Joshua Siskin offers five tips for the garden this week.
. On a stem where you have deadheaded a flower, cut back to the lowest five-leaflet leaf on that stem. If you have a constantly decomposing layer of mulch under your roses, fertilization will not be necessary. However, if the ground is bare, deadheading should coincide with application of a fertilizer designed specifically for roses. On reblooming hydrangeas such as the White Wedding variety, it is also essential to remove faded blooms in order to promote development of additional flowers.
Spraying weekly is recommended. Make sure that you saturate both sides of the leaves with your skim milk solution. On this same topic, I received the following email a number of years ago from Robert Wayne Steele, Sr., a gardener in West Covina. “I am a very long-time vegetable gardener,” he wrote, “and have found that whole milk, full strength in a spray bottle, will kill sucking insects .
To prevent predation by birds, enclose fruit clusters in paper bags. You will need to look inside the bag from time to time to make sure you don’t forget to harvest your grapes when they are ripe. However, should your grapes ripen faster than you expected and begin to shrivel, you can still consume them as raisins. In truth, raisins that come from grapes that dry on the vine are tastier and more nutritious than those that come from grapes that are picked when ripe and then dried in the sun.
4. As your vegetables ripen, make sure you pick them, ideally in the morning when they are more hydrated than at other times of the day. The same principle that governs deadheading of flowers is at work: flowers and vegetables are sinks for the minerals and water taken up by roots as well as the sugars produced by leaves. The moment a flower has faded or a summer vegetable – tomato, eggplant, pepper, cucumber, or squash – has matured, it must be removed in order to allow new flowers and vegetables to form so that resources taken up by roots or manufactured in leaves can be allotted to them.
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