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Question: How can I maintain my Russian Sage plants in an upright position? I love the plants, but they have a tendency to flop over and lay on top of the other perennials in my garden. If I cut the flopped-over branches, I lose the colorful flowers. Do you have any idea of what I can do to keep the branches more upright?

Answer: Russian sage ( Perovskia atriplicifolia) is a wonderful, drought-tolerant perennial. Its silvery stems are graced with blue-green, feathery leaves and topped with spires of blue flowers that cover the entire plant with a blue haze for many weeks each summer.

This member of the mint family is not used as a culinary herb, but the foliage does have a sage-like aroma when crushed.

Russian sage is a woody perennial that’s fully hardy here in Pennsylvania. It thrives in well-drained soil and full sun. By its nature, it is a very floppy plant, prone to tumbling over other perennials. I enjoy the loose form of this plant, preferring to give it a lot of space in the garden by keeping it a 3 or 4 feet away from other plants. That being said, there are a few things you can do to limit its relaxed habit.

Full sun is a must for this perennial. If it is in partial shade, the stems will grow more leggy as they reach for sunlight.

Do not provide this plant with any fertilizer beyond an annual top-dressing of compost. Over-fertilization (particularly of nitrogen) leads to weak, overgrown stems that are unable to support themselves and stand upright. You might consider staking the plant early in the spring with some bamboo stakes and twine.

Pinching helps limit the growth. In late May, remove the terminal portion of each stem by using your thumb and forefinger to pinch off an inch or so of growth. This will cause each stem to branch out and remain more compact. It will, however, delay the flowering by a few weeks.

One more thing to consider: there are a handful of Russian sage cultivars that were bred for a more upright growth habit. “Blue Spire� reaches 3 feet tall and produces stems that reach for the sky rather than their neighbors; “Little Spire� has a similar habit but grows only to 2 feet; and “Longin� is a beautiful, very rigid selection with loads of feathery-blue flowers that grow on 3- to 4-foot-tall plants.

Horticulturist Jessica Walliser co-hosts “The Organic Gardeners� at 7 a.m. Sundays on KDKA Radio. She is the author of several gardening books, including “Grow Organic� and “Good Bug, Bad Bug.� Her website is www.jessicawalliser.com. Send your gardening or landscaping questions to tribliving@tribweb.com or The Good Earth, 503 Martindale St., 3rd Floor, D.L. Clark Building, Pittsburgh, PA 15212.

We don’t normally think about our landscapes and gardens very much during the winter months, but here are a few helpful plant tips that you may wish to consider on these cold season days:

• Avoid heavy traffic and playing on dormant lawns now, as dry turf is easily broken and the crowns of turf plants may be severely damaged or killed. This damage may show up next spring and summer as thin or poorly growing turf areas.

• Flower and vegetable garden seeds stored under warm, moist conditions deteriorate rapidly, and sometimes actually rot. Be sure to keep your seed stored in a cool, dry location, like a cellar or basement. If you can’t do this, it will be best to buy fresh seed each season. And speaking of ordering seed, now is a good time to check through your seed catalogs and place your orders before varieties sell out.

• Save your plastic mesh bags in which oranges usually come because they make ideal storage bags for air-drying bulbs, herbs, onions and gourds. Check any bulbs, tubers or corms that you currently have in storage and discard any that are soft or diseased.

• Examine the limb structure of your shade trees and remove any dead, diseased and/or storm-damaged branches now before they fall and cause damage to any plants or passers-by below.

• While you are traveling about each day, keep an eye open for plants with interesting winter form or color that you may wish to incorporate into your own landscape.

• If feeding birds is one of your favorite hobbies, order vines, shrubs and trees that provide cover and small fruits for your feathered friends. Consider planting species such as crabapple, hawthorn, dogwood, holly, cotoneaster and pyracantha that can help lure and feed hungry birds.

• Clip and bring branches of forsythia, pussy willow, quince, spirea and dogwood indoors for forcing blooms inside the home. Make long, slanted cuts when collecting branches and place the stems in a vase of water as soon as possible. These plants should bloom in two to three weeks.

• Water newly-planted shrubs and trees in the landscape when the soil becomes dry if no rain occurs for more than two weeks. Pay particular attention to evergreen shrubs and trees as their leaves transpire water whenever air temperatures rise above 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

• Design a flower bed for the shady spots in your landscape. Plan to use shade-tolerant plants such as astilbe, begonia, bleeding hearts, browallia, coleus, ferns, helleborus, hosta and impatiens. Several good shade-tolerant groundcovers include: ajuga, hypericum, English ivy, liriope, mondo grass, pachysandra, vinca and winter creeper.

• During cold snaps, invert large flowerpots over semi-hardy perennials such as dusty miller for protection from low temperatures and wind.

• Check houseplants often to be sure they are receiving enough light and water. Most indoor plants prefer a well-lit location like a south or west-facing window. Don’t place houseplants near a heat vent, on top of the TV, next to a door, etc. as hot and cold air are hard on them. When watering, use your own built-in water meter. Stick your finger 1 inch into the potting soil and if the soil feels dry at that level, then it’s time to water. Check to be sure that water drains completely through the soil ball from top to bottom and exits through the drainage holes.

• When fertilizing houseplants during winter months, use only about half the rate recommended. Houseplants grow less rapidly during cooler months, so they don’t need as much fertilizer now. The ideal temperature should be around 70 degrees in the daytime and 60 degrees at night.

• Reposition stepping stones in your lawn that have heaved up or sunk below the grass level. Carefully lift them up, spread sand in the low areas and then replace them. A bed of sand under stepping stones will aid in drainage and decrease sinking and heaving next year.

• Turn or rototill your vegetable garden to expose weed seeds, nematodes and insects that are over-wintering in the soil to the elements. Exposing insects and weed seeds to cold air and drying winds will help reduce their numbers in your garden.

• Take hardwood cuttings of forsythia, spirea, Japanese quince, mock-orange, Viburnum and other deciduous shrubs. Tie bundles of deciduous cuttings together, and bury in sand in a cold frame. Remove in early spring, and plant in a nursery bed.

• Continue to turn your compost pile, adding leaves and yard debris.

Randy Drinkard is a retired technical writer for The UGA Center for Urban Agriculture and ANR Agent for Troup Cooperative Extension. The Troup County Extension office is located at 114 Church St. in LaGrange and may be reached at 706-883-1675, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Vegetables to plant in January include: beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, collards, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, mustard, onions, radishes, shallots, snow peas, spinach, Swiss chard, turnips. Plant seeds of tomatoes and peppers in greenhouses or under lights indoors in mid to late January to produce transplants to be planted out in March.

• Only use garden pesticides when the problem has been properly identified and they are absolutely necessary. There is no need to spray an insecticide, for instance, every time you see a bug or minor damage. When a pesticide is recommended, always ask for the least toxic product that will do the job.

• Try to avoid creating a landscape that demands more time and maintenance than you can keep up with and enjoy. It’s important to design a landscape that only requires as much maintenance time and effort as you have to give. Remember lawn areas and flowerbeds are high maintenance.

• Start off the New Year with great gardening information. For information on a wide variety of garden topics specifically for Louisiana, check out the LSU AgCenter web site at www.lsuagcenter.com. Click on “Lawn Garden” or “Get It Growing”.

• A few gardening resolutions: Pick more garden flowers for indoor vases; Show a child the wonders of gardening; Read a new gardening book; Attend as many educational gardening opportunities as possible; Try a new plant; Correct landscape problems and mistakes rather than just living with them, Subscribe to a gardening magazine; Stay on top of weeding this year.

It’s time to add Christmas 2013 to the memory book. And it is also time to do something with the poinsettias that will begin to fade.

Mine are looking pretty bad and so into the compost pile they go. But … your poinsettia will bloom again next December — with some luck, and these steps.

• Until March, water your plant, provide a liquid fertilizer once a month and place your poinsettia in a window that receives six hours of indirect light a day.

• In March, prune the poinsettia to 10 inches in height. Continue water, fertilizer and sun requirement.

• After the last chance of frost, and when outdoor temperatures remain above 55 degrees, move your poinsettia outside. Locate the plant in a place that receives morning sun with afternoon shade, or lots of indirect light. Continue with the water (do not let the plants dry out) and fertilization schedule.

• In mid summer, transplant into a pot one size larger. Prune the plant to keep it neat and attractive.

• It’s been easy so far, now for the luck part! Beginning Oct. 1, your poinsettia must be in complete darkness for 14 hours each night. Accomplish this by covering the plant with a large box. Take the box off each morning and put it back on each night during October, November and early December. Night temps must be above 60 degrees. Continue with the water schedule, making sure to water when the soil feels dry to the touch. Continue fertilizing.

• Sometime in December the poinsettia should start to bloom — usually, sometimes. It has been known to happen. Good luck!

Todd Goulding provides residential landscape design consultations. Contact him at www.fernvalley.com or 478-345-0719.

Happy New Year to all of you who are awake enough to read this column today!

Have you cleaned up your garden tools?

The pruners that you used all season will have sap built up on the cutting surfaces of the blades. If you use a putty knife or the blade of a knife, you can scrape the sap off the blades.

If the pruner is an anvil type, there is a little groove in the plate that the pruner edge cuts into. Use a flat-blade screwdriver to dig out that sap. Once the pruners are clean, sharpen them.

If you have loping shears, you need to remove the sap and sharpen them, too. All of your cutting tools that have been cleaned and sharpened should have a light coating of oil put on the blades.

The blades on your lawn mower should be sharpened, too. Your owner’s manual will tell you how to remove and sharpen the blades. If this is too big of a job for you to do or you lost the owner’s manual, it would be a good time of the year to get a dealer who services your riding mower to pick it up and do a tuneup. If you have a small push-type of mower, you generally have to bring it into the shop. The mower will then be ready for those first blades of grass in the spring.

If you have shovels, hoes or other tools with a cutting surface, those tools need to be sharpened, too. Once sharpened, they can be coated with oil to prevent rusting of the metal surfaces.

Soon, it will be time to start growing flowers and vegetables from seed. Keep in mind that you only need about eight to 10 weeks from starting those seeds and putting the plants into the garden. If you start the seeds too early, you will wind up with a plant that is too tall and potentially has a weak stem.

If you were going to start seeds this winter, now would be a good time to clean up all the pots and trays that you have for starting those seeds.

If the seed trays and pots were brought out into the garden, they were exposed to the soil in the garden. Garden soil can contaminate your trays and pots with a disease called damping-off. Damping-off will kill the young seedlings.

To prevent this from happening, you should wash and disinfect those pots and trays. You should wash off all traces of dirt and then use a solution of 1 part bleach to 9 parts water to rinse the pots and trays. This will kill the disease that causes damping-off.

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

—

Tim Lamprey is the owner of Harbor Garden Center on Route 1 in Salisbury. His website is www.harborgardens.com. Do you have questions for Tim? Send them to ndn@newburyportnews.com, and he will answer them in upcoming columns.

home gardening tips

The article introduces to people simple yet unique home gardening tips that allow them to maximize their harvest dramatically. Is it trustworthy?

Seattle, Wa (PRWEB) December 29, 2013

The new “Home Gardening Tips” article on the website Vkool.com is divided into two main parts covering comprehensive home gardening pitfalls and tips. In the first part of the article, people will discover eight common mistakes people often make when gardening. The writer recommends people to prepare the soil carefully before planting any tree. “It is the best foundation for your garden. It will give your plants the essential nutrients without overloading them with chemical fertilizers which may deplete the microbial activity needed for healthy plant growth.” says Lisa Benter Rich, Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada. The author indicates that overwatering is the most popular pitfall beginner gardeners make. Overwatering drowns plants’ roots, causing them to rot. After that, this article also points out that planting too large a garden is a mistake that could place a heavy workload on a gardener and lead to frustration and burnout. “A great gardening strategy is to start small in the first year and plant just a few of your favorite veggies. It can help you garden successfully and have a greater feeling of accomplishment.” says Ivette Soler, a Los Angeles-based garden designer and writer of The Germinatrix blog. Next, this report teaches people how to plant a tree properly. In general, the large the seed is, the deep it prefers to be planted. Planting too deeply may cause seeds to fail to sprout or tire out the young seed sprout before it is able to receive needed sunlight.

In the second part of the writing, this author takes people through a process of discovering seven useful gardening techniques. Firstly, the article reveals underground secrets for growing abundant crops of fruits and vegetables. Secondly, gardeners also get to know ways on how to improve the soil of their home garden with organics. People will learn how to protect their precious baby plants from weeds, bugs, disease, and animals. Lastly, in this report, readers also explore the secrets to deal with climate issues. After the “Home Gardening Tips” article was released, a lot of people can improve their gardening productivity with a few simple steps.

Mai Linh from the site Vkool.com says that: “This is really an informative writing that contains tips to enhance their flexibility and mobility to help people do gardening effectively. Furthermore, the report also provides people with simple steps to promote their physical health safely. Additionally, the tips this article delivers are simple-to-follow for most people regardless of their age, their gender, and their gardening experience.”

If people wish to gain more details from the full “Home Gardening Tips” article, they could visit the website: http://vkool.com/15-home-gardening-tips/

______________

About the website: Vkool.com is the website developed by Tony Nguyen. The site delivers to tips and e-books about various topics, such as business, health, entertainment, and lifestyle. People could send their feedback to Tony Nguyen on any digital products via email.

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Now that is officially winter, it’s time to put away the lawn mower and other lawn and garden tools if you haven’t already done so.

How you treat those tools now will make a difference when it’s time to bring them out of storage and put them to good use.

With that in mind, All Seasons Nursery Landscaping and Home Garden Showplace in Lafayette offered tips on how winterize your tools during one of its seminars.

Don Weintritt provided these 10 tips:

1 Pull the cap off the spark plug on any gas-powered equipment you plan on servicing. This will prevent any accidental firing of the engine and avoid injury.

2 Clean all grass and debris from the mower deck before storing. Remove and sharpen the blades. Use the rough side of a metal file to remove nicks and dents in the blade edge, and then use the finer side to smooth. A mower blade does not need to be knife-edge sharp.

3 Drain engine oil into a sealable container and replace with new oil. Dispose of old oil at an approved facility, such as most auto parts stores. Remove and clean the air filter with water or compressed air. An oily filter can be cleaned with gasoline or rubbing alcohol. Allow the filter to dry completely before returning it to the engine.

4 Burn all the remaining gasoline out of the engine or add a fuel stabilizer. Store your mower in a dry place, such as a shed or garage. If shelter is not available, raise the mower off the ground with a pallet or bricks, and cover well with a tarp. Do not put a tarp beneath the mower, as this will catch water and can cause parts to rust in storage.

5 Wipe all hand tools such as shovels and pruners with gasoline or rubbing alcohol. This will remove heavy residues like tree sap and prevent any spread of fungus and plant diseases your tools may have encountered. Clean all hand tools with a steel wool pad (the kind WITHOUT the soap) or wire brush and an all-purpose spray lubricant. Work the action on moving parts such as pruner blades. Wipe with a clean, dry cloth.

The 2014 garden catalogs are beginning to arrive. Here are a few recommendations that will give you the best outcome. Many of these recommendations come from what I have learned from my own mistakes.

n When ordering perennial plants, get the best quality, most-mature plant offered. Here is an example of a mistake I made: I needed some asparagus crowns to finish out a row of asparagus. I bought one-year-old crowns because they cost a few dollars less than the 2-year-old crowns. As a result, the new plants were small the first year. It took three years before they were growing well enough that I felt I could start harvesting. If I had planted 2-year-old crowns, I would have been harvesting asparagus at least a year sooner.

n When ordering fruit trees, it is wise to order the best quality available and choose dwarf trees. If you plan to care for these trees with annual pruning, spraying, etc., a dwarf tree is much more gardener-friendly. If you don’t plan to care for the trees, then a semi-dwarf or standard tree is a good choice. If you are planting them for wildlife, then go with a standard tree.

n Select varieties of plants that will do well in Northeastern Pennsylvania. One year I planted a variety of cantaloupe that had a 94-day maturity. The plants grew well and produced a good crop. The problem was that they matured in late September. To learn which varieties do well here, talk to a gardening neighbor or ask a farmer at a local farmers’ market what variety they grow. Or go to the Penn State Extension publications website at pubs.cas.psu.edu/Publications.asp, and type in “vegetable varieties.” There you will find a 20-page booklet on recommended vegetable varieties.

n If you are purchasing plants from a local nursery, be sure to plant early. Perennial plants that are potted will do much better if they are planted into your garden as soon as possible. Watch local nurseries – as soon as the plant is available, buy it and plant it.

n Finally, have the soil ready when the plants arrive. Have your soil pH in the correct range for the plant. Prepare the site by having all competing vegetation removed. If the plant needs a support structure, have it either in place before or soon after planting. A young tree will grow more quickly if it is supported that first year.

For more information contact your local extension office. In Lackawanna County call 570-963-6842 or email Lackawanna MG@psu.edu.

JOHN ESSLINGER is a horticulture extension educator for Penn State Extension.