Life Starts All Over Again When It Gets Crisp in the Fall Page

As the 2020 gardening year draws to a close, now is the time to ensure a successful gardening flavor next yr, for y'all or your customers!  Sanitation is a cornerstone of integrated pest management and is essential for good plant health management. Throughout the yr, we have been plagued with both unusually moisture and unusually dry weather sometimes within weeks of each other.  This weather incited normally small-scale disease problems to epidemic levels, encouraged the development of new disease issues and made for a difficult year to garden, specially for first time gardeners.  Nevertheless, at present is non the time to give up!

Adept sanitation, in the form of removing diseased establish textile this fall will assist minimize or even prevent illness problems side by side spring. Many affliction-causing organisms can survive the winter in infected plant debris. Cutting dorsum infected plants, disposing diseased plants (past burning or the garbage—do not compost!), or tilling nether crop debris can also help prevent over-wintering of plant affliction causing organisms.

Evaluate and Investigate

Figure 1. Failure to divide perennials can result in crown rots.

Before you brainstorm your sanitation program, bring out a notebook to take records of what did and did not work, what volition need dividing in the spring, and what needs to be moved to a different site.  Call up to accurately place which pests you have and what crops they attack!

For numerous perennials, failure to divide is a leading cause of crown (Fig. one).   If yous haven't started a pest management, client thousand, or gardening log, consider doing so.  Make notes about problems and enquiry potential solutions over the wintertime. Evaluate which varieties did well and which you should consider replacing.  Did your rose defoliate in July? Look for the many illness resistant roses or investigate what fungicides or insecticides y'all may wish to buy if you or your customer wants to keep the trouble child.  The rose blackspot bulletin tin help you with both. Was powdery mildew a problem for your bee-balm?  Consider moving it to a sunnier location in the jump (with better air flow) or remove it and supplant it with a powdery mildew resistant variety, like 'Jacob Cline', or many of the new, petite and affliction resistant bee balms.

Get Down and Muddy

After you've filled up several pages of notes, its fourth dimension to put the notebook down, and put on the heavy gloves.  Clean upward leaves and crop residues from all gardens. As soon every bit crops are harvested, pull up and dispose of all plant cloth, including roots. Later on a hard freeze, remove and compost all affliction-free, merely frost-blackened, tender annuals , from African daisy to zinnia, and everything in betwixt.

A common question asked by gardeners is whether diseased plants tin can exist safely composted. The answer is NO!  Do not compost diseased plants!  In Indiana (and almost of the Midwest), compost rarely reaches the temperatures required to impale nearly found pathogens.  Be sure to discard the material properly, by bagging it or past burning it if this is permitted.

Did yous accept really bad leaf spots on sure perennials?  After your perennials have died back, the leafy material tin can be removed. Carefully cut the tissue with shears or pair of scissors and dispose of the infected leaves.  Consider applying a chlorothalonil-based fungicide next year if leaf spots were especially severe. Some diseases may crave multiple applications for adequate control. At that place are many common leaf diseases that good sanitation practices will help control, such as leafage spot of iris or botrytis of peony, to name a few.  Cut back late flowering perennials like asters and chrysanthemums to a few inches. Did your peonies develop spots?  Pull out the shears!  Peonies can be cut to the ground, but be sure to remove all the infected leaf then it doesn't reinfect the new growth next year.  Don't forget the mulch, or a row cover to protect against freezing and thawing.

Effigy two. This twelvemonth, many clematis beyond the land were infected with Ascochyta bane.

Clematis, "Queen of the Vines" ordinarily gets dethroned by a diverseness of fungal diseases, the about common and most serious of which is Ascochyta blight (Fig. ii).  Remove infected vines and dispose of them.   For some varieties, you may lose flowers, especially if they flower on onetime wood (non commonly grown in the Midwest, but at least you were warned). Mulch heavily with several inches of both soil and mulch—Because this illness usually attacks at the soil line, past preserving the crown through deep planting or mulching, you lot can regenerate your clematis subsequently infection—even severe infection, although the constitute may take several years to recover.  In the spring, consider preventative applications of a chlorothalonil based fungicide to minimize the likelihood of reinfection. If powdery mildew is likewise a problem, exist sure to add a FRAC 3 fungicide, like Eagle/Systhane, Torque, Tourney, or Banner Maxx.

Clematis isn't the only institute to do good from mulching: Add together mulch to your perennials to create a protective layer that insulates plant roots from the freeze-thaw impairment.  Mulch besides conserves moisture and improves soil structure. Harbinger, hay and compost are all excellent mulch materials. Leaves and grass clippings are less effective as mulch material considering neither holds much air space for insulation, but the price is hard to beat!  (Retrieve in the coming spring to remove the mulch layer promptly, to forestall crown rots from occurring.)

Colorado Purple Bandbox Syndrome

Conserving moisture isn't enough, though.  The dry out to drought-like conditions are setting copse and shrubs upward for failure come up spring. Be sure to thoroughly water all plants as we head into winter.  Spruce, pino and other conifers specially can get desiccated past the harsh winter winds if a autumn drought should develop.  When symptoms develop in the spring (royal Colorado blue spruce, reddish brown white pines and red pines), nothing tin can be done to "cure" the trouble.  While watering the bigger plants, don't forget sheltered perennials, such as those under the eaves, or under the trees.  Plants that become too dry in fall are less likely to survive the wintertime. And yous won't know this until the late spring when they fail to return!

Install simple windbreaks, or encompass (Fig. 3) the entire tree, or embrace the body of vulnerable, thin bark trees with plastic "tree guards." to protect them from drying winter winds. Anything that encourages snow accumulation will help provide excellent protection against low temperature or wind desiccation (Fig. iv). Questions regarding the use of anti-transpirants and evergreens need to be put to remainder: Anti-transpirants are tools that assistance plants endure stressful, short-term periods, like transplant daze. Only the almost hardcore lover of snow and water ice could define an Indiana winter equally "short term."  For this reason, anti-transpirants are not a replacement for proper fall watering or proper establish pick.

No Shears Here

If there weren't enough chores in the m this time of year, there is one yous should not be doing: Pruning fruit trees.  In climates such as ours, pruning should exist done in spring just as the buds begin to swell.  Freezing injury and dieback can occur to fruit trees if they are pruned in autumn or early on wintertime. Even though y'all can't clip, you can remove fallen fruits, or hanging "mummies" (dessicated, infected fruit that often serves as an inoculum source for next years infection).  Don't forget to protect copse with mouse-vole/rabbit/deer guards. Wrap tree trunks with hardware cloth (¼ inch openings) up to the expected snow-line to provide the necessary protection.  Be sure to remove this protection in the late spring to protect the crown of the tree every bit it continues to grow.

After the Bulbs of Summer Accept Gone

Okay, that's not what Don Henley sang, but yous get the idea.  Don't forget to lift and harvest tender bulbs and corms (cannas, caladiums, gladiolas, dahlias and tuberous begonias) for side by side year. Lift after a good frost blackens their tops.  Carefully dig bulbs/corms and place the bulbs in a well-ventilated location to dry for a two- to three- week period. This will foreclose storage rot from destroying your bulbs.  Stems can exist cut off with a sharp knife or scissors (except for begonias—proceed reading!) most but non at the point where they sally from the bulb. Allow begonia stems to dry until they are breakable enough to break off from the bulbs or cutting off the stems virtually 1 inch above the tubers.  Place the tubers in a absurd, dry area to cure for 2 to 3 weeks.  Later curing, store tubers between layers of peat moss or vermiculite.  Store bulbs in a cool, dark identify, that does not drop below twoscore degrees F.  Consider dusting the bulbs with a preventative fungicide, like captan or, Bordeaux or another copper to forestall storage rot.  Consider pouring yourself a fine Bordeaux vino to toast yourself and all the work that you've achieved!

Lawns

Don't forget to rake and compost fallen leaves. Leaf litter left on backyard provides an infection court for snow mold.  Be sure to sneak that last mowing in, besides, equally long grass provides an splendid place for snow mold, as well.  Finally, fall is a great time to reduce weed levels—besides, you want your fertilizer to become to the plants you love. And unfortunately for me, no one wins prizes for growing the biggest dandelions!

All photos by Janna Beckerman.

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Source: https://www.purduelandscapereport.org/article/life-starts-all-over-again-when-it-gets-crisp-in-the-fall-f-scott-fitzgerald/

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