July means maintenance for annuals

High summer is here and the annual garden should be bubbling along nicely in July. And that’s great, because it’s an outdoor-living month!

July starts with the Independence Day holiday and just rolls on from there, with weeks filled by vacations, barbecues, pool parties, croquet, fire-fly catching, back yard camping, and whatever else suits you! It’s time to have fun outside.

Almost everything is blooming and simple maintenance is the main gardening task this month. That includes watering, fertilizing, weeding and pest control. Check out the tips below for more details.

• Watering – Don’t let plants dry out, even while you’re away on vacation. You can easily lose an entire garden for lack of proper watering at the wrong time. It’s well worth it to hire someone to water twice a week (more if it’s very hot) while you’re gone. Especially if there are more than 10 days in a row without rain, watering should be deep at least once a week. This means watering for 30 minutes to an hour in one spot.
  
  
• Fertilizing — Feed plants with a water soluble fertilizer every two weeks during the growing season, especially to encourage new blooms after dead-heading old ones. Also, healthy plants are more resistant to heat stress, pests and diseases.
  
  
• Pest control - Leaf-hoppers, flea beetles, aphids and the like might invade and can do quick damage if you don’t stop them in time. Just look over annuals while watering for clues such as curling leaves, chewed leaves, insects clinging to stems and flowers, nibbled flower buds and petals, and the like. Ask a garden center expert for advice on the best treatment for the particular problem.
  
  
• Weeding - Crabgrass, nut grass, spurge and many other invasive weeds seem to sprout overnight in July and can quickly overtake your garden. Pull weeds out as soon as you see them. Be careful with weed-killing sprays, which will kill flowers, also. If weeds are too hard to pull up, moisten the soil first and use a dandelion digger to help get the roots out. Reapply granulated weed preventer to garden soil, moving mulch away, and then replacing it on top of the granules.

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Here are some other general notes for July annuals:

• You can plant zinnia seeds outdoors as late as the last week of July. Keep young plants well watered and feed them to encourage rapid growth.

• Trim old blooms off annuals as soon they fade. Coleus, especially, should be trimmed of all flower spikes. This “deadheading” of spent flowers keeps the garden neat, but also helps the plants produce more blooms, since they won’t be expending energy on seed production.

• Cut back large flowering plants that are suffering from heat. During a series of long, hot days, plants will start having trouble supporting voluminous stems and flowers. Cut them back by 1/4 to 1/3—don’t worry, they’ll bounce back with new growth, especially if you feed them generously and keep them watered. In fact, they’ll thank you.

• If annuals, such as petunias, get leggy (long, scraggly stems) and produce few blooms, cut them back severely, creating a rounded, compact plant. Feed at full strength and water well. They’ll bloom again soon.

• Don’t forget about the window boxes and container plants. Remove old blooms and pinch off growing tips to encourage bushy growth. Putting mulch on top of container soil will help retain moisture. Also, inspect plants for pests and diseases and treat the same way as plants in the ground.