Long and short is that I no longer have a file marked “questions” on my email browser. It got eaten up. So, if you had something in the file – it ainta there anymore. But, you’re welcome to write again. :-) And, as always I’ll answer and send out those that I can in the next newsletter.

If its fall, I must be traveling and visiting garden centres. Tough but somebody has to see all these plants and make sure there’s more new ones coming. :-)

Echinacea ‘Razzmatazz’ did very well in the garden this summer and has bulked up quite well considering I started with a runt of a plant. I’m excited about its chances for next year. It got moved last week (see the article below for tips on fall perennial moving) into its next year garden home. I'll have more reports on other plants as well that I'll share later this fall when the shovels get put away and the dust settles.

So – I apologize for not having questions in this issue but I do want to tell you there’s a bunch more pages up at http://www.gardening-tips-perennials.com on a wider variety of perennials and perennial care. I’d welcome your comments on any of these – be the comment good, bad or indifferent.

Which leads me to saying that any comments on the website you’d care to make are always welcome. I’m working on a long term project here to share / pass along to other gardeners what I’ve been taught or had shared with me. Do let me know what you’d like to see and I’ll do my best to provide it.

As always – I hope you’re having a great time in your garden

Doug

Perennials All Season Explained Here

I've built a page to tell you about my new book called "Perennials All Season".

The book tells you how to design a perennial garden so it will be in bloom all summer long.

It also describes the best backbone plants to put in that garden.

You can see the description of the book here.

News Releases and Interesting Sites

Need to Learn About Microbes?

http://www.microbes.info/

Microbes.info is a site that presents links to web sites on a wide diversity of microbiology information. Stories on the current "hot germ news" (Avian Influenza, microbiology-related bioterrorism, SARS, and West Nile Virus, to name only a few. Many of the links are to original source material. Quite interesting.

From My Garden to Yours

Questions

I'm glad to answer questions for readers. If you have a question, it helps if you ask them in this way:

1) Hit return on your email browser to get the right email address.

2) Please **delete** all the newsletter text so I don't get it all back and have to hunt through it for your text.

3) Give me your location. The answer to a question often is determined by where the garden is located.

4) Have patience. I'll answer as many as I can in the newsletter but there's way more of you than there is of me and I simply can't get to them all. I'll do my best

* * * * * * * *

From My Garden

I went looking in my files and it seems that every year about this time I start writing columns about fall work and warnings about how to avoid problems. This year, instead of putting all those warnings into different columns, I’m going to write them all down in this single effort. Let’s get it down, get it over with and get on to other things.

To begin with, I’m moving my houseplants inside now. They started getting the hose treatment and soap sprays over the past two weeks and with the cool nights we’ve been getting, I decided enough was enough and so indoors they’re coming. The hose treatment is me spraying the full force of the hose onto the undersides of each leaf and making sure the jet of water gets into the leaf axil (where the big leaves meet the stems). I find critters like to hide in these spots (I flushed a bunch of slugs out of my guzmania just before I wrote this article) and a ton of water moves them all up, down and out of the pot. I also checked the bottom of each pot before I brought it in to eliminate slugs and sowbugs. A good stiff jet of water and a quick pass of the hand was all it took. I even got housebroken this fall and I washed all my clay saucers to get rid of the algae and goop on them. They look pretty nice sitting underneath my window and I think that will be a yearly routine now. Mind you, the soap and water also got rid of any pests (like fungus gnats) that were hanging out in the algae.

There are a few houseplants that are not coming inside this fall but are going to the great compost bin in the sky. I worked all of last winter to keep the spider mites off the palm but you know they’re still on that darn thing. So, this fall the palm is toast (as are a few others) as I am not bringing any plant indoors that looks the slightest bit infected. Remember this – an ounce of prevention is worth a lot more than dead plants next February.

I think I’m going to spend some time this week or next digging up a new flower bed for next years kitchen garden and annual trials. I plan on planting a few bulbs in there this fall as well. But note that I’m not planting any until mid-October. If you plant bulbs too soon, they’ll start to grow this fall, be frozen out and you won’t get blossoms next year. Put them into the cool ground with about a month to six weeks to go to full freezing and they’ll be fine. Digging gardens is good exercise in cool fall air and with the three to one to one system (three shovels of soil to one shovel compost and one shovel peat moss) you’ll wind up with an excellent bed for next years garden.

I’m also going to be moving a ton of perennials this fall again. I might just as well put these plants on wheels they seem to be moving around so much. Do move your perennials in the month of September. They’ll survive quite nicely for the winter if you do it now. Yes, I know they don’t look like they want to be moved and yes, they’re still nice and green but take it from me, September is the right month. I pop mine out of the ground, I do not cut back the foliage as I don’t want the plant sending up new fresh foliage and wasting energy on this production and then I pop them back into their new bed. Yes, they don’t look pleased by this treatment but by next year, they’ll have forgiven you. Take as much soil with you as you can to avoid disturbing the roots but if you chop a few roots off – the plants will still forgive you. I do not wait until a heavy frost has knocked back my perennials because I’ve found over the years if I wait until October to move them, the winter survival rate goes down drastically. September is perennial moving month.

September is not shrub moving month. You do have to wait until the heavy frost has knocked the leaves off shrubs and trees to move them about in your garden. You can plant new ones from the garden centre any time now but moving those that reside in your garden is best done when they are fully dormant. This can be done right up to when the ground freezes up in November.

I’ve also started bringing in some of my flowering annuals to give me colour next winter. My new apartment is slowly turning into a plant jungle but hey, that’s what gardeners do in the winter. Next, I’m going to have to hook up some lights to keep everything blooming. Remember that you can easily overwinter flowering impatiens, geraniums, fuschia, and lantana if you follow a few simple steps. The first is to bring them indoors before frost. Frost does very nasty things to tender plants. The second is to start spraying insecticidal soap every few days for the first few weeks the plants are indoors. Trust me on this. You will bring some pests into the house on these plants and the quicker you begin eliminating them, the better. Insecticidal soap is excellent for most houseplants and is safe for children and pets and environmentally benign. Do not breathe the spray and if you get it on your hands, wash immediately. Remember it is a strong soap and some folks might be sensitive to it. Give these plants as much light as you can. They’ll flower for the next month and then start to get leggy. I feed mine monthly over the winter and I expect they’ll get a bit leggy. They’ll get hacked back next spring before I put them back outside but for the next few months, I’ll have a flowering jungle.

Many of you have been buying Datura or Brugmansia plants and these can be overwintered very easily. Somebody told me they were told to put it in a close for the winter. Hmmm. Well, I don’t know about that but I always put mine in the sunniest spot I could find. I kept them cool so they wouldn’t get too leggy but having paid all that money, I didn’t want to leave them outside for Jack Frost to play with. They will get leggy as well but respond quite quickly next spring to a heavy pruning. The cuttings next spring will root easily and you’ll have lots to share.

Simply remember that cold drafts will damage many housebound annuals. Once acclimatized to indoor conditions, they really don’t like those drafts and will drop their leaves if stressed. Don’t panic if a plant drops a few leaves from the bottom but if they start to resemble beanpoles, you’re likely doing something wrong. And quite frankly Scarlet, the single biggest cause of leaf drop is overwatering. Allow the plants to dry down between waterings; damp is good but swamp is bad.

Well, that about sums up the normal warnings. Clean those houseplants. Don’t plant the bulbs until later in the fall even though you can buy them now. Do move your perennials now. Wait until after a heavy frost to move shrubs. Plant anything from your local garden centre now.