common objections we get from clients about this service is that “It makes a mess of my lawn,” which is true. Often it does make the lawn muddy and messy for a week or two until the cores that were pulled break down. However, it’s a lot less muddy than when you lose turf coverage because the roots are dead and you have large bare spots. Also, having the lawn aerated regularly is usually cheaper than a major lawn renovation, which will eventually be needed if you ignore an aeration.

If you have additional question about any of these services, we’d be thrilled to speak with you! Contact our office to request a free consultation.

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About the Author: Jay Worth

Jay has been in our industry since 2009. His passion for beautiful lawns and landscapes along with his great customer service skills made Jay a great addition to our sales team when he joined is in 2015. Jay enjoys meeting new potential clients as he develops business for our company in nearby communities. His attention to detail and cheerful demeanor helps him to easily assist our clients in reviewing current services and finding new ways our organization can assist them with maintaining their properties.

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Too late to plant tulips?

The post Too late to plant tulips? appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

In a word, No!

Now is a great time to get out there and plant tulips before the ground freezes. Until recently the weather was really warm and although the calendar said it was a good time to get these planted, my shorts and t-shirt indicated it was a little early. Well that has certainly changed and the time to plant tulips can’t be put off much longer.

When to plant tulips?

When your elephant ear bulbs quit looking like this…

And instead start looking like this:

My bulbs from Colorblends arrived in mid September but the warm weather was keeping all of my tropical plants looking great. I tell myself that they actually do better with a hard freeze to knock down the growth, but that may also be because I just don’t have it in me to remove these really great looking plants. More on removing and storing tropical plants in our next post!

With the alocasias and colocasias removed it was the perfect time to work the soil. Using a long spade, the soil was deeply tilled and turned over to incorporate some of the leaf litter on top and also to make it easier to plant.

Once the prep was done, I decided the best way to plant tulips in here was to divide my 100 bulbs among the two beds to help get an even amount in each. I ordered the Colorblends Pink Cubed mix and I know from experience that I am a little heavy handed on the planting! This blend includes three varieties of tulips with varying bloom times which should help extend the color display until its warm enough to return the elephant ears to their place of prominence in front of the house.

The instructions for this blend say to plant tulips 5″ deep with 7-8 per square foot.  To keep it simple, I tossed them onto the bed, adjusted a few to help even out and started planting right there. The soil in these beds is very light so it was easy to plant deep enough with a hand trowel. I considered removing all of the needed soil, laying out the bulbs and then refilling, but that seemed like unnecessary work.

Each tulip bulb was set upright as it was placed in its new home.

 

The total planting time for these 100 tulip bulbs was about 30 minutes. I’ve heard it said that gardeners are the world’s most optimistic people. It might be starting to get cold out, but rest assured, it is not too late to plant tulips in your garden. When spring comes you will be so glad that you did!

The post Too late to plant tulips? appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

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The Holiday Preview 2017

I am chagrined, but not surprised that I have not managed to put up a post in the past 10 days. I have been racing against a November 9th deadline to transform Detroit Garden Works from the fall to the holiday winter season. No one disputes that signs of the winter and holiday in late [...]

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Can these Junipers be Saved? by Susan Harris

My latest gardening obsession is making over the landscape in front of my housing co-op offices, where the top priority is to do something about the overgrown junipers. Planted too close to the sidewalk and doors, they’d been sheared back, which caused much unsightly needle-browning.

The problem wasn’t just that they were encroaching onto sidewalks, either. Their looming presence over the doors made the female staffers feel less than safe as they exited, especially at night. Something had to be done, and right away.

So the team of staff and volunteers working on this decided to have the junipers closest to the sidewalk removed, and it was super-gratifying to watch those bad boys being yanked out of the ground by a Bobcat excavator.

Unfortunately, this exposed even more dieback and browning in the adjacent junipers (above). So ugly.

But man, I live for pruning projects like this! Oh, the mountain of dead juniper branches I gleefully (obsessively) compiled, ignoring the dozen or so cuts on my arms, blood and all. Who notices these things when they’re absorbed in the job? (And with industrial-grade loppers, too!)

These next two photos show the junipers after I’d removed all the dead parts. Kinda sculptural, right? And I’ve been telling everyone that when spring comes, these bare trunks will “green up” and look new.

Except apparently they won’t. I went back to Google to double-check on that bit, homing in on a source I trust – Bert Cregg, an actual “Garden Professor,” in Fine Gardening Magazine. The relevant text and photos from his article “How to Prune Conifers”:

I’ll be writing to the good Professor Cregg about the “few exceptions,” in hopes that our junipers quality.

A bit more research yields more bad news, though, this time from SFGate’s Home Guide on the subject:

When trimming junipers, not cutting down to bare stems is crucial: always leave some green foliage, because bare wood will not grow foliage.

Cut down overgrown junipers if pruning will result in mostly bare wood. It is easier to replace such junipers with new, smaller shrubs than to try to rejuvenate old, nearly bare wood shrubs.

Crap! Our only hope may be to cover those bare trunks with the fast-growing flowering shrubs we’re planting in front of them – Ninebarks and Spireas – and going all in on turning those junipers into sculptures.

SF Gate’s guide went on to criticize the shearing of junipers, but with an even curiouser qualifier:

Shearing is not recommended for junipers, although it is often practiced for pyramidal junipers when a formal look is desired. Shearing causes dense outer growth, which shades the interior of the shrub and makes it more susceptible to needle browning and branch dieback caused by drying winds.

That bit in italics makes me wonder why shearing of pyramidal junipers wouldn’t also result in the dreaded needle browning and branch dieback. But if true, it explains how this landscape contractor somewhere in the Balkans can do this with impunity:

Can these Junipers be Saved? originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 10, 2017.

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A Glimpse of a Lunatic’s Garden by Allen Bush

Jamie Dockery, wizard of farm and garden. August 12, 2017.

I don’t know anyone on this planet, or galaxy, with more runaway enthusiasm for gardening than Jamie Dockery. And that’s not all. Besides his rabid determination to grow anything with chlorophyll, Jamie also raises little cows, little goats, chickens, ducks, donkeys, and tends an aviary with finches and canaries—all of this on his ten-acre farm in Salvisa, KY, not far from the Kentucky River.

Ansel, the newborn, black and white calf. March 26, 2017.

“I’m a full blown nut job,” Jamie confessed during a lecture he gave early last spring called: “A Glimpse of a Lunatic’s Garden.”

This was one of nearly 50 talks Jamie presents each year as part of his day job as the Fayette County Extension Agent for Horticulture Education. Jamie’s first love, after his livestock, is perennials, but he is no one-trick pony. He’s extremely knowledgeable on trees, shrubs, and fruits and vegetables, too.

The little cows in early May.

Jamie trials many new plants and vegetable seed items in Salvisa. At his recommendation, I have planted two disease-resistant apple varieties ‘Liberty and Enterprise’. And Jamie told Rose recently about the thornless Prime-Ark Freedom® Primocane blackberry variety that produce a second crop later in the season, on new growth.

Jamie tours the vegetable garden with Tay Breene and Rose Cooper in mid-May.

Jamie muscled through 200 slides in an hour and 40-minutes. There was not a dull moment.

“You’re going to kill plants. Don’t worry,” he advised.

“I avoid pastel colors; I prefer crayon box colors,” he said.

The celandine poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) has “glow-in-the-dark yellow sap.”

The popcorn plant, Senna (Cassia didymobotrya) “smells like popcorn for a few seconds before it begins to smell like stinky jimson weed.”

Jamie and Rose Cooper with the popcorn plant, Senna (Cassia) didympbotrya in early October.

There was a slide with a “cacophony” of bright flowering daylilies including ‘Rainbow Towers’, ‘Lemon Madeline’, ‘Heavenly Dragonfly’ with Echinacea purpurea and Chrysanthemum ‘Becky’.

Effie (L) and Diesel (R) along the summer border summer. Dockery photo.

Jamie keeps a sharp eye open for old, passalong plants. He has several old bearded Iris, about which he is philosophical: “They persist.”

Summer Sorbaria sorbifolia. Dockery photo.

Jamie also got excited (he’s easily excited) about the false spiraea, Sorbaria sorbifolia, with one caveat that momentarily knocked the shrub off stride for me: it is “vigorous” (meaning, suckering like crazy).

I perked up again when Jamie said, “This hardy shrub will take any abuse you can throw at it.”

Good advice, but that was only a teaser.

Jamie uncorked the closer.

“It has ginormous astilbe-like flowers for two or three months and is disastrously beautiful,” he said.

Jamie dares timid gardeners to be cautious of fads but not to be shy about trying new plants. Be patient; be bold. Cross the threshold to garden discovery.

Sit a spell.

Rose and I met Jamie through mutual friends who garden and swap plants. Jamie spends free time in Salvisa. (He lives in Lexington during the week with his partner Gerry.)

Washtub tower of succulents.

Jamie initially built a run-in shed in Salvisa for his goats, cattle and donkeys so they could be protected in inclement weather. He liked the animal shelter so much that he added a modified run in—a simple house (1500 sq. ft.) with a wood stove. There is no electricity.

Summer daylilies—’Rainbow Towers’, ‘Lemon Madeline’, and ‘Heavenly Dragonfire’ with Chrysanthemum (Leucanthemum) ‘Becky’ and Echinacea. Dockery photo.

 

Animal farm and garden.

The Salvisa farm and garden originated from a child’s dream of kittens, puppies and memories of the refrain, “No, you can’t keep that until you get older.” His patch of soil and sentiment is a walk back in time to a childhood of canned vegetables, medicinal herbs, no running water and big snowball bushes (Viburnum macrocephalum). His farm and garden are homage to the self-sufficient lifestyle his maternal grandparents lived in rural Russell County, in South Central Kentucky, near Lake Cumberland.

Potted carnivorous plants in mid-summer.

Jamie grows a keepsake flameleaf sumac shrub, Rhus copallinum, harvested from from root stolons dug from his grandmother’s garden. The orange-red fall leaf color and bright-red seed heads are stunning. He soaks up inspiration wherever he goes. “I have taken hostages from everyone I met along the way, ” Jamie said.

The buzzard has feathers made from bean pods of a honey locust. Osage orange tree in the background.

He invited friends—more hostages—out to the farm the weekend before Halloween. It was a raw, wet-cold evening. The vegetable garden was winding down. Light frost had already nipped the lablab beans. Jamie set up several fire stations to keep everyone warm. The gardening maestro’s luscious, lunatic garden was a backdrop for the season’s closing event.

Jamie’s newly completed seasonal sculptures made their debut.

Halloween ghoul with $10 bucks worth of Walmart fabric, burlap sack and nimblewill hair. Dockery photo.

Now he is preparing for cold weather. Jamie never stops. Tender plants go to Lexington and spend the winter under grow lights in the basement of his Lexington home. His canaries and finches go to town, too.

Our 2016 gift of Christmas greenery from Jamie.

Christmas decorations will get underway soon. Jamie will start with sprigs of boxwood, Magnolia D.D. Blanchard, Nandina and red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) If he is lucky, he might add the beautiful pheasant back mushroom—if he finds one on a decaying log. And who knows what else.

“I make the decorations for my friends,” he said.

Little Dude, the noble donkey. He guards the livestock from coyotes.

 

Plenty of Osage oranges to go around. Crocus speciosus in foreground.

There is no need to call ground control when you’re held friendly hostage in the swirling orbit of Jamie Dockery’s lunatic garden.

It’s all fun.

As any garden should be.

A Glimpse of a Lunatic’s Garden originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 8, 2017.

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Are Images of Gardeners in the Media Finally Improving? by Susan Harris

Gardeners in the play “Native Gardens”

My recent rant about stereotypes of gardeners in a new play got me thinking about the images of gardeners used in advertising and elsewhere. The garden-club-competing gardeners in the play typify the demographic so often used to portray us – white and elderly.

 

More of the same can be found by searching “gardener” at istockphoto, where these images of older women especially bug me because they convey the surprising (to all real gardeners) impression that gardening is about fussing over flowers. You and I know that gardening requires hard work – digging, hauling, and wrestling branches with pruning tools.

Thankfully, iStock’s offerings include more diversity than just older white women.

On Google image there are plenty of young people and quite a bit of pruning going on.

Searching “gardener” on Shutterstock yields mostly super-fake images of gardens and just a few actual people, most of them young.

Pexel’s gardener images are even stranger, starting with their three top results: woman with lavender, man with monstrous leaf-blower, and a green ball.

With that bit of research, I realize that representations of gardeners as old white people snipping flowers can’t be blamed on stock photo companies, because they DO offer other choices.

The good news is the arrival of an real alternative – Boys with Plants on Instagram! Whether they’re gardeners or not, who cares?

Are Images of Gardeners in the Media Finally Improving? originally appeared on Garden Rant on November 3, 2017.

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