August First

August first is upon us. Now it’s time for things to really heat up! I asked a dude the other day if he felt like it was getting hotter every year or was I just getting old. He laughed and said he felt like it was a little bit of both, I figured that was going to be the answer. I remember it being crazy hot when I was a kid in the Mississippi summer, it just seems like that heat is coming a little earlier and staying a little later. It’s hot all over the country even the east coast isn’t having much fun this summer.

What I am seeing around town, at our nursery, and my house are plants that are transpiring faster than the roots can take up water. The tempting thing to do is to water and fertilize the plant to bring it out of the yellowish hue the perennials are showing. More water might be adding to the humid conditions, the roots just can’t move water as fast as the plants water can evaporate, sometimes they try themselves to death. I don't think a little fertilizer is a bad idea but it needs to be a very slow release organic fertilizer. Any quick release fertilizer could shock the plant while it’s trying so hard. We will just have to go into survival mode until this passes, possibly mid October.

Some things we have done around here to give the plants and us a fighting chance are easy and make your watering much less stressful. All of our beds are mulched which helps retain the moisture under the mulch, that Death Star (the sun) can be rough on soil that is exposed directly to it day after day. Covering the soil will keep it cool and allow it to live and breath like it should. In our garden with raised beds we have mulched the tops to protect the soil from those rays. We even mulched the parts of our garden that is laying in wait for some fall plants. We are slowly clearing the beds so when the time comes we can start the fall planting. As that soil in the beds with no plants would be fully exposed we gave them a good covering. Any of my trees with tree circles around them that seemed a little shy on mulch got a nice, wide layer of mulch. It’s good to cool the roots but the wide circle helps to keep that weed eater from getting closer and closer to the roots and the trunk.

Another thing we have done to cut down on the stress of keeping things watered enough is to have our spigots around the yard equipped with enough hose to reach everything you need to with a wand and a breaker on each hose. I do not like to have wander

around the yard wondering where I can steal some hose from or where my wand and breaker is. The more difficult something so simple is the less excited I get about doing it. Our irrigation system is ready and running but still manually so far. The afternoon rains have been hitting pretty regularly so I’ve not been able to find a solid pattern enough to just set it for automatic yet. That may happen sometime in September or when it has stopped raining for more than two weeks straight, whichever comes first.

It’s easy to over water certain areas of your yard while having the system come on a pattern no matter what and getting these regular 1/2” downpours on a regular basis. It is a little more trouble to work your system with the weather I’m just saying when you can it’s better on the plants. There are some things that can be done now to take some stress off the plants. We have given the plants a fighting chance by getting everything dead headed. Those blooming perennials and annuals are trying to produce seeds. Seed production will wear a plant slap out in the summer months. By removing the seed heads before they can mature on the plant will save the plants life. Once the plant feels like she has done her thing and produced seeds then she can go to the happy hunting compost bin. When the flower heads are removed as soon as they are done, dropped petals, looking shabby it makes the plant go into flower mode again. It lets the plant know it’s ultimately job is not yet done, get to making some more flowers!

The same thing goes for a little light pruning on shrubs and trees. We remove anything that doesn’t belong there that is taking up energy in the plant that could be better used somewhere else. Keeping some plants high and tight is ok but there are some plants that we don’t prune after August first. Plants that bloom late winter/early spring like Sasanquas, Azaleas, Forsythia, any of those plants that give us color in March and April are going to begin forming flower buds that you can’t see until later. If we prune later in August we will be cutting off those latent buds and have fewer flowers next season. This is the time of year that the plants weaklings and tough ones are separated. The healthier the plant is while going in to a relentless summer the better chance the plant will have to survive and give you a second spring when the grip relents.

On August first Mimi and I are getting ready to spend some time in San Francisco and surrounding areas. Dead and Co. are playing for 3 nights outside in the Golden Gate State Park like they did 60 years ago when their journey began. The music still lives and grows. Mimi and I have had a lot of fun over the years with them and their music so we feel like seeing them at their 60th anniversary is the answer to all of our questions. We will head down to Big Sur the day after the last night of the shows. We will stop in at Santa Barbara, the harbor there is beautiful. We will have 3 days in Los Angeles for some nursery and botanical garden tours and whatever else is going to happen. From there we will drive towards Joshua Tree and on to a little town outside of Phoenix called Feel Good, Arizona where we stay for the next 3 days. I certainly will have some stories to relay after this one. This sounds like a fun one, I better start packing!