Summer Gardening Stressing You Out? How to freshen up your landscape for fall.

August 23, 2017 | By webadmin

The long hot Texas summers can make it tough for many of us to tackle a lot of big outdoor projects. It's probably you can do to keep everything watered and the lawn mowed. Unless you’re a seriously avid gardener, you might just prefer to take most of the summer off from dealing with your landscape. We get it! But now that cooler fall weather will soon be on it’s way, now’s a good time to take care of a few transitional tasks to get your landscape in great shape for fall.

Step back and take a hard look

Sometimes the most important thing you can do in your landscape is stop and stare at it. Walk around looking closely and evaluate what areas are working well and what needs improvement. Are there bare places that need to be filled? Is there enough bloom and textural interest to balance out the changing seasons and to make a compelling display? Sometimes you find that most of your perennial flowers do their thing in spring and the summer and fall are a bit too quiet. Are there places prone to weeds that need maintenance or reworking? Make a list of small projects to complete over the next few months.

Cut back spent plants

Many plants will be showing stress from the summer heat. Plants may have burnt or damaged foliage or spent blooms that need to be deadheaded. By deadheading and pruning back certain shrubs and perennials now, you can help them look their best in fall. Now is the time to do a light pruning on roses (about 25-30% of growth) and remove all diseased or damaged foliage. Summer blooming perennials such as salvias and lantana can be sheared if they need to be refreshed. Damaged fern leaves can be removed at the base. Cleaning up your plants from summer stress will make a big improvement on the look of your entire landscape.

Feed Your Plants

In addition to deadheading and pruning, you can now fertilize roses, shrubs, perennials and seasonal color to give them a boost for the fall flowering season.

Remove Dead Plants

If you’ve had summer casualties in the garden, now’s the time to remove them. Fall is the very best planting time in Texas; that means September, October, and November are a great time to replace dead shrubs, trees, and perennials. Don’t wait until spring to plant, or to replace dead plants. New plantings will have a much easier time getting established if you plant them in fall.

Mulch

Adding a good layer of composted hardwood mulch, pecan mulch, or pine straw mulch achieves several important things: Mulch helps retain moisture in the soil so that plants dry out more slowly. It covers bare ground to control the growth of weeds. Finally, all this organic matter breaks down to diversify and improve the soil beneath it. Plus, when you mulch your landscape, it gives it a clean and unified look. Mulching is an easy way to make you feel like you’ve made a big difference.

Give us a call if you have questions or need help with your landscape evaluation and cleanup. We've got plenty of ideas to make your garden fantastic for fall…