Tuesday, July 27, 2021

July 27, 2021 - stormy weather

Do you see the photo bomber?
First, I would like to say to all of you who had their gardens damaged or ruined in the past couple weeks by the awful weather, I feel for you, I'm sorry. Plants are resilient though and you may be surprised how well they will recover. Many people have much greater problems than a ruined garden from the weather. Take care of yourself and your family first. There can always be another garden. I’m wishing you hope and luck and a speedy recovery.

If you had wind damage to the garden and plants were blown over, especially sweet corn, see the article below.

Here in Michigan this past week 4 tornadoes touched down and did extensive damage. Across the country there have been storms, floods, fires, and drought. It’s a good year to evaluate how you might change your garden or gardening practices to reflect the changing weather patterns.  Should you move the garden to higher ground, add drainage tiles, or make raised beds?  Should you shift your landscape plants to drought tolerant species? Should you install a fire break or roof sprinklers? Planning and implementing some changes can help mitigate garden damage in the next garden season and beyond.

Monday was a beautiful typical Michigan summer day. It was hot, but it’s that time of year. It was sunny and there was no smoke from the wildfires. I went out early to do a little weeding and got to watch a mamma Eastern phoebe feeding a baby in our cedar tree. I got some pictures of both birds, but not together.

The bees were really busy, they were visiting hosta flowers primarily. People forget that hosta flowers attract both bees and hummingbirds.  There has been a lot of butterflies around lately too.  I saw Tiger swallowtails, a black swallowtail, red spotted purples, viceroys, a monarch, and a bunch of small butterflies I think are meadow fritillaries.

Blooming here now are cannas, rudbeckia, daylilies, coreopsis, roses, orienpet lilies, tiger lilies, hollyhock, hosta, beebalm, garden phlox, anise hyssop, lavender, and a whole range of annuals. The rose of Sharon are beginning to bloom. Three of the five new dahlias are beginning to bloom, the other two have buds.

The violet stemmed taro leaves are getting huge, but my elephant ear is not very big this year. Neither is the canna ‘Tropicana’. I’ve had that canna for 3 years now and it’s never gotten more than a foot tall with a couple leaves. Time to try a new plant and discard that one, I guess.  Some plants are just bummers.

Violet stemmed taro and canna

In the vegetable garden I am struggling with fungal diseases as are so many gardeners this year. MSU states that cucurbit downy mildew (see below) has been found in several Michigan counties, including mine and I believe my cucumbers and pumpkins may have it. I’ll decide in the next day or so whether to pull them and discard them.  My cukes are not elongating, they turn into little balls with a shriveled tail. I picked a few and they are bitter when eaten.  This could be a heat/pollination problem or from disease.

I am getting some nice tomatoes, but many are splitting from excess water.  And the plants have Septoria leaf blight, so they won’t be at their best.  They are loaded with tomatoes though.  We are eating Goliath tomatoes now and they are yummy.

I found a tiny watermelon starting on one of my melon plants. They don’t seem to be affected by any problems- yet.  The peppers seem to be doing well.  And my pot plant is growing like the weed it is.

Today its cloudy and we may get some rain. Even though it rained 6/10 of an inch Saturday, Monday evening I was watering all the pots. It’s amazing how quick they dry out.  And through today we have had less than 3 inches of rain in August but just to the south of us they have had 15 inches through the month. It’s just so strange.

Cucurbit Downy mildew

Cucurbit Downy mildew is a serious disease of cucumbers, squash, pumpkins and melons. It is different from powdery mildew, which is a common problem but less destructive.  There are 5 strains of this fungus.  It is most common in wet weather.

Symptoms of downy mildew are light green to yellow angular spots on the top of leaves.  Spots eventually start running together, turn brown and the leaves dry out and fall off. The bottom of the leaves will have black, water-soaked looking areas, then a purple-brown dusty or fuzzy appearance to the bottom of leaves when spores appear. Usually, spots appear on older leaves first.

Downy mildew on cucumber
Photo UMass, J. Higgins

 

Downy mildew on back of leaf.
UMass, J. Higgins

                                                   

Cucumber plants quickly seem to dry up and die. Squash and melons are damaged but often continue growing. Downy mildew is carried to crops by the wind and usually begins in hot, wet or humid weather.  Once in your garden it will spread rapidly. 

Cucumber plants rapidly die from the disease.  Melons have greatly reduced production.  Squash and pumpkins survive but grow more slowly and are less productive.

The best thing to do is to prevent downy mildew by applying protective fungicides. IF YOU ARE IN MICHIGAN YOU MAY WANT TO DO THIS NOW. The Extension office in your county should be able to tell you if downy mildew is a problem in commercial fields in your area. If commercial growers have it, it will soon be in home gardens.  You can check this national map for infections also https://cdm.ipmpipe.org/

Look for home garden fungicides that have chlorothalonil or mancozeb in the ingredients and apply as directed.  If started and applied regularly before the infection gets to your garden, you may save your crop. If caught early fungicides may help crops that are lightly infected. Heavily infected crops won’t be helped. There are no organic products that are effective for downy mildew.  Baking soda, milk, Epsom salts, dish soap and so on are useless. 

If you can’t bring yourself to use a conventional fungicide on plants infected with downy mildew, then pull the plants once they are infected and bury them away from the garden or put them in plastic bags for the landfill.  Don’t mess around with home remedies, allowing the disease to continue spreading.  Don’t compost infected plants at home. Don’t plant in the same spot next year and make sure all plant residue is removed from the garden in the fall.  Next year look for varieties that are resistant to downy mildew.

There is also a strain of downy mildew that also infects and quickly kills impatiens plants.

 

Lodging (blow over) of corn and other plants

When we get summer storms with wind and rain tall plants can get blown over – or “lodged”. This often happens to corn when storms happen after the tasseling stage. It can also happen to tall garden plants with heavy blooms, like lilies, sunflowers and phlox.

After the storm has passed examine your garden carefully for blown over plants. When you see a big patch of sweet corn just starting to get ears lying on the ground you may be ready to cry, but don’t despair, you can often fix things.  If plants are just blown over and stems aren’t snapped, you have a good chance for repairs to work.


Sweet corn blown over by storm

Let it dry out a bit before you attempt to do repairs- it won’t hurt to wait a day or two. Don’t wait too long though. Find some nice stakes- maybe you can cut some from tree limbs that also fell in the storm. Farm stores sell electric fence stakes in various sizes and garden stores sell bamboo stakes.  You may need twine or soft rope for tying up individual plants or rolls of wire for rows of corn.

For individual plants like lilies, put the stake behind it – far enough back you won’t stab the bulb, and then lift the plant slowly and carefully and tie it to the stake. You may be able to put stakes around a clump of plants and then run wire or rope around the stakes – but its hard to get several plants lifted up at the same time and then run wire around them.

Be very careful lifting up blown over plants. If you snap the stems, it’s all over. That’s why you put the stakes in first – so you aren’t holding them up and trying to insert a stake. It can be helpful to have a helper if you have a lot of plants to stake.  If they have exposed roots on one side gently scoop some soil over them after staking and lightly press the roots down on that side.

Farmers whose field corn has lodged are advised just to leave it. In many cases the corn will try to right itself- bending and growing upward again. It’s harder to harvest corn this way though. You can try this with sweet corn and you may still get a decent crop- or it may rot on the ground.

I have had sweet corn lodge before, and this is what I did.  It’s a lot of work but it will help you get a harvest. Start behind the last row of corn- where the wind has blown it away from where you are standing. Put stakes every 8-10 feet – they can be 3-4 feet tall. Then run wire or rope across your stakes- attach it so its taut and the wire/rope won’t slide down the post when weight is put on it.  The wire/rope should be at least 3 feet above ground.

You may need something like fence post insulators that screw on the post.  I have seen people use duct tape wrapped around the post in a thick layer and then the wire/rope goes above that.  A notch near the top of a wood post or a nail sticking out can work. You want to keep the wire/rope from sliding down.

I happened to have electric wire and posts with insulators on hand but if you can’t find something to use and have to buy the supplies you may want to weigh the cost and effort against just buying sweet corn at the farm market later. I spent most of a day one year lifting the sweet corn after lodging, but I thought it was worth it.

After the posts and wire/rope is up, go down the row lifting the corn plants and leaning them against the wire.  Then put up a second set of posts and wire/rope and repeat and so on. If your rows are close together this won’t be easy.

If you can’t get into your patch to do this, you may as well just leave the corn and hope for the best. It should look better after two weeks. If it doesn’t, if it yellows or starts looking black and moldy just pull it and call time of death. Pollination is harder with lodged corn so if the corn is blown over when it’s tasseling and it doesn’t right itself quickly, you won’t get much of a crop. 

You’ll find that after a couple weeks most corn won’t need the wire to stay upright but taking it down will be a hassle, so leave it until after harvest. 

 

Color for late summer gardens

In April, standing in the garden, August seems so far away. In April, hungry for color, we stride through the garden center, grabbing up perennials already in bloom, or looking as if they will bloom soon. We want a garden -now. The garden centers know this and the perennials they put out to tempt you are weeks ahead of when they normally bloom. Some are grown in greenhouses; some are grown in the far south under hoops and trucked north. But they are nice, big plants, some with blooms.

If we in the north were choosing perennials in April grown locally outside, they would probably be sprouts in a pot. Some gardeners would be experienced enough to know these are a good choice.  But would we choose them, if sitting next to them was the same plant only larger with buds and blooms? My experience in retail says people naturally go for the bigger, blooming plants. Your mind tells you one thing, but your eyes direct your hands to pick up the bigger plant with flowers.

Is there anything wrong with this? Other than having to protect those more developed plants from late frosts things will probably be fine. Next year they will come up and bloom in your garden when the normal time for them to do so comes. But there is one disadvantage to this cheating the season scenario. Many gardens end up lacking late summer color, both in the current year and in years to come.

Even with tricks to advance bloom, the late summer bloomers may not be quite as big and pretty in April as the early summer bloomers. The gardener sees colorful Siberian iris, daylilies, poppies, bleeding heart, Asiatic lilies, creeping phlox, columbines and delphiniums and chooses them. Some gardeners are unaware that most perennials bloom for a short period and then quit.

If you want color in the late summer garden, you need to plan for it. In the spring those late bloomers may not seem like they are contributing much, but you’ll be happy to see them later. Luckily many of the common garden perennials that begin bloom after the summer equinox do have long bloom periods, taking the color into fall.

Garden mums, echinacea (coneflowers), monarda (beebalm) rudbeckia (black eyed Susans- and others), coreopsis, helenium, hardy hibiscus, rose of Sharon, buddleia, sedums, hollyhocks, asters, tall garden phlox and goldenrod are all plants that either have a long summer blooming period or bloom late in the season.

For shadier gardens late summer color can be provided by fall blooming anemones, toad lilies, cimicifuga (snakeroot) and even hostas. Many hosta have beautiful blooms. Hosta varieties have a varied bloom time, with some blooming in June or July and some in August. If you need late summer color look for late blooming varieties.

One thing the gardener can do is incorporate bulbs and tubers into the garden like cannas, dahlias, crocosmia, peacock orchids, glads, and late blooming lilies. Many of these have long bloom times and will take the color to the first hard frost.

Some bulbs need to be dug up and stored, depending on your garden zone if you want them for the next year. Many gardeners treat them like annuals, however. And of course, bedding annuals can really be helpful for fall color, with things like geraniums and petunias even surviving light frosts. (Actually those examples are tender perennials treated like annuals.)


If your garden is running out of steam and starting to look drab and you don’t think you planted things that are going to bloom in August and beyond, don’t despair. This is a good excuse to head right back to that garden center. A good garden center will be featuring hardy hibiscus with their flamboyant blooms, garden mums, buddleias, Joe Pye plant, sedums and other plants that you can pop into the garden.  Just remember to keep them watered after transplanting.  And the good thing is that they will come back next year, with any luck.

Having a beautiful, blooming garden in late summer keeps you interested in keeping it weeded and watered, which is a win for both you and the plants. Keep that color coming.

  

 "Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass... Life is about learning to dance in the rain."

- Vivian Greene.

 

Kim Willis

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And So On….

 

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(This is the Lapeer County Gardeners facebook page)

 

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