I need to remind you that now is the time to prune lilacs, weigela, mock orange, and snowball viburnums. These are all spring-blooming plants, and cutting them back now gives the new growth time to mature and develop buds for next year’s flowers. I recommend pruning to eliminate the old stems to encourage new growth from the base of the shrub.
When I looked at my potato crop last week, I noticed a busload of Colorado potato beetles had arrived! Those hungry buggers can strip away foliage in a flash, and worse still, they vector diseases in addition to reproducing at an alarming rate.
I got my bottle of Sevin insecticide, which gives excellent control, and remembered that I had not used it for a couple of years. I shook the bottle pretty vigorously for awhile, took the lid off and used a stiff wire to check if the liquid was all fluid.
What I found was that the solids were no longer suspended in the liquid. So I pried loose what had settled with the wire and then shook it until it all dissolved. Had I not done that, likely what had settled out would be the active ingredient and my spray application would have had little effect on the beetles. But my beetles weren’t that lucky!
Be sure to deadhead perennials that have finished blooming to keep them from going to seed and giving you some more “weeds” to try to control … that is, unless you want more of that particular plant.
I usually allow a few flowers on my gaillardia to go to seed because often the old plant doesn’t survive the winter.
In the case of columbine, perennial salvia and delphinium, cutting back hard after they have finished blooming will reward you with another round of flowers in the fall.
I have written about using a product called Milorganite as a repellent for rabbits and deer. Well, it worked for rabbits, sort of, but not as well as I wanted. Then I was told to try shaving a bar of Irish Spring soap and sprinkling those soap shavings directly on the plant the critters were munching on. Bingo! It worked really well!
One of my gardens is really big, and I had not had time to put up the electric fence. I have experienced minor deer damage previously, but this year they were ganging up on me. I protected my early crops with old bird netting I had used on my cherry trees and strawberries, and that worked, but my big garden is BIG and I have to rely on the electric fence for protection.
For some reason, once these critters pick a plant to munch on, they keep coming back to the same plant time after time, and in the case of perennials, if you don’t protect that plant, you will not only lose the flowers, but the plant will be weakened and likely will not survive the winter.
In the case of vegetables, it’s called sharing the harvest, and I vote “no” on that one, too.