Spring is a busy time for organic gardeners, and it can be a relief to take a break in the hottest months to enjoy the fruits of your labor. However, industrious gardeners know that a few carefully planned chores may give you more bang for your buck in the organic flower garden.
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Cutting a summer bouquet serves as more than just a way to beautify your living room or kitchen. Most annuals benefit from regular cutting, whether you’re removing spent blooms or whether you’re taking the freshest blossoms for the vase. Cutting annuals produces bushy, vigorous growth, and it spurs the plant to produce more flowers in an attempt to fulfill its mission to produce seeds.
Concerning perennial flowers, deadheading controls the undesirable spread of plants. Some perennials, such as coneflowers, are notorious for taking over a garden patch with the seeds they drop. Gardeners must weigh their desire for tidiness against the benefits of leaving spent flowers to provide winter interest or food for wildlife.
By now, the warm humid nights of summer have encouraged the growth of foliar diseases like mildew and black spot in susceptible plants. Water your plants in the morning, to give foliage an opportunity to dry quickly when the sun comes out. Avoid watering leaves unnecessarily by using soaker hoses.
Use sulfur or copper based organic fungicides on minimally affected plants, and destroy any plants that show evidence of disease on more than 50% of their leaves. Keep diseased plants out of your compost bin. Discard diseased foliage in your brush pile or bury it so that it can decompose naturally.
The thick layer of mulch that seemed to obscure emerging plants in the spring may be surprisingly thin now. Heat and moisture cause organic mulches to break down rapidly, so add enough mulch to maintain a 3-inch layer around flowering plants. If you’re overwhelmed with green matter in your compost bin, you can use excess grass clippings as mulch in the flower garden.
In the middle of summer, your annuals may need a nutrient boost to keep up their performance until the first frost. Your focus should be on adding sources of potassium to boost blossom development rather than nitrogen, which promotes leafy growth. Liquid seaweed products provide a quick potassium boost, and a top dressing of rock potash provides a long-lasting source of potassium.
Save some compost to use as a seed-starting medium for fall flowering plants, like pansies, nasturtiums, and ornamental kale. Start these seeds in an area of the garden sheltered from the direct summer sun. If the entire garden plot is sunny, use shade cloth to protect these cool weather lovers until temperatures become moderate. Start your fall flower garden seeds at least two months before first frost, and you’ll reduce the wait between the last blossom of this season and the first blossom of the next.
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