Late summer means nights get colder and growth slows for many plants. Wasps get busier. Flowers quickly set seed. Tree and shrub leaves stop producing chlorophyll, and the absence of green allows hidden colors to emerge. It is a season of contrast—slow down and hurry up.
I like my beefy cosmos plants now because they just keep sending up blooms while setting seed for the goldfinches to eat. They don’t mind the cool nights even if they look a bit lanky. I will stake them if the wind insists on bending them sideways.
My ironweed (Vernonia) at 4.5 feet tall kept blowing sideways after a mole or ground squirrel dislodged its roots. With two simple bamboo stakes and twine, I can now see the deep purple blooms over the surrounding perennials. Adding a stake can change a frustration into a success very quickly. Yay!
In anticipation of cooler days to come, start acclimating your houseplants to the indoors again. Start by using insecticidal soap this week. Spray the tops and undersides of leaves plus soil surface with insecticidal soap—outdoors—and allow to dry. Indoors, clean windows and surfaces where you intend to keep the plants later this month. Move the plants to warmer and shadier locations outside or to a porch/breezeway, in reverse of what you did last spring, doubling the length of time they have in a lower light situation each day. After about a week, bring them inside to a shower or large tub to spray the whole plants with insecticidal soap again. Allow them to dry before moving plants to their indoor winter home.
I will spray my summering amaryllis bulbs, too. Once they get their second spray, however, I will just bring them inside, remove them from their pots, and place them in a dark, cool spot in my basement. The leaves and soil will dry after about a week. I will brush off the soil and cut the dead leaves off. Once dry, the bulbs go into an airy cardboard box to stay in darkness for about two months. By early November, I want to pot up the amaryllis and water it to bring forth new blooms for late December.
As I clear perennial gardens of diseased plant material or dead stems, I am very cautious of wasps. They are fierce at this time of year. Also, avoid squishing them. The squished odor will signal other wasps to attack!
Wasps may have built nests behind shutters or in gaps around window frames. It is a good idea to look around windows and doors for gaps that could let in wasps or other overwintering insects (like stink bugs, lady beetles, or boxelder bugs). While weather is still pleasant, use caulk to seal these gaps on the inside and an outdoor-approved caulk to seal them from the outside.
What to do with all that dead plant material? If leaves and stems did not show signs of fungal issues, add them to a compost pile for improving next year’s flower garden soil.
You can start gathering leaves from your healthy shade trees as they drop now, too. Rake into a pile in an inconspicuous part of the yard to use as “brown carbon” with your “wet nitrogen” food waste in your composters through the winter. At my house, we are just about out of leaves from last year, just in time to get more.
An example of what not to compost: lilac leaves that have turned brown from the bottom up this past month. This browning comes from bacteria that appears about this time of year or from powdery mildew. The bacteria can come from the plants themselves or blow in from weeds or surrounding wild areas. The bacteria will overwinter and reinfect the plants next spring. Gather up all these browned leaves and burn or bag up for the trash. In winter, once the plants are dormant, plan to spray the twigs and flower buds with a copper fungicide. The disease can overwinter on the new wood, but a preventive spray will reduce the chance of losing flowers and fresh growth to fungal diseases in spring.
And while thinking compost, plant oats, barley, or winter rye in empty vegetable garden areas. Once these crops start growing, they capture soil nutrients and hold the soil through the winter. In spring, you can cut them back and turn them into the soil to restore organic nutrients to your vegetable gardens and improve the structure of the soil.
Don’t think you found all the tomato hornworms. I found another one this week on a separate tomato plant. I discovered this fellow when I found tomatoes with bites on them. Look closely as you water every day.
If tomatoes drop rapidly or you can’t care for your plants, pick green tomatoes and place them in a brown paper bag with an apple. The ethylene gas emitted by the apple will ripen the tomatoes. Just check the bag every few days to cull the ripe fruits and check for rotting.
For fall gardens, continue to check your kale, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and cabbage for cabbage worm pests. One of my stalks had one cabbage worm caterpillar, but it also had a cluster of rice-like structures—cocoons of the braconid wasp. This wasp is a good guy, a parasitic wasp! The cocoons will hatch soon to release more wasps to attack larval pests on my Brussels sprouts. We have another Lazy Berkshire Gardener victory!
I call myself the Lazy Berkshire Gardener because I don’t want to work too hard in my gardens. I want to enjoy them. I find it easier to observe my landscape and let the compost happen, the water pool up, or daisies to self-sow. I look for ways to do the minimum task for the biggest impact. For example, mulching is better than spraying and much better than weeding all season. I look for beautiful, low-maintenance plants that thrive in or at least tolerate my garden conditions. Plus, I am willing to live with the consequences if I miss something.
