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Welcome & Introduction
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Hey there. if you are new to the school or recently enrolled, welcome. We're so excited that you're here. The, when we don't have a live class, I like to film little mini classes, if you will, to keep you updated on the things that you need to be focusing on so you can stay on track where we are in the season so that you don't miss planting deadlines or, I'll share some tips on general maintenance, and often th- share things that I'm working on in case that's helpful for you.
When I'm working on anything, I'm always thinking about, if I'm in the moment, it really helps me understand the things that people might have questions about. So that's an way that I like to instruct, is just to share what I'm doing so that it's top of mind for me, and I can really give you the detailed information that may be forgotten or glossed over in a more generalized [00:01:00] instruction that's not quite in the moment, if you will.
Cutting Back Salvias & Perennials
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So in today's little check-in, I wanted to l- I'm gonna first talk to you about the things that I'm focusing on right now, and then, I also wanna give you some reminders about how we're dealing with recovering from the heat and transitioning into the fall season. So the first thing that is making me happy but also something that I'm focusing on in terms of working on is I have been cutting back my Salvia mystic spires even more.
So I did an early August shearing back of the Salvia. If you haven't taken the perennials class yet, one of the most important maintenance items for perennials to keep them looking good through the year is to cut them back in July. Not everything can be cut back like this, but a lot of perennials really benefit from being cut back in July [00:02:00] to help maintain their shape and then also encourage continued bloom.
Because of the heat and the effects of the heat, I am continuing to cut back things a little further into the fall than I normally would. And that's just to remove any of the foliage that has been heat stressed or heat damaged in order to allow more new growth and more new blooms to occur once the temps start to cool down and once we start getting rain again.
So if you have some perennials that are looking kind of leggy or floppy, yes, you can cut them back now. If you have never cut back your perennials or if it's in the first year that the perennial is in the ground, be conservative. So if you're not sure how a perennial is going to respond, just cut it back by a third, and you can watch the process and see how it affects your plant.
And then in future seasons, you can cut it back even more. So that's one of the things that I'm doing specifically for the Salvia mystic spires.
Coneflower (Echinacea) Maintenance
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And then the other thing [00:03:00] that I'm cutting back are my purple coneflower. So my Echinacea purpurea, which is a Texas native.
And often people are frustrated by them because this time of year, what happens is they put up a bunch of blooms in the late spring, early summer, and then those blooms die just the same way that blooms on every plant don't last forever. Those die back. And important maintenance with those is to cut those bloom stalks out or cut them all the way to the ground.
The way that Echinacea purpurea grows is it has what's called basal foliage. So what you wanna do to encourage a possible fall rebloom You do wanna cut those flower stalks all the way down.
Zinnias & Heat Damage
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and so that's another kind of maintenance item that I've got going on. The next thing that I'm working on is I'm gonna be pulling out a lot of my zinnia plants. And this is just what happens very naturally over the course of a zinnia plant's life [00:04:00] The main things that end up happening with the zinnias that affect the way that it looks.
So much of the foliage is also heat damage, so you can see in this picture. The browning leaves on the bottom are a combination of two different things. One is just the natural aging of the plant. Two, it's heat stress, especially in this year, and three, it's very natural for zinnias to get powdery mildew.
And even if you have proper spacing, lots of airflow, it's just something that they do end up getting. And what happens is with the powdery mildew, the result is that those leaves turn brown. So for these plants, up until now, I've been able to remove the brown leaves, and that helps it look a little bit better.
But now these plants are overmature, and even if I cut them back, they're not gonna look much better, so I'm gonna be pulling these plants out. But the cool thing is, since spring, as my zinnia [00:05:00] flowers fade, individual flowers on the plant fade, I've been leaving them on the plant until the flowers turn completely brown and the stem beneath the flower is completely brown.
Saving Seeds
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This is really important if you're trying to save seeds. You need to make sure that the seeds are fully mature, and the way to make sure that they're mature is to let the flower become completely brown and also the stem below the flower to become completely brown. That's when you know that the seeds are mature.
Then you can harvest. You can, take that, crumble it up, and you can spread the seeds throughout the garden. So I've been doing that from the very beginning when the zinnia flowers started to fade in late spring or early summer. I've been doing it all summer long. And now what I'm getting is new zinnias coming up from the seeds that I scattered, so that as I take out these old overmature heat-stressed zinnias, I'll have a whole new batch coming [00:06:00] up for the fall.
So that's just something to keep in mind. Th- this works really well for zinnias. You can also do this for sunflowers, and you can do this for marigolds as well. So let the bloom fully die back, completely brown, the stem bene- ben- beneath the bloom completely brown. Then you can collect the seeds and scatter them through your garden, and then they can come back for a fall bloom.
Pumpkins & Care
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Or you can just save the seeds for planting in the future The other thing that I am working on and spending a lot of time doing is really babying my Halloween pumpkins, and they're looking really good despite the heat. But that's also because I've been doing minimum a deep hand watering every day.
And on particularly hot days, or if the soil to me is, seems particularly dry, I'll do twice daily waterings because I really want these to do well. So I've [00:07:00] been watering them up to twice a day if it's really hot, and then also I just fertilized them again. So before I sowed the seeds, I mixed in compost from my home compost pile and fertilizer.
But we've had to water everything so much that the nutrients tend to leach out of the soil a lot faster. Normally, I wouldn't necessarily need to fertilize again, but on some of the plants, I'm noticing that the lower leaves are starting to yellow, and that's a sign that the plant needs nitrogen, so I'm starting to fertilize them again.
The other thing that I want you to notice about these pumpkins is how they're growing. So these pumpkin plants, they look more like zucchini plants than what you may think of as vining pumpkin plants, right? So standard pumpkin plants have very long vines, and the foliage is much closer to the ground.
There are other types of pumpkins that are called, bush types or semi-bush [00:08:00] types. And what that means is that they grow more in a bush form than a vining form. And these particular types of pumpkins do better here in North Texas than the long vining ones. One of the reasons is because the foliage is taller, it shades out the soil below, which keeps the plants happier.
And I've been experimenting with these, and they just work a lot better for our area than the traditional pumpkins do. I'm gonna link below a comparison chart that Johnny's does to show you. It lines up all the pumpkins that they offer, and in one place, you can compare the various varieties by their growth habit and how many-- and the days to maturity.
So what I look for when I'm picking a pumpkin is I want a short days to maturity. That means that the length of time between when I sow the seeds and I start harvesting pumpkins is short. I don't want it to be [00:09:00] really long because that means that I risk I'm-- there's a risk I may not get pumpkins for Halloween if I don't plant, sow the seeds early enough.
So I want short days to maturity, and I also want a bush or semi-bush growth habit. And so that's what you can see here
Watering Reminders
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The one thing I've been getting questions about frequently in the last few weeks is I've just been noticing a hesitation to water enough. If you have any plants that you have planted within the last, like permanent plantings like trees, shrubs, or perennials that you've planted within the last six months, y- you really need to be watering those every single day.
When, when we have days that are 100, 100, 102, especially without rain. We're starting to get rains now, which is awesome. It's not quite enough yet, though. We really need a good long period of soaking rain. Because of that, you want to make [00:10:00] sure that you are hand-watering these plants daily. And you could do every other day, but it needs to be either every other day or every day in order to keep them healthy through this extreme weather that we've been having, especially for annuals and vegetables Both annuals and vegetables are requiring, for me at least, daily hand watering.
I use... I rely on my sprinklers for plants that have been in the ground for more than a year or my grass. I don't rely on sprinklers for my vegetables or my annuals because it's not enough right now. It's enough for my trees, it's enough for my shrubs, my perennials that have been in the ground a long time, but it's not enough for the vegetables and for the annuals.
So if you're noticing that your plants are struggling and you have not been watering every day, The first change I want you to make for any plant in your landscape is to [00:11:00] start hand watering every day until we start getting cooler temperatures and regular rain, and see how that perks things up.
Fertilizing & Drip Irrigation
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All right? And then the second thing that I want to remind you guys is don't forget to keep fertilizing. So I mentioned fertilizing my pumpkins. Kind of old school advice is when temperatures are really hot, don't fertilize. That is antiquated becau- it only applies to harsh, strong, synthetic fertilizers that you don't want to use during periods of a hi- high heat because it stimulates too much rapid growth, and this rapid growth puts a strain on the plant itself.
If you're using an organic fertilizer, it's not going to have this sudden spike in growth activity. It's much more mild, it's much more gentle, but it still continues to give the plants the nutrients they need to survive, to just baseline, y- [00:12:00] continuing to grow. Not anything spectacular, just what they need to continue to move forward and progress.
So don't forget to fertilize, especially your containers. We need to fertilize containers very regularly because of how often we're watering them and because the nutrients get leached out really quickly. Also, if you have drip irrigation set up, I want to remind you that drip irrigation runs for hours, not minutes The way you can test how long you need to run your system is you wanna run it and then check it every hour or e- every 30 minutes to every hour to see, like, when it, when the, the soil six inches below the surface gets wet, that's how long that you need to run it every time that you're running it.
If you're only running your drip system for 20 minutes every day, the water never gets deep enough to reach the roots of the plant. What you want to do is every time that you water... Now, when you do [00:13:00] this and you run 'em, you run them for a significant amount of time, you will probably, in this heat, only have to run them every other day.
When we're not having extreme heat, you can go down to maybe twice a week with your drip irrigation. But right now, if... I don't have drip irrigation set up, but if I had drip irrigation in my vegetable beds right now, I would r- pr- probably be running them for at least an hour and a half every other day.
So if your drip systems don't, they don't work the same way as sprinklers. You have to run them a very long time in order for enough water to reach deep enough into the soil that it actually reaches the roots. Otherwise, it's just evaporating after you run it.
Class Info & Fall Planting
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So I hope that was helpful.
Of course, don't forget that you can ask me any questions. I have added the Ask Cali module to this particular Section, if you will to this particular class in the class library, so you can ask me questions [00:14:00] below. Our next class, let me double-check this to make sure that I am remembering the exact date.
So
Next Class: September 12th
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our next class is going to be September 12th. So that is, I believe that is a Saturday, so that's gonna be not this Saturday, but the next Saturday. So watch for reminder emails on that. And then other reminders, w- if you haven't already,
Start Brassicas This Weekend!
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definitely plan to start your brassicas, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, by seed indoors this weekend.
If you wait any longer, your plants don't have enough time to mature before we start getting heavy freezes. These plants, they can survive a light frost, and you can keep them growing further into winter when you cover them. But extended periods of time that these plants are exposed to temperatures 50 degrees or [00:15:00] below, it diminishes the chances that you're actually going to get a head to form.
So you may never get a cauliflower head, you may never get a broccoli head. So we wanna do that now. If you don't wanna start seeds indoors, I recommend looking for transplants in nurseries that you can put into the ground in coming weeks. So if you started your brassicas, like, in late July, they're probably almost ready to go into the ground.
It's okay. The high temperatures, your seedlings are gonna be okay. As long as you are keeping the soil around those plants evenly moist. So that's gonna require deep hand-watering every single morning to make sure that they get through. You can also cover, protect them with some shade cloth for a few weeks just to ease the transition into the garden.
But don't be afraid of transplanting things into the garden, as long as you are prepared to really be consistent with your [00:16:00] watering and that's the most important thing. I've got young cucumbers and really young squash that are growing right now, and they're doing just fine because I am watering them daily.
So that's very important. You can put things in. You just cannot let that soil dry out, and do not let those small seedlings wilt. Hope you have a great rest of your week and a fabulous weekend, and hopefully, we can get some more rain and enjoy these cooler temps that we're having for the moment.
Bye, guys.
