A July Garden Ramble

Time to catch up on a few shorter topics, as I’ve been out shopping, digging and reading. This week a ramble, a rant and some important updates. Just want to keep you thinking, keep you on your toes, give some garden guidance and offer a bit of advice

Having retired a few years ago from managing two large estate properties in Westchester and Southampton, I thought this would be a good summer to just relax, take stock and enjoy my own personal gardens. I held back a bit on my usual plant orders, and for the most part I’ve just been doing the same things you do: weed, water, plant and repeat.

Lots of time left for just pausing and looking at what the garden is up to and what it might need.

I got distracted, though. In a fit of creativity and energy, I decided to expand my double-sided border that has gone from nothing 15 years ago to 120 feet long and 8 to 20 feet wide on two levels. Three weeks later, 4 cubic yards of rocks and clay have been excavated, a stone path started, 4 cubic yards of traditional compost mixed with mushroom compost added — and voilà, the long border was (nearly) instantly 20 feet longer.

My biggest challenge was how to get the native soil out and get the new soil in. I’d spoken with a local contractor and told him what I wanted to do, but realized that the job was so small that I was very low on his priority list. Now, I’ve got a great but small diesel Deere tractor with a front bucket but, alas, no backhoe. I knew I’d have to dig down 12 to 18 inches in order to make a great soil base, so I gave the work a try with the front bucket. An hour here, an hour there and the hole was dug.

A call to my soil guy, and four days later I had a dump truck dump with 4 cubic yards of his mushroom compost mix about 60 feet from the bed and began the work of moving the material into the bed and grading it out. The only plants I knew for sure that were going in this new section were a group of Oso Easy Double Red roses, and the rest of the space, for a short while, was up for grabs. This gave me a chance to hit the local garden centers to see what was around.

In my plant search, I was quickly reminded what we should be buying locally and what we should buy by “mail.” I found some perennials in 3-quart and 1-gallon pots for between $18 and $21. The plants looked fantastic. Full in their pots, loaded with buds and flowers and ready for planting. On the other hand, plants that I’ve been buying from my online nurseries have been running at about the same prices, but when you add shipping and packing, they end up being 30 to 40 percent more expensive than plants seen in Southampton, Bridgehampton and East Hampton.

This reaffirmed that online nurseries can be very expensive for plants that are much smaller in size and a year or more behind those bought at garden centers. However, garden centers carry only a fraction of the plant varieties that you can find at online nurseries, and that is where online nurseries shine. For collectors and experimenters, it’s always a good idea to find the most common plants locally and to go online for the rarer and more unusual offerings.

Something else struck me though as I was, and continue to shop for plants to fill the newly liberated lawn that’s now garden. What gets sprayed on the plants we buy or what’s added to the soil or water that we don’t know about? It seemed for a while that a few garden centers were offering a small selection of organically grown plants, but mostly vegetables. What about trees, shrubs, fruits, berries and perennials?

The question actually dawned on me six weeks ago when four beautiful rose plants arrived from Proven Winners. They arrived in great shape, fully budded and flowering. Obviously, they’d been grown in some type of structure, which is the only way to account for them being in such an advanced state in late April. Not a single leaf spot, not a single insect on plants that were incredibly bushy and yet compact.

My suspicion is that PGRs, or plant growth regulators, had been used on these plants to stimulate budding, flowering and compactness. Now, PGRs are not necessarily bad, although I think there should be a notice on the plants that they’ve been used. But what’s the issue if the PGRs may not be harmful to us or the environment (may not be?). Simply because we are being sold plants that are out of character. An artificial regulator has been added in the growing process to make the plant look different (compact, budded and in flower) and thus very different from what the plant will look like in our garden next year.

Does this happen with annuals? Of course. And what happens to your marigolds, petunias, coleus and dozens of other nursery-grown plants when you get them home and the effects of these PGRs wear off?

Another example of “truth in buying” is with boxwoods. We know that many varieties of boxwoods are susceptible to boxwood blight, which is now fairly widespread. When the weather conditions are perfect for the blight to be actively spreading, alerts go out to the nurseries via emails that say based on current weather conditions these boxwoods should be sprayed with a fungicide for the blight. The fungicide doesn’t kill the blight, it merely suppresses it.

This may be fine in the nursery, but what happens when you have this boxwood planted in your landscape and you are totally unaware that the new plants only look great because they’ve been sprayed numerous times with a toxic fungicide? You should have a right to know. Should plants be “posted” at the garden centers with warning tags. Do we need this freedom of information? We certainly don’t have it now.

Beech trees are under a great deal of stress these days. Beeches have been plagued by a canker disease for years that has been manageable, but now there’s a beech leaf disease that can defoliate the trees and a nematode that is being found on some beeches that we simply don’t know the full ramifications of yet.

Step in “Big Tree.” One of the large mega tree companies began circulating an email telling us that there is no known cure yet for the beech leaf disease, but that our beeches should be fertilized to keep the trees healthy. What the email failed to note is that if you feed your beeches too late — like a month or three weeks from now — you may push out new growth that may not harden off well enough for the winter.

A plant pathologist I spoke with about this agreed that feeding these stressed trees now, like this week, could help them this season in generating new growth if the existing foliage drops. It was emphasized though that fertilization is not a cure and that later feedings could result in unexpected stresses for the trees.

I always tell you to sow grass seed late in the summer or early in the fall, and I know from your emails that many of you heed this. I had a small area where I needed to level a section of lawn and I wanted to do this before mowing started. I added the soil, corrected the grade, sowed the seed and applied a light mulch. Up came the grass seed and along with it at least five types of weeds. Some of the weed seed may have been in the soil and some may have been in the seed mix. However, had I planned ahead and done the seeding late last summer, most of the weeds would have never germinated.

There are several reasons for late-summer, early-fall grass seeding. One of them is that most weed seeds will germinate when the days are getting longer and the soil is warming. In September, the perfect time for lawn seeding, days are getting shorter and the soil is cooling — not conducive for weed germination.

Sorry to burden you with so much to think about this week, but I do hope you give these issues some thought and ask some questions. Just keep growing.