All you did was take a one week trip in early August, and everything looked either parboiled or deep fried to a crackly crunch when you came back. Does this sound familiar? Or maybe you didn’t even need to leave for it to happen, it just sneaked up on you through the last dry month. Or in the case of June 2021, you watched helplessly while the temperatures rose, and the plants cooked in the sun. So what can you do to make it look better?
Perennials are easy. You cut them off to the ground and they come back up, often in time to rebloom this fall. Give them a nice handful of organic fertilizer, and keep them adequately watered from here on, and they’ll be fine.
Lawns are fairly easy, too. Mow it short, give it a light fertilizing, and water it regularly. Or just leave it a nice golden color, it’s pretty that way, too. Makes the shrubs look greener.
Annuals are harder. Some, like petunias, impatiens, lobelia and verbena will come back fine from a burned state with a hard cutting-back. Others, like zinnias and cosmos, are so upright in their growth that cutting them short will set them back too much. Snip off any collapsed parts, pull off the worst shriveled leaves. Then, with all of them, water regularly, and fertilize them once a week to help them grow back. If they look like they’re not strong enough to recover, don’t waste time and effort on them. If it’s early enough in the summer and you can afford it, replant with more of the same. We have crops of annuals growing here all summer at Egan Gardens. If it’s late summer, pull them out and replant with pansies to last you through fall, winter and next spring.
Shrubs and trees are the hardest. Deciduous shrubs, hydrangeas or lilacs for example, with all their leaves burned brown on the edges aren’t going to improve much in appearance until those leaves fall off, but you can pick off fully burned leaves and cut off completely collapsed stems, and that helps. At least deciduous shrubs and trees will look normally bare by late fall. However, broadleaf evergreen shrubs, like rhododendrons and azaleas, with rusty brown burned patches on the centers of the leaves won’t cover over the burned parts until next June. All will recover, though, except possibly some newly-planted shrubs whose roots hadn’t yet reached out far enough to find water on their own, and went dry to the point of no return. If the whole length of the season’s new growth has collapsed on any or all branch tips, give them a day to come back up after a heavy watering. then cut off collapsed parts.
And when you’ve done what you can, just live with it, put up with it. Don’t worry, don’t whine, just wait for plants to heal and repair themselves – unless you have a plant or plants that get damaged every year. Then you know you have to move or replace that plant; it’s simply in the wrong place.
So what does this mean? That you should never take a trip in summer or your garden will take vengeance on you for your daring to ignore it? You should grow only plants suitable to Southwest deserts? Some of us are lucky enough to have good reliable neighbors to help out, others are not so fortunate. What we need in this town is a garden-watching service, like dog and cat boarding services. I think I just thought of a nice retirement job.
Happy gardening,
Ellen