Embrace the dog days of summer with a renewed focus on your lawn and garden. This month is all about nurturing and enhancing your outdoor display by ensuring your landscape continues to flourish throughout the late summer with tips from our experts.
Garden
- Enjoy the fruits of your labor. Remember to pick plants clean of produce and do not allow fruits and vegetables to drop and decompose on the ground.
- Pull plants and dispose of as they finish producing.
- For fall gardeners, plant fall radishes, beets, broccoli and cauliflower this month for production before hard freezes.
Lawn
- When mowing, leave the blades taller at around 3-3.5″. This will provide better insulation and better water usage. Roots also grow taller in relation to the height of the grass blade.
- Continue to water your lawn. Lawns should receive 1-1.5″ of water per week.
- Towards the end of the month going into September consider applying a fertilizer. Do not fertilize if not actively growing. If you want to apply a weed killer at the same time apply Fertilome Weed Free Zone. For lawns with no weeds apply Fertilome Classic Lawn Food.
Perennials, trees and shrubs
- There are many perennials and shrubs that should be deadheaded at this time (cutting out the dead and faded blooms). Watch for daylilies, spirea, and garden phlox to finish flowering.
- Some plants will start to go into dormancy. These should be trimmed down when completely brown.
- Spider mites are often a problem in evergreens. If you have spider mites, you should be spraying with Bonide Systemic Insect Control.
