Horticultural Hints for September!
Begin the vegetable garden clean-up by removing plants that have passed. Any diseased plant should be bagged and put in the trash. Only healthy, disease-and insect-free plants should be composted. Also remove any fallen fruit (vegetables can host disease or insects over the winter as well as the plant.) If you are not planning a fall/winter garden, plant a cover crop
of annual rye grass or use leftover peas and bean seeds. These will die during the winter but continue to prevent soil erosion over the winter and add nutrients next spring. Weed every chance you get. Every weed you remove in September - so it doesn’t spread seeds - is a thousand weeds you won’t have to remove in the spring.
Your last opportunity to do something about swallowwort. By early September, seed heads on black swallowwort – which is deadly to certain butterflies – are turning brown. Once they ripen, seed pods will open and – like the milkweed to which it is related – the seeds will scatter on the wind. If you see swallowwort with seed heads, pull it, bag it, and send it to be incinerated (never composted). The butterflies will thank you.
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Feed woody plants and your perennials with a layer of good compost (two to three inches) followed by a layer of chipped leaves, straw or wood chips. The material will be naturally incorporated into the soil by the freezing and thawing over the winter and be available to your plants in the spring. If you have not used herbicides on your lawn this year, leaves shredded by your mower, along with grass clippings, are excellent mulches.
Preparing for the nibblers and gnawers. Deer, rabbits, and rodents damage your plants by feeding on foliage, twigs, and bark when their regular diet disappears in the winter months. Wrapping tree trunks is a way to keep your landscape safe from hungry critters. Place plastic tree guards around the bottom of your deciduous trees (especially young or newly planted ones) to keep rabbits and mice from gnawing. Chicken wire barriers or cages around your trees, shrubs, and plants are often the best solution to keep rabbits at bay. Applying repellant sprays to the trunks, branches, and stems of evergreen trees and shrubs is a great option. Repellant sprays will need to be re-applied monthly but teach critters to look elsewhere year round.
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If you throw that diseased tomato vine or beetle-infested bean plant in the compost pile, its eggs or disease may well over-winter. Send it to be incinerated instead.
Keep planting your winter vegetables as you open up space in the garden. Spinach, arugula, beets, swiss chard, radishes, many oriental greens and even peas can tolerate enough cold to produce a crop between now and the first serious frost. Add a layer of row cover (available at nurseries and online) and you can serve fresh garden vegetables for Thanksgiving, and possibly beyond.
Get a soil test this fall. If you wait until spring to send in soil for a soil test, you may find yourself with a lengthy wait, as labs are inundated with requests as soon as the soil is workable. A test done in the fall gives you a chance to start improving your soil over the winter when you have time to affect beneficial changes.
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Martha's Vineyard Garden Club
PO Box 5061 Vineyard Haven MA 02568 Updated 1/29/2017 |