Whether you have finished planting your gardens or not, it is already time to pay attention to their maintenance. Keep your plants blooming all summer long with simple routine care.
Water
Plants are accustomed to a steady diet of water and nutrients when we bring them home from the nursery. Keep them well watered until they establish. Remember, even drought-tolerant plants require water.
New trees and shrubs must be kept well watered until they are established. Trees, depending on size and type, need extra water for two, three and up to five years.
Check container plants daily. They dry out much faster than plants in the garden. Don’t count on rain or overhead irrigation to adequately water them. The heavy foliage and blooms often act an umbrella over the soil with rain rolling off the foliage onto the ground.
Fertilizer
As you know, soil should be well prepared with plenty of compost. In addition, annuals and perennials generally benefit from balanced, slow-release fertilizer applied in time for their spring surge of growth. Long blooming annuals, repeat blooming perennials and heavy feeders welcome another serving of slow-release fertilizer midseason, but hold back on application if we are in a drought. You can also treat prolific bloomers with a periodic light (half-strength) dose of liquid fertilizer.
Pests
Inspect your plants regularly. Aphids, mites and white flies love new growth. Catch them early and you can spray most of them off. Follow up with soap spray or horticultural oil.
Deadheading
Deadheading is an easy but important garden task that keeps lots of flowers blooming throughout the season. Deadheading prevents flowers from going to seed, thereby allowing plants to keep putting energy into new growth and blooms. Deadheading is simply pinching or cutting off spent flowers.
Some people love to wander through their gardens pinching off faded blooms. Others find deadheading tedious. Either way, you can improve the look of your garden if you know what plants to deadhead.
Read plant tags. Often they tell you if a plant is self-cleaning. Plant breeders continue to make life easier for gardeners by developing self-cleaning varieties which drop their spent flowers before they can develop into seeds. Old petunias, for example, need to be deadheaded; newer varieties like Wave, Supertunia and Million Bells (calibrachoa) are self-cleaning. Also, plants identified as sterile hybrids do not need deadheading.
In general, cut spent blooms back to just above the first leaves or bud below the faded flower. Daisies, cosmos, dianthus, gaillardia (blanket flower), marigolds, scabiosa, snapdragons Stokes asters and zinnias should all be consistently deadheaded in this manner.
Plants that bloom on stalks are handled a bit differently. Cutting back faded flowers will bring on a second bloom, extend bloom time or facilitate summer-long blooms.
• Bleeding Heart (dicentra hybrids): Cut flower stems back to the foliage to keep plants blooming all summer.
• Columbine: Cut stalks back to stimulate a second round of blooms.
• Gaura: Cut older stalks back to encourage branching and more flowers.
• Lavender: Cut stems to base to promote a second round of blooms.
• Salvia: Cut stems back to side branches after the first set of blooms for a better next round.
• Delphiniums, foxgloves, hollyhocks, lupines, perennial salvia and veronica (speedwell): Cut the spires back after blooms are about 75 percent spent.
• Coreopsis blooms all summer if it is deadheaded, but it is not practical to deadhead thread leaf coreopsis blooms one by one. After your patch of coreopsis has bloomed shear it back by one- half to two-thirds. It will bloom again. This method can be applied to other tiny bloomers.
Some plants do not need deadheading to rebloom but benefit from deadheading in another way.
• Coneflowers rebloom but deadheading stimulates larger flowers.
• Asters rebloom but deadheading promotes consistent repeat blooms.
• Hibiscus and verbena do not need deadheading but look tidier when spent flowers are cleaned off. Iris and daylilies look better, too, when unattractive stalks and brown flower heads are removed.
• Lantana blooms all summer, but cutting off the black seeds will produce more blooms.
• You will be relieved to know that most vines do not need to be deadheaded.
As you deadhead your way through your gardens this year, expect to be gratified by the result.
Reach DEBBIE MENCHEK, a Clemson Master Gardener, at dmgha3@aol.com.
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