This month's Stadler Nursery post is about June!
Cheryl lives with her husband and their three cats in a 100-year-old house in the beautiful state of Maryland. She has a degree in horticulture from the University of Maryland and has been the manager of Stadler Nurseries in Maryland and Virginia for over 20 years. Become a fan of Stadler Nurseries on Facebook to find out what's going on in the garden world!
My big beautiful hydrangea is in full bloom right now and I love seeing it every time I look out my kitchen window. Did you know you can change the color of the flowers on some types of hydrangea s? Acidic soil will give you blue blooms while alkaline soil will generate pink. The science of it works like this. The color is a direct result of the availability of aluminum in the soil. Most garden soils have adequate aluminum, but in soils where the pH is high (alkaline), the aluminum is chemically bound to other elements in the soil and not available to be absorbed by the hydrangea, causing it to produce pink flowers. In lower pH soils (acidic), the aluminum is freely available and can be absorbed by the hydrangea which then produces blue flowers. To make your soil more alkaline, add lime around the plant two or three times each year. For more acidic soil, add ammonium sulfate. Since our clay soils in this area tend to be slightly acidic, my hydrangea is always blue so I don’t have to worry about it, but if you live in an area where this is not the case, either embrace the pink or be prepared to amend your soil several times a year every year!
I am not a big planter of annuals in my garden. They only live the one year and, while they do flower the entire summer until our first frost in late October, I don’t like having to keep replanting them every year. However, I do have a few areas that always get annuals this time of year. These are areas in which the perennials are “summer dormant”. They have done their big show for the year already and have died back to the ground to rest and wait for next spring. These include the beautiful, vibrant orange poppies that fill my garden in May, the lovely and delicate bleeding hearts, the ethereal Virginia bluebells and the patches of bright daffodils here and there. Planting annuals in these areas keeps me from having bare spots once these spring beauties have died back and, since they are fairly shallow rooted, they don’t disturb the roots of the perennials in that area . It also allows me to try new combinations and colors that my more permanent perennials don’t allow.
June also brings the arrival of the Japanese beetle, scourge of gardeners in this area. One or two beetles, finding something tasty in your garden, send out a chemical signal to other beetles in the area that says “There’s food here! Come on over!” Before you know it, you have hordes of beetles devouring all your prized plants and flowers. Several control methods are available to you. Those beetle bag traps work well, but only if you have enough room to place them far away from their favorite plants in your garden. The pheromone bait supplied with the bags is a powerful lure and will draw beetles that might have been perfectly content munching away in your neighbor’s yard right over into your garden where they will be sure to sample lots of your plants on the way to the trap. It’s also important to change those bags frequently as once they are full of dead beetles, the others in the area get the idea that perhaps that’s not the best place to be and avoid the trap all together. Several sprays are on the market and most work pretty well as long as you keep up with the recommended spraying schedule. The beetle season usually lasts about six to eight weeks around here, so that’s a lot of spraying but may be worth it if you have a number of plants prized by both you and the beetles.
Another possible solution is the application of Milky Spore to your soil. This is an organic approach, employing a naturally occurring host specific bacterium. It is applied to the soil in a powder form and works by killing the Japanese beetle grub in the soil before it emerges in its adult form and begins feeding on the foliage in your garden. The big plus, of course, is the non-chemical approach. The big minus is that while it will control the root-feeding grubs in your lawn and garden and thus reduce or eliminate entirely the adult beetles they would have grown into, it takes at least three years before the bacteria has built up to sufficient levels to have good effect on the grubs. During this time, you cannot apply any sort of grub control to your lawn because you will kill off the food source of the bacteria and inhibit or even halt its establishment in your garden. Also, it has no effect at all on the beetles that can just fly over from your neighbor’s yard and munch happily on your delicious plants. So unless you can get your entire community on board with this control method, it won’t help much with the Japanese beetle problem. Fortunately for us in this area, as far as I know, no Japanese beetles have been sighted yet this season. Perhaps this is a result of our very cold and snowy winter having killed off the grubs in the soil before they had a chance to grow up and become those dreaded voracious flying adults. I hope so.
If you've got chickens you could try this method!
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