Summer Garden Maintenance!

Summer heat and disease can take down a healthy lawn or budding flower garden quickly. To avoid spending hundreds restoring your garden next year, you can maintain it through the season. To keep your garden and lawn looking beautiful despite the heat, follow the steps outlined in this checklist:

Remove Dead Plants:

Whether they died of disease, insect damage or natural causes, dead plants shouldn’t remain in the garden. Not only are they unsightly, but they can harbor pests that may spread to other plants. Move dead plants to a compost pile if they are safe for that purpose. If further infestation is a concern, burn or bag and dispose of the plants off site.

Mulch:

Mulch can make a huge difference in growing conditions insulating soil from the heat, blocking weeds and helping to conserve moisture. We recommended to keep a thick layer of mulch on landscape and garden plantings through summer. 

Deadhead:

Removing spent flowers helps plants put more energy into flowering again. Annuals, and repeat flowering shrubs and perennials will offer more color, more often during the season if you deadhead.

Pest Management:

Be vigilant...As you deadhead, weed and water, watch for signs of insect and disease pests. The solution may be simple or complex, but the key to garden success lies in early detection and prompt, decisive treatment. Know, invite and protect the good bugs in your garden. Follow the manufacturers instructions on any treatments that may be necessary.

Fertilizer:

Mid-summer is a good time to address fertilization  in the landscape and garden. Yellowish leaves may signify an iron deficiency in an otherwise healthy plant (particularly in lawns and broad-leaf evergreens like gardenias, rhododendrons, azaleas, hollies and others). It is also time to feed hungry garden veggies like greens, tomatoes, peppers and others that may have been planted a month ago or more.

Pick Veggies Clean:

In the vegetable garden, keep repeat fruiting plants (like tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, okra and others) picked cleanly as the fruit ripens. Allowing fruit to become over-mature slows production, and may spell the end of the season for these plants.

Weeds:

As plants fill out in early summer, if you’ve kept them weeded up to that point, they should begin to shade out most of their weed competition. It’s okay to slow down, but don’t stop weeding. One weed left to go to seed can cause much more weeding in the future.

Water:

If it’s dry, remember to give your garden an inch of irrigation water per week. Containers may need significantly more, especially in hot, arid conditions. If you are having a wet summer, be sure that automated irrigation is adjusted or turned off until needed.

Prepare for Fall Gardening: 

When summer has already come to an end, it is too late to start your fall garden. In fact, fall gardens are planted in August as summer temperatures start to fade out and your summer vegetables no longer produce a bountiful.

Call For a FREE Estimate and Consulting:

631-428-6740

AUTUMN the best season for planting!

 

The advantages of planting a garden in fall season:

The landscape around us is obviously winding down as the days grow colder and the nights get longer. Mid-to-late fall sees most of the plant world going from mellow to muted to moribund. But, contrary though it seems, this is the best time of the year to plant new things and to work in the garden.

The reason is simply fall weather, which, up until the ground freezes, is kind to human beings as well as to newly planted trees, shrubs, and perennials.

In autumn, there are many more good days to be outside than there are in spring. Serious gardeners love November; they're happy working up a sweat inside their hoodies and gloves when everyone else is starting to huddle indoors. 

At first thought, spring, with its explosion of buds and shoots and sprouts seems like the

best time to put new plants in the ground. But spring in much of North America has quite a small window for planting—between the last frost and the onset of hot weather. Some of the days in that window will be rainy, making the soil muddy and hard to work with a lot of the time. The soil takes a while to warm up from a winter's worth of cold; a new plant's roots grow slowly in chilled earth.

In fall, the soil still holds summer's warmth, which encourages root growth up until the ground freezes. Fall planting gets perennials, shrubs, and trees off to a faster start the following spring. In mild-winter parts of the country, fall is even more emphatically the superior season for planting because roots can keep growing all winter.

Plants shift their objectives when the sun wanes and the temperatures go down. They stop the spring and summer work of making leaves, shoots, flowers, berries, and fruit. All their energy goes into establishing roots.

Trees, shrubs, and perennials put into the ground in fall don't have to deal with heat and drought early in their young lives. By late next spring, when things begin to heat up, the plant's roots will be up to the job of absorbing and circulating nutrients and water. 

The Ultimate Late Summer Garden

The ultimate perennial garden. It's not difficult to bring that vision to mind. For me, it's a classic English border, with iris, lupine and poppies, that continues blooming right into the fall, with wave after wave of color and form: foxgloves, roses, delphinium, dianthus, hollyhocks, lilies and more.

Bloom time in most American perennial borders runs from late May through early July—a glorious but short 5 or 6 weeks. By late July, most perennial gardens are past their prime and look pretty dull for the rest of the season.

Fortunately, there are many perennials that bloom in late summer, including coneflower, asters, mums, Russian sage, cimicifuga, sedum, rudbeckia, and phlox. But I've found annuals are the real key to summer-long color.

Unlike many perennials, most annuals thrive in summer's heat and once they get started, will keep blooming right into early fall. With a little planning you can create annual - perennial partnerships that will keep your flowers gardens looking terrific for a full 5 o 6 months.

There a are few perennials that save their big show for the end of the summer, and remember impatients bloom until frost, and the the coleus have incredibles colors to choose from.

Contact us for a FREE estimate.

Preparing your garden for Autumn

                                                                                   Soil Health:

Soil is dry after a hot, dry summer. Increase organic matter, especially nitrogen, as it adds moisture.

• Organic resources – things that are from a natural source
• Organic products – liquid fertilisers, eggs,  worm juice, compost tea, comfrey tea, purchased products (ensure they are organic) and slow release fertilisers,pellets etc.

Gather resources from around your home. Don’t throw away green waste (i don’t call it waste !!)  into green waste bins, keep it all !!  Soil can become water repellent after long periods of dry. Adding organic matter will help to hold moisture in soil.

Grow Support Plants around your gardens. A few great plants are the veggies and herbs

Support Plants are used to improve soil health and as good companion plants. Growing

these plants amongst your gardens means you have free resources available as needed. Chop up the foliage and place over the soil, cover with a sprinkle of mulch. This is a quick and easy way to feed the soil.

                                                                          Get to know your soil type.

• Sand – has large particles, good drainage, poor water holding, good root development, good aeration, high erosion & low compaction.
• Clay – has small particles, holds nutrients well, bad drainage, poor aeration, lower erosion; high compaction.
• Loam – balance of sand, clay and silt and best growing for plants.
• 
  
• While gardens are resting here’s some jobs to do…
  
  • pruning
  • weeding
  • composting
  • mulching
  • irrigation maintenance
  • planting
  • pests & diseases
  • seed saving
  • harvesting
  • cooking
  Make a list of foods to grow.
  
  
  
  • Start with a ‘Shopping List’
  • Sow seeds
  • Propagate cuttings
  • Planting seedling
  During Autumn it’s still warm enough to do vegetative propagating and grow new plants.

Nurture & Care for your Garden

Our gardens respond to nurturing and care just like us. If you spend time in the garden, enjoying all the abundance of nature and connecting with nature then your garden will respond. We have a natural connection with nature and plants!!

Perennials vs Annuals coloring your garden!

We are often asked about the difference between annuals and perennials, how they differ and how they are used in the landscape. It can be a bit confusing because both are colorful and come in all sizes and shapes. Here is how to tell the difference.

An annual is any herbaceous (non woody) plant that is not hardy in your area. It dies over the winter and needs to be replanted yearly or annually. For example, a Martha Washington geranium becomes shrub-like in California but only gets 18 inches high here, then dies with the first hard frost. Popular annuals include marigolds, petunias, alyssum, geraniums and zinnias. So why do people go through the trouble of replanting every year? To answer that, we should first learn what a perennial is.

A perennial is an herbaceous plant that comes back every year. 

Once planted, they grow through

A perennial is an herbaceous plant that comes back every year. Once planted, they grow through their first season, die back to the ground during the winter then reemerge in the spring for many years (sometimes decades) to come. Shasta daisies, peonies, salvia, delphinium, sedum and coral bells are just a few of hundreds of types of perennials. These plants sound wonderful, and they are, but there is a catch—most perennials only bloom for 6-8 weeks. Even those that re-bloom have a non-flowering period after they have had their first flush of blossoms.

So what is a color loving gardener to do? Enter the Mixed Border, which uses a combination of perennials and annuals for a succession of flowers from early spring through fall. By choosing perennials with varied heights, colors and bloom times and using them as the “backbone” or framework of your bed or border, you can then simply fill in the gaps with annuals which generally bloom continuously from planting time right up to the first frost. New varieties such as the plethora of hybrid premium petunias stay covered with flowers with no deadheading necessary. With annuals available in every color of the rainbow, the look of a border can be changed from year to year without the need for a major revamp.

Now that you know your perennials from your annuals, you can design a border that will dazzle with color and texture. If you would like some guidance, don’t hesitate to ask, we are here to help! 

  Follow Us in Facebook:
Zion Landscaping & Masonry 
Call for FREE Estimates
    631 423 8082

    

The Beneficts of Power Raking

Power raking is the process of cutting swathes into the dead material of lawns to remove dead grass so the soil can breathe and the grass can grow more efficiently. Power raking differs from dethatching in extent. While dethatching tears deeply into the soil, removing both dead layers and healthy root systems, power raking is a gentle process design to tear out only the grass material at the surface of the soil.

A power raker is a specific type of machine equipped with roto-tiller-like blades that are intended to be used on lawns. It is about the size of a lawnmower, often larger, and many homeowners rent them from local landscaping services. The blades are set to turn just on the surface of the lawn, so that they dig into the grass bed and dead material covering the soil without actually digging it up. Power rakers produce a layer of detritus and a normal raking is often done afterwards.

Raking should groom, not damage, your spring lawn as it wakes.

Raking the lawn each spring is one of those tasks done by habit by homeowners. Before the days of mulching mowers and leaf blowers, raking was one way to keep thatch at bay and remove winter’s debris, but nowadays, machines have replaced muscle power in many lawn-grooming tasks. Spring raking can still be helpful in maintaining a neat lawn -- if you know how to use your rake to best effect.

Power raking removes the buildup of thatch under a lawn.

Power raking removes thatch, a tight mat of dead rhizomes, stems and roots, which builds up under the surface of a lawn. Some thatch is beneficial to lawns, but too much blocks water, air and nutrients from reaching the soil. If thatch gets thicker than 1/2 inch deep, the roots grow in the thatch instead of the soil.

Preparing your lawn, the Spring is the best season to do it.

                Contact us for a FREE Estimate:

Zion Landscaping & Masonry Inc

     phone: 631-423-8082

Preparing your plants for Spring!

Finally!!

Our spring weather is here to stay and now we can plant those flowers and vegetables without worrying about another freeze.

Plant out daffodils, lilies, crocus, hyacinth and any other bulbs

Early spring is the time to set out bulbs which were forced in pots or bowls in the house. Some may bloom next spring, others may take two or three years to rebuild enough food reserve to support flowering.

Time for Plant your Perennials: 

The springtime is the best season for plant some perennials flowers in your garden. All the conditions that perennials relish and respond to are in place: warming soil, warm sunshine, longer days, moist ground, and regular rainfall. Roots quest into the ground, taking up water and nutrients to fuel growth, and top growth — foliage, stems, and flowers — surges forth.

Healthy soil for healthy         vegetables:

Container gardening is also the easy way to start growing your favorites vegetables on windowsills, balconies, decks even if you dont'n have  an outside garden plot.

Instead of using chemicals based soil and fertilizers, go for natural composts like dried leaves and flowers. Always keep the soil healthy for gardening vegetables in the spring season. Begin composting from late fall to build up proper soil. When the soil becomes moist, dig the compost and add well-rooted manure before you plant the spring vegetables.

Enjoy your Spring season!!

Zion Landscaping & Masonry Inc

Consulting your FREE Estimate:
           631-423-8082