In a normal year, the floral hero for early September is the brugmansia – or more properly the brugmansias, since there are 2 of them. By now they are usually 8 feet tall, very nearly as wide, and covered with giant white flowers that perfume the whole yard at evening. That’s usually. But usually, it rains once in a while.
Because it hasn’t, the brugmansias are less than stellar. It’s the lespedeza that makes you go Wow. Clover is admittedly tough, but it’s still a surprise to see the thing remaining green in every leaf and covering itself with blossoms. As the self is approximately 6 feet – in every direction – and the blossoms are like tiny magenta-pink sweet peas, the effect evokes every cloud clichaé you’ve ever heard or read. Bought it years ago from Plant Delights.
Vinnie the cat is trying his best, but we still see vole damage in the Swiss chard. There is huitlachoche ( aka corn smut) in the corn; blight has taken most of the heirloom tomatoes. Still orders of magnitude too much to eat, and too much to keep up with. Bill has been harvesting squash every day but I just turned over a leaf and found a zucchini as big as the Ritz.
* It’s time to haul out those bulb maps I was nagging about last spring, then – unless you are very well fixed indeed – you can start having an argument with your inner accountant. It isn’t time to plant yet, but by the time you make up your mind and make up your orders, it will be.
* There is still a great deal more to come from the vegetable garden, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start cleaning up. Look around for anything that’s hanging on by a thread, then get rid of it. Compost everything that’s simply dying of old age, send disease-victims to the landfill – or pile them up somewhere deep in the woods where there isn’t any underbrush. The assorted ailments that hit soft growth can’t get much purchase on tree trunks.
* It’s best to harvest big heirloom tomatoes like Brandywine and German Streak a little bit early: completely colored but not yet really dead ripe. This may sound nuts – why else are you growing your own – but most of these “unimproved” beauties are very vulnerable to cracking, even when there’s no last minute rain. Letting them finish up indoors for the last day or three won’t make them taste any less vine ripened; just be sure to keep them in a single layer, out of the sun and somewhere between 60 and 75 degrees.
* If you haven’t tested your soil for a long time – or ever – this is a good time to check things out and see if adjustments are called for. Organic amendments like greensand and lime need time to break down, so if you want their good effects next spring you have to spread them this fall.
* Goldfinches are very food-needy right now; they wait to raise families until wild seeds are ripe. Even if there are feeders around, your little black and yellow neighbors will be grateful – and gratifyingly in evidence – if you stop deadheading the cosmos.
The first corn is disappointing, starchy and less sweet than it might be, and I think I know why. We used up some older seed for the first planting and when – no surprise – germination was lousy, Bill ( who is in charge of the corn) just bought some tasty-looking new stuff and used it to fill in the blanks. ” Is it the same type?” I asked. ” Got me, ” was the reply.
But if corn with one kind of sugar gene cross-pollinates another, neither of them is likely to taste as good as it should. Fortunately, there’s lots of old fashioned Stowell’s Evergreen, a late white corn that takes forever and a day so it never crosses with anything. It also often gets frosted JUST when it’s about to get ripe – I think of it as a sort of autumn magnolia – but it’s yummy when it comes through.
The annuals that got cut back hard at the end of July have responded with textbook zeal, even though they got a lot less water than would have been good. State Fair zinnias in particular. Great big flowers on gigantic bushes and for once more or less mildew free. Too bad the only bouquets you can put them in are big blowsy “everything but the kitchen sink it must be August” monsters. The “all one kind of flower” routine works pretty well, especially if you have a nice clunky vase, and it’s very much in fashion these days…but long about now I always remember last year’s vow not to grow them any more.
* As you drag the hose around, don’t forget that the compost needs water along with everything else. It won’t die if it gets desiccated, but it won’t decompose either. It can be a low priority if there’s plenty of space to make a new pile ( or piles!) at cleanup time. Otherwise it will be very convenient to have a nice open place to heap the frost-blasted dahlia stems and chopped up autumn leaves. Plus fall plantings benefit from lots of compost, which is often in short supply by the end of the growing season.
* It’s time – past time, really – to sow cover crops in annual and vegetable beds that are starting to fade. The payoff in improved soil health is worth the effort it takes to clean out tired plants and find winter rye seed. If you don’t expect frost for at least 6 more weeks, you can plant tender alternatives like buckwheat or field peas instead. They will still be small when they get killed, so they won’t make as much green manure, but because they will rot down over the winter you won’t have to till them in next spring.
We have inadvertently discovered how to create a monarch nursery: mow an overgrown field that has some established milkweed in it. Six weeks ago, Bill took the old beater mower and leveled a 20 by 10 foot section right down to the dead thatch. The spot looked to be mostly full of goldenrod and blackberries , but there was also a good bit of milkweed – which of course means a ton of milkweed roots. As soon as we cleared out the competition, a forest of baby milkweed rose up, much faster off the mark than the blackberries (though they will win in the end). Almost every one of those tender young milkweeds has played host to a monarch caterpillar – or two or even three. We checked the tall, tough plants in the unmowed field: nada.
* This is a good time to cast a cold eye on your summering houseplants and ask: would I buy this thing if I were browsing at the nursery? Would I buy it if it were on sale? Would I pick it up if it were sitting on the curb with a “free” sign around its neck? You know what to do if all answers are no. Most of the plants that remain are likely to need cutting back and re-potting before being moved to a shadier spot, which should be done fairly soon. There is still a fair amount of outdoor time left, but it helps to get them used to low light before they must go indoors.
* It takes at least 6 weeks – often more – for a baby winter squash to reach full size and ripen thoroughly , so before long it will be time to tip-prune the vines and remove new fruits and flowers. Plants that can put all their energy into just 4 or 5 large fruits are the ones that produce great squash. Just count back from your expected first frost date to find the optimum pruning time. The vine tips and baby squash are sometimes tasty, sometimes quite bitter. Try sautéing a sample in butter or olive oil before putting all that (potentially) high-end vegetable material on the compost heap.
* If you have been feeding roses, don’t forget to stop. Succulent young growth needs plenty of time to toughen up before cold weather, and you don’t want to encourage the plants to keep making more of it.
* If you have to ration water in the food garden, give the first drinks to tomatoes, peppers, beans, leafy items like lettuce and chard, and any young fruiting plants – like squash or peas – you planted for autumn crops. Don’t worry about melons and summer squash that are already producing – plants may look wilty at midday, but once the fruit is set it’ll taste better if it ISN”T irrigated.
* Among annual flowers, give preference to those that will keep blooming after frost: asters, calendulas, honeywort , snapdragons, stocks … And don’t forget that big plants in pots are practically on hydroponics by now – those pots have more roots than soil in them and may need water as often as twice a day.
* Inconsistent water supplies lead to blossom end rot in tomatoes, and being where it’s on the blossom end you often don’t notice it until the rotten part gets huge. But why let the tomato plant waste energy on failures? It only takes a minute to get down , look up, find the ailing fruits and get rid of them. If getting down far enough to look up isn’t easy, you can use a mirror just gently turn large tomatoes that appear to be ripening. With any luck, that’s what they’re doing, but changing color can also signal that something’s going wrong.
There isn’t much reason to bother with shoes when you’re just darting out to move the hose, especially now that the straw mulch on the paths is all soft and broken in. The problem is that late summer is also when many tall plants have fallen over, laying their flowering stems on said paths. Ms. Sausage-foot is thus able to report that ammonia DOES quickly dull the pain when you’ve gotten the mother of all bee stings, but don’t expect it to do anything about swelling.
A more tidy type would long ago have ripped up the bolted chicory – beautiful blue flowers be damned. And in the old days even I would have tried to do something about the thick cosmos stalks, broken at the base, that are now flowering at ankle height. Self-sown morning glories would have been ripped out – or given something besides the dahlias to climb … No more. The August garden is now a many-leveled thing and none the worse for it.
Take advantage of the wilting heat to fiddle with crisp stems that are prone to breakage: tie up floppy dahlias, unravel wayward bean and morning glory vines, tuck tomato branches back where they belong in the trellis. At midday these plants are limp and easy to work with – assuming you’re not so limp yourself you can’t bear to be out there.
This is about last call to cut back repeat-blooming roses – new growth needs quite a while to toughen up before freezing weather. But cutting them back is well worth doing ; by now a lot of the old foliage is bound to be freckled with blackspot or turned to lace by the Japanese beetles. Removing it instantly makes things look better, and it usually results in a good flush of fall bloom.
Even when it’s too hot to work, it’s not too hot to write, and the notes you take now will come in mighty handy when it’s seed and plant order time. Which tomatoes are ripening soonest? Which ones are fighting off the blight? Is there a rose that doesn’t appeal to our little brown and green pals? Which daylily is covered with buds, its blooming days still to come? You might think you will remember this stuff, but the chances are you won’t.
