A little bit of late-season TLC can help your garden stay looking fresh and beautiful all through fall. Some of your plants may start to look a bit sad or overgrown towards the end of summer, so a little bit of cleanup goes a long way to keeping your garden looking good for the rest of the season. A bit of work now will also make your fall yard clean up and winter prep a little easier and faster.
Here are four tips to help you tidy up your garden for late summer:
Clear Out Spent Plants
By late summer, many of the annuals that looked so beautiful in the spring, like petunias, marigolds, and pansies, are in rough shape by now. The best bet with these is to pull them straight out and toss them into your compost.
Give spring and early summer blooming perennials a quick trim, removing seedheads and trimming them back to a tidy shape. While you’re at it, get aggressive with the weeds. If any weeds have gone to seed, do not add them to your compost.
You can also start taking out finished vegetable plants as well, like peas, beans, chards, and kohlrabi. These can all be added to your compost too. They’ll break down faster if they’re chopped up first. The easiest way to chop up plants like this is by laying them down and then mowing over them with your lawnmower once or twice. This will break them down into smaller pieces that will decay faster. Then you can rake them up and dump them in your composter, or till them straight into your garden soil.
Plant Garden Mums
If you feel your garden or containers are looking a little empty or drab, plant some garden chrysanthemums for many weeks of beautiful jewel-colored flowers. Garden chrysanthemums are a little different from the pots of mums you see in every store in the fall. The mums sold at your favorite grocery store are florist’s chrysanthemums. They’re gorgeous, but they’re not hardy enough to survive a North Dakota winter.
Garden mums are much hardier, and they’re perennial. They’re available in quite a variety of vibrant colors. Next year, keep an eye on your garden mums, and when they reach 6 inches tall, you’ll want to start pinching them back. Remove about 1 inch off the end of each shoot, and repeat this process every 2-3 weeks, until the first week of July. This will encourage loads of blooms in the fall; garden mums usually bloom in the early weeks of September.
Add Other Cool-Season Flowers
If your pots and planters are still looking a little bare, top them up with some fresh new cool-weather annuals. This is a great time of year to buy annuals as they’re usually on sale this close to the end of the season. You can still get several weeks of beauty out of them, so it’s worth it.
Here are just a few gorgeous annuals that will look wonderful in your garden for weeks to come:
- Pansies
- Asters
- Sage
- Kale
- Cabbage
- Verbena
- Celosia
- Dianthus
- Alyssum
Top Up Your Mulch
It’s never too early to start topping up your mulch. Mulch breaks down into your soil over time, and it needs to be topped up every year or every other year to stay looking good and keep protecting your plants. Adding a new layer to your mulched areas now will instantly give your yard and garden a facelift and help it look fresh. More mulch will also help retain moisture and regulate soil temperature.
From mulch to weeding tools, compost bins to fresh annuals, we’ve got what you need to get your garden in tip-top shape for late summer. Stop by the garden center and pick up what you need, so you can enjoy many more weeks of beautiful fall weather.