Summer Garden Maintenance
Early Summer Maintenance
June is the gateway to summer flowers.
I have always thought of June as a pretty moody month. She has beautiful blue skies, lightning bugs, and singing birds. But she also brings possibly the craziest weather of the entire year; thunderstorms, crazy winds, drought, blistering heat, occasionally cold mornings, and oh yea Japanese Beetles. This time of year I get impatient waiting for the summer flowers to bloom in the garden. Before the Zinnias and Dahlias start to bloom there is some work you can do to help pass the time, and make the plant healthier and well maintained for the summer ahead.
So let’s dig in.
I have lots of summer annuals sprinkled around the farm, simply for my enjoyment and to add a little pop of color to the farm. To keep annuals looking nice, they benefit from pinching. People are often intimidated by pinching because you are removing part of the plant that looks otherwise healthy. Pinching is simply removing the top part of the plant, encouraging more branches to grow up from the bottom of the plant. This allows your Zinnia, Marigold, or Dahlias to not only have more stems, which means more blooms, but they will be sturdier as they are growing from the base of the plant rather than the top. Pinching creates a sturdier plant that reduces the need for staking.
The ideal time to pinch plants is when they have at least four sets of leaves, and you are going to 'pinch' or clip off the top half of the plants, being sure to leave at least two sets of leaves. If you look at the base of the leaves, you will see tiny stems forming where the leaf meets the main stem. Those tiny stems are what you are encouraged to grow by pinching the top of the plant. You will now have a bushier, sturdier plant with lots of blooms soon!
Some plants, even after being pinched, still might require staking. There are several ways to tackle bending plants in the garden. Staking or caging is important not only to summer flowers but to tomatoes for all you veggie gardeners. Staking is our go-to for Dahlias, some perennials like Achillea (Yarrow) and Rudbeckia (Black-eye-Susans), and Pycnanthemum (Mountain Mint). Cages can also work for tomatoes, as well as peonies.
Here are a few basic instructions for staking:
When your plant is about 8-12 inches is a good time to stake. You want to give it support before it starts to bend. Place the stake about 2-4 inches from the base of the plant and drive it in several inches. You can use t-posts, rebar, or wooden tomato stakes.
Starting a few inches from the ground, loosely tie the plant to the stake with a loop of garden twine. If your plant is tall enough, you will want to add another higher loop. As your plant grows, you will continue to tie it to the stake, ensuring it grows tall and beautiful. Nobody likes horizontal zinnias!
Be sure to tie the loop with enough for the plant to grow but tight enough to support it. Think of how it feels when you have a pair of pants that are too tight. We are going to for cozy sweatpants tight when you tie the twine.
Sometimes when we have a large area that needs to be staked, we use a corraling method instead of individually staking plants. This works if you have several Zinnias, Marigolds, Cosmos, Peonies, or any plant prone to falling over as it grows tall.
Here is how are a few of the corralling basics:
You start by placing stakes in a rectangle around the outside edges of your plants. Imagine you are building a fence around the outside of the plants you want to corral.
Then run twine around the outside about 8 inches off the ground, wrapping it around each stake several times to hold it in place.
Add another row of twine higher up as your plants need it.
Sometimes if the bed we are working in is wide, we will add a stake to the middle of the bed and run another set of twine between them to give it support in the center.
Once you get everything staked, pinched, and fertilized, here comes my gardening nemesis, the Japanese beetle. They truly are the bane of any flower grower's existence. Even though they only last a few weeks, they can decimate your flowers in a single morning. The easiest and chemical-free way to get rid of them is by picking them off the plants and dropping them in soapy water so they can't fly away. You can also pick them off and feed them to your chickens if you have them.
You want to do the beetle picking early in the morning before the dew burns off. The beetles' wings are still wet from the morning dew and can't fly away yet. Another favorite way of mine is grabbing the beetle, saying a few choice words to it, and then chopping its heads off with the clippers. It's oddly satisfying. You should try it.
You might notice that certain plants seem to get hit harder than others. For example, there might be one Zinnia they all seem to go to in the entire patch. This is because the beetles put off a pheromone that attracts the others to the party. You know what kind of party I am talking about. This is the same pheromone that the Japanese beetle traps use to attract them to the bag. Yes, the bags do work, but I will caution you not to put them in the garden because it does attract beetles to that area. Maybe try sticking the bag in your neighbor's yard and send them over that way.
As always, drop me your questions below in the comments, and I would love it if you shared our blog with another gardening friend who might enjoy it too.
Get your hands dirty,
