Showing posts with label fall planting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fall planting. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 August 2012

Fall planting

I'm a gardening answer person periodically on a call-in radio program for our university's Your Day Public Service Radio feed that goes throughout the state.  It's fun, and I'm glad to encourage gardeners of whatever knowledge level to learn more and have fun doing it.  I pitched in today as a last-minute guest for my friend and colleague, Bob Polomski (and substitute for a much more well-known gardening 'personality') - Felder Rushing, whose Mississippi radio base needed to switch their focus to Hurricane Isaac.

Today's calls were typical, from ornamentals to vegetables.

I'm always reminded (and try to encourage folks) that learning about plants is fun, and rewarding.  Before adding landscape plants, learn about them.  Vegetables, ditto.   If you've  inherited an overgrown landscape, learn about what you have and prune things back judiciously.

Talk to your extension agent, too. He/she often knows a lot about what you're interested in planting.

Oh, and planting in fall is the best practice, too, throughout the Carolinas, even if maybe you can't acquire the right plants.  Try, however!

Wednesday, 1 August 2012

Weeding

Back home in the Piedmont for a couple of days, I devoted time to tidying the main vegetable garden and satellite garden for fall planting.  "Tidying" is a wimpy word for the weeding involved, but happily, enough recent rain has left the soil pliant enough for easy pulling of even the Italian dandelion volunteers (from an original plant that I had deliberately cultivated years ago).

What was I thinking?  The leaves were just as bitter as 'regular' dandelions... Ick.

But I managed to clear out most of the weeds, so I'm feeling good about it.

There's no sign of woodchucks (hooray), perhaps because of the rainy summer (so good forage beyond the vegetable garden).  So I'll be sowing fall cole crops and lettuce in mid-August, when we're back for fall semester.