5 things to do in the garden this week:
Fruit. Having trouble with raccoons eating your fruit? Claire Splan, author of “California Month-by-Month Gardening” (Quarto Publishing, 2017), offers this advice: “Soak rags in rubbing alcohol or ammonia and lay the rags along the paths that raccoons are using to enter your garden. I even draped a few of the soaked rags over the plum tree that was their current target. I didn’t have problems with raccoons in the garden for the rest of the season.”
Vegetables. Although we have reached the onset of peak season for many vegetables, you can still plant warm-season crops, especially from nursery starts, for the next few weeks, making sure you water every day for the first two weeks. You can still transplant bean, corn, squash, cucumber, pepper, eggplant, and tomato seedlings and plant beets and carrots from seed.
Herbs. Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is frequently seen growing as a volunteer in this part of the country. Its distinctive woolly gray leaves have a licorice scent. Although short-lived, it may sky up to seven feet in a short time, with long stalks festooned with butter yellow flowers. All parts of the plant, except for the flowers, are mildly toxic. If nothing else, enjoy it for the unique foliar fragrance.
Flowers. I saw some hydrangeas the other day that were as robust as you could ever hope to see. Certain ornamental plants do respond well to fertilizer and hydrangeas are among them. There is a difference between surviving and looking good and flourishing. I once talked to the proprietor of a native plant garden who told me that fertilizer, judiciously applied in the rainy season, would bring out more blooms on certain natives than otherwise. Horticulture is as much an art as it is a science and if you know your plants well, you may indulge in practices that refute accepted wisdom where growing conditions are concerned.
Place an order for summer and autumn flowering bulbs. Plant coral red spider lilies (Lycoris radiata), pink-flowered Nerine, and golden yellow Sternbergia lutea. Plant canna rhizomes throughout the summer as long as you attend to their water needs. Canna flowers are seen in pink, red, yellow, and orange, and resemble irises except they grow on stalks emerging from banana-shaped foliage. Canna tropicanna has orange flowers and burgundy foliage, while Bengal Tiger shows off variegated, yellow-striped leaves.