From the beginning of September, most children return to school while the majority of adults return to work: life returns to its normal rhythm. While you were on vacation, who took care of your garden? We will give you some important tips to take care of your green space at this time of year.
Fertilize flowering plants
Many flower beds and potted plants usually flower in August and then start again at the end of the summer!
For petunias, for example, it may be useful to encourage them to grow again by pruning them to form new buds. But it is even more important to give them enough nutrients now for them to flower and flourish later.
After all, this is an important time: during your holidays, you may not have given liquid fertilizer to your plants. And even long-lasting fertilizers often no longer work at this stage, even though, in theory, they should easily last until September or October. Why? Why? Heat and humidity diffuse fertilizer faster than expected, so they no longer act on your plants.
A plant lacks nutrients if it does not flower or if its leaves are an atypical light green, which is often accompanied by yellowing of the lower leaves, even on plants that are not dried out.
Start by adding normal liquid fertilizer, and supplement it with granules if necessary. When summer flowers lose their shine and it is no longer worth taking care of, replace them with late summer flowers or autumn flowers: heather, wintergreen, shrubs, chrysanthemums, herbs, gentians, etc. offer many possibilities to tuck in your home.
Pick up fallen fruit
You can now find fallen fruit next to your apple trees. You can use them in different ways:
You can use ripe fruit in the kitchen if you remove the damaged parts
Rake up and discard unusable fruit, ideally with organic waste. If you throw these fruits into your compost pile, they attract wasps. Apples eaten by worms also contain small butterfly caterpillars such as late looper larvae that overwinter in the soil. In spring, females climb to the apple blossoms to infect the following year's fruit. To prevent caterpillars and, later, pupae from overwintering in your compost pile, it is better to discard fallen fruit with organic waste. Alternatively, you can dig a hole in the depth of two shovels to bury the fruit.
After harvest, check the plum trees to make sure you have removed all the remaining moldy fruit. They contain thousands of fungal spores that could attack your fruit again next year.
Install bird shelters
The bird breeding season is now definitively over, so the old nests must be removed from the nesting boxes. This way, you eliminate the parasites that would spend the winter here and create a new breeding space for spring.
You must also completely remove old nests in bushes and decorative trees, as they will prevent new residents from settling in. When cleaning nest boxes, make sure that a dormouse has not taken up residence there.
In protected areas, you can now hang shelters so that night bats, small horseshoes, etc. can find shelter there now.
Fertilize the lawn
It's also time to pay attention to your lawn again!
To ensure that it overwinters properly, use a special fall fertilizer. It contains additional nitrogen and potassium mixed with nutrients. But this fertilizer is designed to diffuse nitrogen very slowly so that it is not removed during the wet winter period, as it would then be of no use. For this reason, you should not use spring or summer fertilizers for fall or winter maintenance.
The potassium in the fertilizer allows the lawn to withstand the fiercest frosts, while the slow release of nitrogen supplies enough nitrogen to grow back in the spring. Fertilizer often contains iron, which makes the grass greener and more pleasing to the eye.
Apply fall lawn fertilizer on a dry day followed by a rainy day, as rain allows the fertilizer to penetrate immediately to the roots.
Maintain the vegetable garden
Harvest as many vegetables as possible before going on holiday to prevent them from rotting while you are away. It is all the more important to take advantage of late summer and early fall to plant vegetables and fresh herbs.
You can still plant herbs such as borage, watercress, nasturtium, and dill, as well as vegetables such as spinach, fall radishes, lamb's lettuce and lettuce.
You can also plant other vegetables, such as kohlrabi, chicory, fall, and winter lettuce, as plants, but not as seedlings.
Flower bulbs
But the most pleasant job to do at this time of year is to plant flower bulbs!
After all, these little brown bulbs are the promise of pretty flowers in spring. When you buy your bulbs, take them relatively large, because they grow better. Cheap bulbs are often smaller.
If you have a vole problem, especially if you live on the edge of a village or in the countryside, it is better to cover the bulbs to prevent them from eating them. Otherwise, it is as if you were leaving food for the voles during the winter.
The rule to follow for the planting depth of bulbs (measured from the tip, not the base):
The planting depth should be twice the height of the bulb
If you plant your bulbs in pots rather than in flowerbeds, you can also use the sandwich method and place different types of bulbs on top of each other to make layers, for example, narcissus at the bottom, then mini tulips, hyacinths, winter bulbs again.
If you coordinate the flowering period of the different types of flowers (following the instructions), the different layers will grow one after the other, like a firework display. Moreover, you can also extend the flowering period of a single type of bulb by planting the bulbs by 2, 3 or 4 every 10 to 15 days.