So here we are in September, the best time to do lawn seeding — renovation, if necessary — and the best time to rid your lawn of weeds.
If you are seeding a new lawn, as the ground temperature drops, most weed seed will not germinate; however, the grass seed germinates better in cool soil so the weeds are not competing with the grass. The new grass has plenty of time to get established before the ground temperature is too cold for it to grow.
If you wait until spring, first you have to wait for the soil to dry enough to prepare the seedbed. Then you have the weed seed more than happy to get going for the season so that competition will be there until the grass is established enough to use weed spray.
Spraying for weeds now eliminates the new seedlings that start showing up in late summer. Then too, if you are trying to eliminate a pest like creeping Charlie, that will take at least two applications of herbicide and if you spray now, you can repeat in 4-6 weeks.
People ask me about how to get their poinsettia to rebloom, and we are getting to that time of bud initiation, which is Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. During that period of time in a 24-hour day, our daylight hours become equal to and then less than the nighttime hours. The plant realizes that and thereby knows it is time to initiate its flowering cycle. Nature doesn’t mess up. The darkness is uninterrupted until the sun rises the next morning.
If you are growing that poinsettia indoors in your home and you turn on the room light where the plant is growing, you just made the day longer ... that is a problem for the plant. Thus the plant will continue to grow but will not bloom because you messed the light/darkness ratio.
People say they will put the poinsettia plant in a closet to give that uninterrupted darkness … that’s fine for the night, but the plant has to have sunlight during the day. The point is that we are trying to mimic nature: every 24-hour period has light and dark. Even a streetlight can prevent a poinsettia from blooming if it is close to the window. The temperature change as well as the light-to-dark ratio is a clear enough message to a poinsettia that it’s time to bloom for Christmas.
When I went to Australia in November several years ago, I realized that in the southern hemisphere for a poinsettia to bloom for Christmas, they have to use heavy shade cloths to artificially create the longer hours of darkness.
So I’m not ready to think about Christmas yet, but the poinsettias certainly are!
Bonnema is a gardening enthusiast and former greenhouse owner. He can be reached at flowergb@iw.net.