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This Month in Your Garden
JULY |
Roses |
If you have been deadheading regularly
and fertilized last month, your roses
should be going through a second stage
of blooming in July. As the days warm up, make
sure you are irrigating your roses sufficiently. That
said, I must say, roses will get hardened off, learning
to live with less water, if they don’t have other
stresses such as black spot, rose slug, rust, thrips or
lack of sufficient sunlight-(six hours a day). Don’t
limit water drastically, but experiment with your
roses and they will tell you if they are doing ok.
Not knowing what the future holds with drought, it
makes sense to get them used to a little less water.
Of course, mulching is a wonderful way to
save water and keeps the roots at a constant temperature,
which is good because constant changes
in temperature of the top few inches of soil can
also be stressful to roses. If you find the weather to
be hot this month, especially during Santa Ana
wind conditions, roses will enjoy an occasional
shower from the hose to prevent too much moisture
loss from the leaves. This is especially important
for those of you with drip irrigation systems. Contrary
to popular belief, washing off your leaves
doesn’t cause fungal growth, unless you have the
fungus living in your soil and are splashing it onto
the lower leaves. A good layer of mulch and
cleaning up fallen leaves usually helps this problem.
If you have any old roses that bloom on old
wood, now is the time to prune them, after they
have had their yearly flush of flowers. Do not
prune them again until next summer. For the rest
of the roses, continue deadheading down to just
above a 5 or 7 leaflet.
Keep a lookout for black spot (yellowing
leaves with black spots), rose slugs (skeletonized
leaves), thrips (check brown buds that don’t open -
they will be hiding inside), spider mites (leaves
with a sandy looking residue on the underside of
the leaf - actually a mix of mites, webbing, eggs
and droppings), and rust (rust colored powder on
undersides of leaves), and treat accordingly before
you have a major problem. Oh, don’t forget to enjoy
your roses too. Move your potted roses to the
patio when you entertain this summer. |
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Perennials and Shrubs |
July is the time of year when most gardeners are
ready to hang up their hoes and go to the beach. June gloom
is usually over and the main chore in the garden is keeping
everything watered. Making sure that the layer of mulch that
was spread in the spring is still intact and two or three inches
thick will make it easier to keep everything from wilting and
also cut down on the inevitable weeds.
In addition to watering, deadheading is a constant chore
for summer flowering perennials. Be vigilant to keep favorites
such as scabiosa and heliotrope blooming all summer.
Remove seed pods if you didn’t get all the spent blooms in
time on fuchsias
Pinch back coleus, impatience and fuchsias a little each
week to keep them from getting too leggy. If you cut back
geraniums, pentas and penstemon you should get another
bloom later this summer.
Now is also a good time to give all of your non-native
shrubs (including camellias) and perennials an application of
balanced fertilizer. This is a time of growth and stress for
most of them and they are using up many of the nutrients that
are available to them. If you use a chemical fertilizer, be sure
to apply only to well watered plants at the recommended
strength to avoid fertilizer burn.
If you are just getting around to looking at what you can
plant, there are still choices available to fill in a bare spot or
complete a whole landscape if that is your goal.
If you have cool, shady spots that need plants, this is a
good time of year to add plants to those areas. There are
many different kinds of shade and it is best to study what
kind you have before you go to the nursery to pick out your
plants. Plants that thrive in dry, partial shady conditions may
not do well in an area that is moist with deep shade.
There is also still time to plant tropical plants in areas
that are along the coast. Look for hibiscus, banana trees,
palms, brugmansia, exotic fruit trees and, of course, bougainvillea
to plant early this month. Just remember to keep them
well watered until they are well established.
If you have an area in your garden that is too hot to enjoy,
you might want to spend this month working on turning
it into a more inviting destination. Evoke a cool effect with
tropical plants that are mainly green and white, such as giant
bird of paradise and white bougainvillea. Add a white brugmansia
for fragrance, a few palms for atmosphere and throw
in a couple banana trees for some shade and it will seem like
paradise! |
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Fruits and Vegetables |
We all naturally increase our consumption
of liquids during warm summer months,
but sometimes forget that our plants are thirsty too.
Just like human bodies, plant material is made
mostly of water and requires more H2O this season
to re-hydrate and replace what is lost in daily transpiration.
Nutrients from the soil pass through moisture
surrounding a plant’s tiny root hairs, and if
those hairs become dry, nutrient transfer diminishes
causing the plant to stop growing and enter a stress
mode. The sugar content of fruit will decrease,
leaves toughen, and the plant may bolt to send up a
seed stalk, then shed its leaves and die. If the plant
lives, the stressed condition will then make it more
susceptible to disease and pests. Moisture deprivation
will cause growth interruption and damage with
every occurrence, so the more often a crop is
drought stressed, the more it will suffer and the less
you will harvest. All this makes proper irrigation
crucial to your vegetable garden’s success. Automatic
systems should be checked often to ensure
they are supplying requisite moisture through the
depth of the root area. If YOU are the automatic
system, then you know what to do and when to do
it!
July is a good time to plant tropical fruits,
papayas, cherimoya or avocados, and one that looks
great in any landscape, the banana. Its habit is
unique but bananas are easy to grow and dwarf varieties
won’t become giants nor consume your garden.
Native to Indo-Malaysia, they do well here,
especially if placed near a south-facing wall to increase
warmth and shield them from Santa Ana
winds. They are actually a plant, rather than a tree,
and the fruit supplies lots of amino acids, vitamin C,
potassium and fiber to our diets.
There are many different types of bananas
and better nurseries will have stock, or can order the
variety you choose. Those known as the applebanana
type produce medium size, 5-6” fruits. Gary
Matsuoka has great success with the Dwarf Brazilian
variety producing a 60# stalk of very sweet fruit
each year in his Mission Viejo garden. As pups
sprout up around the mother plant, he cuts away all
but one or two and fertilizes them. Mulched and
watered well, those plants produce the next crop. Gary harvests when the first fruits are just beginning
to yellow and are filling out and rounding
at the angular edges. Bananas can be taken
from the stalk one hand (or bunch) at a time, or
a novel way to harvest is to cut the entire stalk
and hang it from the patio. Within 30 days all
of the fruits will gradually ripen so your family
and visitors can enjoy picking truly fresh bananas
- something we just don’t get to do every
day. |
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