Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Star jasmine is an evergreen vine that prefers some shade. The fragrant blossoms fill the June air with their sweet scent.

• Attract hummingbirds to your patio this summer with hummingbird feeders, so you can enjoy their iridescent beauty and charm.

• Azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons can be pruned now without sacrificing next years bloom. Ask at your nursery if you need help.

• Paint trunks of young fruit trees with Tree Trunk White. This will keep the soft bark from sun-burning which leaves cracks for borer insects, the most common cause of death of young apple trees.

• Earwigs are out and about and hungry. Control them with the new “Sluggo Plus”, which has the natural, bacteria-based spinosad added to the original iron phosphate formula.

The Cutting Garden

If you enjoy having fresh flowers in the house, it makes good sense to grow your own. With your own cutting garden, you can grow the flowers you love in the colors you want and make sure you have a selection of flowers for cutting most of the year.

Cut flowers are as easy to grow as vegetables when grown in blocks of the same kind. Choose plants that bloom for a long period and hold up well in the vase. Make sure you grow flowers that bloom at different seasons to have bouquets throughout the year.

In order to receive the maximum production of flowers, the garden should receive seven or eight hours of sun a day. The soil should be fertile with good drainage. There are also some flowers for cutting that can be grown in light shade, though flower production won’t be as great.

If you want to grow cut flowers in an ornamental garden, mix annuals and perennials with ornamental grasses, bulbs and roses. Grow at least three plants of each perennial and six of each annual to have enough flowers for cutting at one time.

Many of the best annual cut flowers are in the daisy family: asters, bachelor’s button, calendulas, cosmos, dahlias, marigolds, zinnias and sunflowers. Some contrasting flowers include gladiolus, dianthus, gayfeather, Victoria Blue salvia, snapdragons and stock.

Everlastings make great cut flowers for fresh or dried arrangements. Baby’s breath, globe amaranth, pink candle celosia, yarrow, statice and strawflowers are easy to air-dry without losing their color or form. Some, such as purple coneflowers and black-eyed Susans produce bold, bristly seedheads that are nice in dried arrangements.

Perennials from the daisy family include: aster, gaillardia, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, black-eyed Susans, Shasta daisy and painted daisy. Cup-and-saucer campanula, delphinium, lupine and penstemon offer tall spikes of bold flowers. Iris, poppies, peonies, daffodils, lilies, tulips and roses have individual flowers to uses as centerpieces of your arrangements.

Ornamental grasses add drama to flower arrangements. Use Northern Sea Oats, fountain grass, feather reed grass (Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’), or Japanese silver grass (Miscanthus sinensis) in both modern and country-style arrangements.

For long-lasting cut flowers, be sure to include carnations, Peruvian lilies (alstromerias), delphiniums, roses, lilies and sunflowers in your cutting garden. Their blooms will last in the vase for 6-14 days.

In areas that receive less than two hours of sun a day, you can grow astilbe, columbine, foxglove, and old-fashioned bleeding heart. If your flower bed is under deciduous trees, daffodils and tulips will flower nicely before the trees leaf out in the spring.

Whether you create a cutting garden, or add cut flowers to your ornamental flower beds, it’s easy to have lots of pretty cut flowers to enjoy indoors all season long.

• Fall is for Planting! Trees, shrubs, lawns, ground covers and bulbs get a jump on spring if you plant them now.

• Keep apples picked up from under the trees to help control the spread of coddling moths which make wormy apples.

• Trim foliage on grape vines to allow more sun to reach the fruit and ripen the grapes.

• Prepare houseplants for return trip indoors. Scout for insects, and thoroughly rinse leaves and container.

• Fertilize lawns now to build up strong, healthy root systems.

Colorful Flowers for Fall

The end of the summer doesn’t have to mean the end of your colorful garden. There are plenty of ways to keep your garden beautiful with fall-blooming flowers. Fall gardening will put you in the spirit of the season, and is a great way to enjoy the beautiful outdoor weather.

The mum, or chrysanthemum, is the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks “fall flowers.” They bring a fresh new look to the fall season and are available in an array of lively colors. They are hardy perennials that come back year after year.

Asters are the other classic fall flower. These 2-3-foot plants pact a lot of punch in the flower bed, blooming with dozens of flowers over a long fall season. They come in various shades of purple and pink and are a fine addition to the perennial border.

Japanese anemone is one of the best of the late summer and early autumn border flowers, with tall upright stems that do not need any staking. In light, airy shade the pink, white or rose-colored semi-double flowers bring a fresh look to the perennial bed. Anemones are sometimes called ‘wind flowers’ and they are indeed graceful swaying in the lightest breeze.

Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ is an upright sedum growing 2 feet tall. Its thick grey-green leaves are topped with large domes of bright pink flowers in September which gradually soften to a coppery color through the fall. Drought-tolerant and hardy, this is a fine plant for the fall garden, and it is much visited by honeybees.

Another secret for a beautiful fall garden is the use of ornamental grasses. Around Labor Day, they begin to send up dramatic plumed seedheads. These usually begin as silky tassels, then expand into fluffy flags that last well into winter. They are decorative in the garden even after the grasses themselves have dried and gone dormant.

The tough little pansy is another great choice for a fall garden and will still be blooming after all the other flowers in your garden have died off. It will also be amongst the first to bloom again come spring.

Pansies have been bred in a wide range of colors, from soft pastels of yellow, pink and apricot to bright gold and orange though to purple, violet, and blue. They are a hardy plant, growing well in sunny or partially sunny locations. This versatile flower is perfect whether planted in gardens, window boxes, or pots.

Snapdragons are another staple of the fall garden. From low border snaps to tall “Rockets”, these colorful beauties will brighten the garden or your containers this fall and next spring too. They come in a rainbow of colors adding a lot of cheer all around.

Brighten up your landscape with colorful fall flowers.

Few hardy perennials offer such a lavish display of flowers as asters. Their beauty ranges from the small, spring-blooming rock asters to the almost overwhelming show of the tall, fall-flowering kinds. And they are some of the easiest perennials to grow.

Asters are typical members of the daisy family, but flower color in this group ranges from white to pink to purple and almost to blue. Heights vary from the 8-inch tall rock garden species to the 4-foot tall fall asters.

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